@anthony1986 I have to give you some back story so it makes sense how I got there:
So a few years ago I was working up in Oakland as a mechanical designer at this firm PSI. We built custom C&C robots which fabricated sculptures for the artist Anish Kapoor (3D printers are pretty much just smaller versions of those machines), giving me a lot of experience with robotic fabrication techniques.
One day I'm up in Sonoma wine tasting with two friends of mine who are both residence at UCSF, Emil, an orthodontist the Chevy, an ENT. The three of us have a friendship built on all being from Atlanta, GA with ties to The Medical College of Georgia (the library is named after my grandfather who was one of the inventors of the birth control pill).
So Emil, Chevy, and I are all at this vineyard and end up having a few too many. Emil and Chevy start bitching about this patient that they happen to be referring back and forth to each other, and saying something about a mask. The conversation's been going on a really long time, and I'm getting annoyed/feeling left out as I had nothing to add. When I'm like, "A) Why in the world do an orthodontist and an ENT have a patient in common, and B) What is this mask? If I promise to design you a better one, will you stop talking about it right now?"
Of course, this only makes Emil and Chevy want to talk about the masks more... First, their antagonizing me cause its fun, saying that there's no way I could come up with something better; but I keep throwing out ways I could use robots and printers to do them as one offs. Which I know how to do cause of the art thing.
Eventually they say to me if you do this, you'll be rich; and not only will you be rich, you might actually make a dent in measuring up to your grandfather (they know me pretty well; and we were really drunk at that point).
A few days later we picked the conversation back up, and that's when I decided it was time to leave PSI to work the project out in Grad School. Grad School was Art Center- left half way through to start the startup, and they funded me in a partnership with Caltech called The Design Accelerator.
