Printing Gone Real

3D printing hits Houston in the head: New mainstream technology is a historychanger

HCC has brought history to life, thanks to the new frontier of 3D printing.
Costing upwards of $40,000 only a decade ago, today's 3D printers are availablein desktop models starting at $2,200.
HCC hopes to bring the technology out of the engineering labs into more academicsettings.
Lincoln in 1860 and 1865

Long the domain of engineers and manufacturers, 3D printing has gone mainstream in recent years, sparking a bold frontier for artists and designers alongside a host of concerns about everything from copyright issues to basement gun makers.

With help from Smithsonian Institute's recently-launched X 3D initiative, Houston Community College is pushing the technology in yet another direction, creating hands-on educational tools virtually unimaginable a decade ago.

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, HCC students have "printed" a facial plaster cast made for Abraham Lincoln just months before that fateful night at Ford's Theater.

Created in molded plastic with a MarkerBot Replicator 2 — one of 3D printing's most affordable devices at only $2,200 — the replica brings every detail of the Great Emancipator's iconic mug to life, beard and all. Total cost in materials? Roughly $12 . . . and getting lower each year.

"When you hold an object like this in your hands, you get an entirely new perspective on the history around it."

"Students now have the ability to touch the features of Lincoln's face and see how the demands of presidency changed him," says Doug Rowlett, HCC's interim educational technology director. For a point of comparison, the Smithsonian offers 3D blueprints of another Lincoln facial cast made during the 1860 presidential campaign.

"When you hold an object like this in your hands, you get an entirely new perspective on the history around it."

Rowlett — an English professor for HCC's Southwest College — notes the countless possibilities 3D printing affords the school's engineering and design students. But with the Smithsonian project, he hopes the technology will work its ways into more academic settings.

For example, art students can explore a rare 16th-century piece of Italian furniture while a biology lab attempts to reassemble the bones of a woolly mammoth and a history class examines Amelia Earhart's flight suit. The Smithsonian will add new artifacts on a regular basis.

"3D printing is going change how we do everything," Rowlett says.

"Right now we're making small trinkets, but in the near future we'll be making practical items. Something you buy at Walmart today soon will be something you can make at home with the push of a button. We want our students to know how to work with the new technology."

unspecified

challenge your bias

Holocaust Museum Houston examines bias in Smithsonian-backed exhibit

New exhibit looks at how humans form hurtful biases.

Photo by Jef Rouner

"Bias Inside Us" at Holocaust Museum Houston.

Asked to explain bias, Robin Cavenaugh, the CMO for the Holocaust Museum Houston, pauses for a moment then cites the opening scene of HBO’s limited series Watchmen.

“I didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until I saw that show,” she says. “I work in Holocaust museum. We do exhibits on Black American history all the time. It had still somehow never come up in conversation before. That’s what bias does. It’s a system of missing information.”

That unconscious ignorance is a key component of “Bias Inside Us,” a new exhibit at the museum. A production of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), the exhibit examines the subtle ways that bias frames the world.

One wall is dedicated to a photography project by Spanish photographer Angélica Dass. Humanae is a series of portraits of people of various skin hues, usually framed against nondescript backgrounds. The subjects all wear the same expressions, but their faces form a rich, random tapestry of humanity that dares the viewer to see them as different.

The exhibit is divided into six sections: Introduction, The Science of Bias, Bias in Real Life, Serious Consequences—Bias is All Around Us, #RetrainYourBrain, and Personal Reflection. The science looks at how our initial biases are formed. Babies instinctively gravitate to familiar faces. If that child grows up in a homogenous environment, they will begin to distrust people who look different.

That distrust manifests in hundreds of different ways that shape the world. As one quote on the wall from Stanford social psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt puts is, “When people think about racism they’re thinking about bigots, but you don’t have to have a moral failing to act on an implicit bias.”

Dotted throughout the exhibit are personal stories of bias. Students seen as troublemakers by teachers of a different race, police who arrest one ethnicity at higher rates than others, even two stepsisters (one Black, one mixed race Black and white) who received different treatment in a restaurant.

Collectively these all add up to greater sociological actions.

“Here at the museum, we obviously try to tie everything back to the Holocaust,” says Cavenaugh. “Those biases, built up over hundreds or thousands of years, lead to atrocities. It’s regular people feeling an inherent distrust or fear.”

“Bias Inside Us” is a gentle exhibit. It frames the fight against bias as one of correction, not condemnation. An ad from the Love Has No Labels ad council from 2015 shows crowds reacting to X-ray portrayals of couples and families that show only their skeletons. It’s impossible to tell race or gender until the subjects come around the front to reveal who they are.

The last part is a small wall space with sticky notes and pencils. Visitors are encouraged to write the ways they will combat bias in the future and stick it to the wall. It’s a final sign that the quest to end bias starts with us making conscious change despite early ideas of trust and safety.

“Bias Inside Us” runs at the Holocaust Museum Houston until October 6.

bias inside us holocaust museum houston museums