We very much think of Kirby as ours. He is as unique and hard working as it is possible to be and he is now a fundamental and very highly regarded member of our team at 3DPRINTUK.
A little background….
Kirby Downey (to give him his full name) joined us at 3DPRINTUK in 2017 back when we were located in central London and supported our expansion and move to our new and bigger premises. He had previously worked at iMakr and that, together with his own FDM printers gave him invaluable knowledge when it comes to the realities of 3D printing. His desire and drive to learn more about industrial powder bed fusion processes with a realistic approach meant that he fitted in to our growing team from Day 1 and has become an invaluable team member.
That is all public domain stuff, of course. What may be lesser known is that Kirby is also a prolific advocate for SolidWorks (SW). He is the lead for the SW user group (SWUG) London, the SW Committee Representative for Europe and a global SW champion. While the latter has seen him travelling around the world and making an impact in all sorts of ways the former keeps him busy in London and across the UK with different UG meetings and projects. Kirby is also CSWP certified.
SolidWorks Community & Outreach
A few weeks back Kirby was one of a group of UK SWUG leaders to organise the second SolidWorks User Group UK Regional Event, which was hosted at DriveWorks’ headquarters in Warrington. Kirby was joined by Jonny Harrison (North East England SWUG), Luke Frost (Midlands SWUG) and Theodore Chortatsos (Hellenic SWUG) who all worked together to plan the event where attendees were able to hear from other members of the SolidWorks community.
Community is a key motivating factor for Kirby with his group. Particularly the ability to help educate, inspire and create a space where like-minded people can get together and network. His role with SWUG and his work with us at 3DPRINTUK has also enabled him to get involved in wider community projects. His passion for Magic Wheelchair really epitomises Kirby. Magic Wheelchair is a non-profit organisation that builds epic costumes for children in wheelchairs — at no cost to the families. The organisation brings community teams together to create, engineer and build these wheelchair costumes.
Left to right, Theodore Chortatsos, Hellenic User Group leader, Greece; Luke Frost, Midlands UG leader; Heather Hasz, Driveworks community manager; Jonny, Matthew Hall, Solidworks community manager; Our Kirby; Ian Pilkington, DS 3D Experience product manager.
Experiences
Last week, at the Develop3DLive 2022 event, SolidWorks’ CEO Manish Kumar gave an inspiring keynote presentation entitled “Experiences: Moving Beyond Designing Products.” As part of the Dassault Systemes family, SolidWorks is all about promoting ‘experiences.’ DS has a full product suite named accordingly (3DExperience) and the tagline for SW is “Authentic design experience.” Manish delivered some real, and at times personal, insight into how experiences shape our lives. He cited his family’s experience as it navigated a tricky and scary surgery that his daughter underwent earlier this year. Customisation and design helped them navigate the process and mitigated some of the fear and he went on to share his thoughts on how this can translate into some of the best design tools out there and the experiences that they can generate.
Kirby on stage at Develop3DLive, speaking about the Magic Wheelchair project. Part of the presentation given by Manish Kumar, CEO of Solidworks, also on stage.
To round out his presentation, Manish invited Kirby onto the stage to share his involvement in the Magic Wheelchair project — there were videos providing insight into the design and make process. Solidworks and 3D printing were involved, obviously. But the point? The main point?
Those angelic, happy — no, joyous — faces of the children in their magic wheelchairs. Their experience was priceless.
That was the point that Manish and Kirby were making. And they did it really well, we thought.
Manish Kumar and Kirby Downey at Develop3DLive 2022.
That’s our Kirby!