Alissa and I had lunch today with the amazingly talented Clare Goddard and her wonderful partner, Matt. Clare currently lives in Helsinki where she works creating mixed media collages and Matt is finishing his PhD in England on the subject of Rapid Prototyping. After some seriously great food at Terrain we headed to an exhibit at the Esther M. Klein art Gallery on the subject of Rapid Prototyping. In a nutshell, a rapid prototyping machine is a three dimensional printer that uses uploaded schematics to rapidly create a 3D object. Imagine you were hosting a dinner party but didn't clean enough forks -- no worries, all you need to do is print a few more out. Obviously there are drawbacks to this technique (loosing that hand-made feel being the most obvious) but it has a lot of potentially great applications.