Daniel, that sounds great, I'd love to meet up some time, and talk shop, I'm a design engineer, recently moved back to town.

Hey Jacob - welcome! I'm excited to learn together too - especially the process part. What do you have in mind?

I recently spent a week in a prototyping course where they taught us different types of creation methods and materials. One of my favorite classes they just sat us down with a new material, something no one had worked with before (in our case it was rubberized silicon) along with the tools to work with it. Then we were given a few hours to just explore the material, flush out ideas, just make stuff. I was thinking that it would be a fun thing to do as a group. It was a really great way to see the different approaches and perspectives people brought to a new material.

My other thought was, lately I've been interested in experimenting with some basic manufacturing methods, in my case I've been interested in sand casting and rotomolding. I was thinking if anybody would be interested in spending an afternoon working with a method we could share the costs of materials and flush out a method as a group. Maybe take a field trip to visit a local factory or artisan who works with the particular technique.

Some videos that inspired me:
Max Lamb's Pewter Stool - http://vimeo.com/9498805
Phil Cuttance's Faceture - http://vimeo.com/35912908

That sounds AWESOME! To be honest I don't know what I want to make, but I know I want to make something. Would be totally cool if you have time to organize a meetup to serve as an intro to the topic, gauge interests from the group, and see where we can go from here!

That sounds good to me, I'm not sure whats best for people. I work in San Marcos so I spend my weeks down there and my weekends up in Austin. I could set up something for a weekend or do week nights work best for people?

This is amazing. I know I want to make something too. No idea what yet, but that'll shape up once we get started. :) Anytime works for me - weeknights or weekends, in Austin.

Well if you guys want to get together for a drink or something I'm free all day Saturday, maybe an afternoon/evening meetup at YellowJacket or somewhere.

I'm going to create a formal event for the weekend of the 26th dealing with Prototype Thinking where we can talk about future events and I can go over some of the ideas I learned while in Belgium.

Did you mean Oct 26?

Er, sorry I read my calender wrong, I meant Sept 29th

We usually recommend putting up events that are 2-3 weeks out so there's time to rally others to come join. You available the weekend of Oct 20?

Ruby, isn't that a bit too far out? We could start meeting earlier, visit a few artisans, and then add people to the group as our ideas materialize? This is something I've been curious about for a while. Have any of you been to Roadhouse Relics at South Congress where they make handmade signs? Its in a different vein from pure manufacturing techniques, but interesting nevertheless.
http://roadhouserelics.com/

I like it - add people as we go. Let's do it!

So I set up a new topic, Creative Prototyping, and I was going to set up an event for the weekend of October 13th but I realized that I don't have a good place to host it, any suggestions for a time and location?

I was going to use the session to talk about the prototyping process, and I thought we could talk about manufacturing techniques and materials people are interested in learning about and go from there.

Roadhouse Relics looks great, we should defiantly organize a little trip up there, it would be really great to see someone like that at work, and see his process.

Sounds great! We could meet at Kung fu Saloon or Key Bar on 6th Street and Rio Grande Saturday afternoon? Or if you think we need more space, we could go to Mozart's coffee place by the lake. Not sure if you were looking for a classroom type location :)

This sounds like a great idea. Would it be possible to have the event earlier than 10/13? (I will be away that weekend, but certainly don't schedule around me.) Looking forward to it.

I thought it was a great sketching session, too!! I can't believe how much I learned and thank you soooo much. Nice sneaky photo!