German Researchers Publish Paper That Shows Us Just What’s in a Thingiverse 3D Design Remix | 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing

"Four researchers from Germany decided to explore the online design platform and determine just where all of the designs came from, and recently published a scientific article about what they discovered.

'Personally, I am fascinated by the creativity of the community. Sometimes you see a design and ask yourself how did they do this? And then, analyzing it, we found that often the answer was that people cleverly recombined what was already there,' Marco Wirth, from the University of Würzburg, told 3DPrint.com. 'Much of the creative potential of the platform really lies in the open exchange of models.'

Wirth, together with fellow University of Würzburg researchers Christoph Flath and Frédéric Thiesse, and Sascha Friesike with the KIN Research Group of VU Amsterdam, investigated how Thingiverse users are able to reuse existing designs to make new ones – this is known in the 3D printing community as remixing."