Harry Allen Design Diary

LONG LIVE LEO!

I admit it, I’m a Luddite.

I like making things with my hands and I often find the computer age a snare and a delusion – having to move 10 time-consuming steps forward to test an idea, hours spent on upgrades and glitches when I could be working, and I’m not so fond of the aesthetic computers encourage – fantastic and sweeping yet disconnected. 

Don’t get me wrong. I love my computer and it is a great tool. I’m just not totally sold on the brave new world technology has spawned. What used to be a finite book on a shelf, one tree felled, is now a computer file that needs electricity to exist – in perpetuity.

So when my friend Carla Diana told me she was writing a children’s book on 3D printing I might have rolled my eyes a little, but it turns out I just had no vision. The vision was all Carla’s, and technology is transformed into something charming in her book Leo the Maker Prince.

image

The images sort of remind me of the stop animation Xmas movies of my youth. I see a movie in Leo’s future.

It’s a story about young woman who meets a robot who happens to be a 3D printer. The book features a series of objects that appear as photos on the pages but can be downloaded so that readers can actually have them in their hands while they read.

Genius! Revolutionary! Empowering! Just in time for the holidays! 

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