On Dec. 22, a dozen people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, gathered at a cafe called FabCafe in Tokyo's Shibuya district with a common purpose: to toy with a range of digital tools, including 3-D printers, 3-D CAD (computer aided design) software, a laser-cutting machine and a full-body 3-D scanner — and to create a collective artwork.

The "navigator" for the hobbyist event — organized jointly by FabCafe operator Loftwork and K's Design Lab, which operates a 3-D printer showroom directly above FabCafe — was designer Kota Nezu. Nezu, a former designer for Toyota Motor Corp. who now heads his own design firm znug design, proposed that each of the participants that day create their own small object. To do that, some participants posed in front of a full-body scanner to create a 3-D image of themselves, while others manipulated CAD software to give form to whatever ideas for objects they had conceived. The data would then be sent to 3-D printers in the showroom for outputting. Finally, the printed objects, each about 2 cm high, would be perched on top of plastic cogs, which would be made with a laser cutter.

Given a blank piece of paper and a set of color pens to work with, Maki Murakami, 33, seemed at a loss at first. When you are not particularly art-inclined and are suddenly given freedom to draw "anything," it's perhaps only natural to feel that way. Soon afterward, though, she was struck with an idea, and started drawing what looked like a simplified version of a Ferris' wheel, which she then managed to turn into a 3-D image using a modeling software called FreeForm. After that, a staffer wearing a FabCafe T-shirt copied her design to a USB memory-stick to transfer the data to a 3-D printer the size of a small fridge. Then — whoa! — in about half an hour, a red plastic object in the shape of Murakami's Ferris wheel, popped out.