Hello again there dear readers! Today we continued the Monozukuri tour by starting of with a visit to the Hilltop, a company specialized in prototyping aluminum products for a variety of customers. This varies from creating prototypes for airplanes, to custom-made products. Their production is by means of letting machines do the routine work and the employees doing the creative work. On top of that, their R&D department consists of people specialized in mechatronics, system design, and product design. All in all, a perfect environment for a creative technologist! The second company that we have visited, was called crossEffect. This was typical industrial design company that was specialized in helping clients with creating product by applying rapid prototyping; saving the clients a lot of time and money in the product development. In this company, prototyping is done with the use of vacuum-injection, resin casing and laser etching. Rapid prototyping is one of the company’s main strengths. Besides specializing in rapid prototyping, they also have a partner company called crossMedical. This company saves many lives by giving surgeons the opportunity to practice surgery on a 1 to 1 scale replica of their patients’ organs such as the heart. By doing so, they surgeons get more confidence in performing the surgery and ultimately decrease both time and chance of complications. Back at Kyoto Makers Garage we listened to a presentation given by a master student who started his master thesis on analyzing start ups in Kyoto, but ended up focusing on the Makers Garage studio. Finally, the two-day Monozukuri tour was rapped up with a presentation from a start up called PLEN, that creates very cute robots both for entertainment and daily support. Thanks Sabrina for providing us with these two very interesting days and maybe see you soon! To our dear readers, thanks for tuning in again and see you tomorrow! 🙂
