Olivia Lam is live streaming her assembly of the BigBox from scratch at the moment. Edit: events currently over, check the recaps here: Olivia's view for part 2: Mike & Olivia's hangout:
If you have any questions or comments do post them here, I'll monitor and call them out live on the stream.
I wonder if some sort of chat platform might be useful for us to setup semi-permanent. e.g. something like slack.com or a good 'ole IRC channel.
Just checked in to see how Olivia did last night. I noticed that she pulled out the free filaments and immediately put aside the bright purple and bright orange bundles, not anticipating finding any use for such colours. I continue to maintain there is little use for such colours, unless you are making children's toys. When it comes to colour in everyday life, LESS is MORE. 5 shades of gray, five shades of beige, five shades of very pale blue, very pale green etc.. These are going to be much more useful to have about the room - unless you happen to be making a rainbow light switch cover like Richrap! Olivia also enthused about the aesthetic properties of CF carbon filament. Nice and matt. Once again appearances do matter in practical applications and it's absurd that she might have to resort to using a difficult to print material with extraordinary physical properties (and high expense) JUST in order to get the LOOK that she is after. +Sanjay do consider getting someone with a certain aesthetic sensibility involved in the filament colouration process. Even ColorFabb is still a bit Play Dough. In 5 years time this all will have changed.
I actually get through a fair amount of bright orange, but my use case is rather specific. Get what you are saying though, subtle colours are more product focused. Though often I end up painting things because I don't have stock of filament in the right colour. Fortunately PLA in particular takes paint well. In the UK buying short lengths of good filament is hard or so expensive you may as well buy full reels. Problem there is buying full reels of sometimes difficult to store once open filament just to use 15m of it is quite wasteful.