By Len Vermillion, Editor in Chief
On a typical day, Keith Liddy leaves Medina County Career Center about 20 miles south of Cleveland, OH, and head to his after school job. The senior engineering student doesn’t head to the mall to work in a local retail store, nor does he head to a fast food restaurant to earn his paycheck. Instead, Liddy goes to Atlantic Tool & Die where he works as a 3D modeling associate for the manufacturer.
Once Liddy is at work, he uses his expertise in Inventor software to help the company transition from a 2D modeling environment to a 3D system. “I’m helping to convert the AutoCAD design to Inventor,” he says at a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont, IL, where he was one hand for the Extreme Redesign awards ceremony during National Manufacturing Week.
Liddy was one of three engineering students on hand for the festivities after winning first-place honors in the annual design competition for engineering students from around the world. Extreme Redesign is a contest held by The Dimension 3D Printing Group, a division of Stratasys Inc. In the contest, Dimension, a maker of 3D printers for rapid modeling of CAD designs, received .stl files from students for product designs and printed them for the students, giving them an opportunity to redesign their products for final submission. In the end, judges from major US manufacturers such as Harley Davidson, SC Johnson, and SmartDesign, picked first and second place winners in high school and college categories. (Product Design & Development is the official media sponsor of the event.)
Liddy used his Inventor skills to design a cord reel and take home the top prize, a $2,500 scholarship, in the high school category.
Liddy’s cord reel was an idea that came about from what he deemed a necessity. Like most teenagers these days he has a bedroom filled with computer equipment and other electronic devices, all of which have numerous sets of power cords. The cords left his room in a confusing mess and to some extent, a hazard. “I had a lot of electronic devices that were tangling up and no matter how I tried to straighten them they’d kink,” he says. “The cord reel rolls the cords up to keep them neat.”
At the awards ceremony and at the display on the show floor, Liddy’s design garnered complements from professional designers. “This was a product that was very close to a marketable product,” Ryan Jinks of Harley Davidson, one of the contest’s judges said during the ceremony.
Liddy finished his design by making a few modifications to his original idea. “At first I did research on size and wanted to make it bigger,” he says. “If I made it bigger I could get more cord in the reel, but people wouldn’t buy it.”
Now with his scholarship in his hand and graduation right around the corner, Liddy is looking ahead to his future as a design engineer. He plans to study engineering at a local college near his home in Brunswick, OH, so he can continue his job at Atlantic Tool & Die. “I want to continue to design stuff,” he says. “It’s fun for me and I get to use my imagination.”
Using an imagination and creativity is also what got Gabi Ritter interested in engineering. The student from University of Art and Design in Halle/Saale, Germany was one of the co-winners in the college category, tying with Bruce Cherry of Lake Washington Technical College in Mountlake Terrace, WA. Ritter and Cherry were also on hand for the awards ceremony.
After a difficult trip from Germany to Rosemont, Ritter sat at the ceremony’s dinner at discussed her fascination with the concept of creative design. She won her award for a perpetual calendar design that is basically a sphere with rotating parts that can keep the date handy through eternity.
Ritter says she takes a slightly different approach to design because of her interest in both engineering and art. She says she looks at products from the perspective of both functionality and aesthetics. Her approach is evident by her calendar design which takes into account the lighting that can be reflected by it.
Coming from Germany, Ritter is one of two European students that won prizes in this year’s awards, making them the first non-Americans to win in the contest. “It was a professor of mine that found out about the contest,” she says of her involvement.
Ritter, who says she is determined to become an engineer, is also the first woman to win an award in the contest. However, she downplays the significance of that achievement. “I want to be an engineer,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m proud [to be the first woman to win] but in the end it doesn’t matter if I am a woman. I just design my products.”
Her co-winner in the college category, Cherry is also not a typical engineering student in the sense that he is an adult student at his school. Cherry designed a won for his design of a wall mount for an electric toothbrush. At the awards ceremony he showed off his design, complete with an electric toothbrush fro a prop. The design, which he says he came up with because he needed on for his home, holds the toothbrush upside down and attaches it to a wall for easy access. It also helps preserve the brush with a cup holder at the bottom that holds sterilization liquid.
“I originally only had the top half that holds the brush,” he says. “I added the bottom part later.”
Other finalist in the contest included Balaza Galambos of the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary, the only other finalist in the college category (because of the tie for first-place, only one finalist was selected.) Galambos is the designer a holographic projection device.
The finalists I the high school category were Joe Novello, a senior at Preble High School in Green Bay, WI, and Rick Barr, a junior at Kettering Fairmont High School in Kettering, OH. Novello is the designer of extendable electrical outlets. Barr designed a special sandwich holder for use by disabled people.
The three finalists each received a $1,000 scholarship.
According to Dimension, approximately 300 student worldwide competed in this year’s competition.
Next StepMore information on the Extrme Redesign contest is avaiable by contacting The Dimension 3D Printing Group, 14950 Martin Dr., Eden Prairie, MN 55344, or by visiting www.dimensionprinting.com/extreme.html.
Pull-Quote:“I want to continue to design stuff. It’s fun for me and I get to use my imagination.”
Keith LiddyCaptions: PD64ER01The cord reelPD64ER01BThe electric toothbrush holderPD64ER01CCollege co-winner Gabi Ritter displays her perpetual calendar
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