Wired for Wonder: Ping Fu – Digital Reality a Life in Two Worlds
3 Sep 2013 by warrencammack, No Comments »
Ping Fu strolled on stage in a pair of red, 3D printer manufactured high heel shoes. Her talk was equally as fascinating as her dress sense and started with a recount of her childhood where she served as a soldier in the Chinese army for 6 years.
She didn’t delve into the details of the horrors she experienced but alluded to the suffering that she endured. The one thing that stopped her from breaking down through all of this was something her father had told her when she was young, “Be like bamboo, it bends with the wind but never breaks.” Ping said that she has used this to shape how she lives her life – lots of external factors can have an impact on you but it’s your inner resilience and flexibility that will see you through it all.
Having left the army she turned to study and as part of her research at university she studied infanticide in regional china. On her travels she encountered 8-9 month late abortions and other such horrific acts. When her tutor read her thesis he alerted the authorities and she was swiftly kicked out of university then forced to leave country.
She applied to and was accepted to a US university where she intended to study English Literature (her previous studies were in Chinese literature) however when she arrived she found that her English language skills were insufficient to enable her to take the course.
So Ping switched to Computer Science and her whole life changed, she progressed through academia and took on a teaching position. Along with one of her students she invented the Netscape browser, her University asked her what the next killer app was but she didn’t want to create a dot com – everyone else was doing this at the time.
She had a goal of making art interactive and sustainable for everyone. Seeing that art museums were struggling at a time when they charged $2.50 a ticket and the maintainance of the museum averaged $45 per person. She met the inventor of 3D printers and wanted to push this new technology into fields that it was not intended for and the rest is history.
Closing her talk on the issue of IP and the ability to duplicate everything she pointed to the food and fashion industries were nothing can be protected and therefore we will see mass innovation in this space in a very short period of time
You can read Ping’s book Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds
or reach out to her on linkedin
