Prof. dr. Jeroen de Jong and Max Mulhuijzen surveyed YouMagine community members to learn about the motivations of makers and their reasons to share what they made.

Below is a summary of their findings:

• An interesting trend is that Makers increasingly develop designs that benefit producer products. At YouMagine, we observe that users upload designs that serve as inspiration for the next generation of Ultimaker printers.
• We aim to find out: what are the characteristics of Makers improving 3D printers?
• With a response rate of 33% (N = 122), we find an engaging Maker community in the YouMagine platform.
• Although 40% of the respondents are also occupied with 3D printing in a business environment, only a few report being driven by commercial motives.
• Respondents are driven because they want to help others, learn, satisfy a personal need, or out of enjoyment.
• On average, we find that the respondents spend 10 hours on 3D printing per week and have 7 years of experience working with 5 different printers.
• Designs that are created to overcome a personal problem show higher scores of online adoption on YouMagine.
• This is well-reflected by the designs ‘Yet Another Ultimaker 2 Feeder’ and ‘Ultimaker 2 Cable Chain’. These are uploaded by Makers who essentially created these designs to solve their personal problems.