Jason Pohl: From Designing Video Games to Orange County Choppers and Beyond

CAD Craft & Design Digital Fabrication
Jason Pohl in his home workshop

Jason Pohl calls himself a “pretengineer” because he’s self-taught. Trained as artist, his design work has taken him from creating video games to actually designing and fabricating parts for Orange County Choppers. He moved into CAD design and working with CNC machines, creating custom parts for motorcycles in-house.

Jason has boundless energy and enthusiasm as someone who is doing what he always wanted to do — make things that are real. And it just might have been a high school art teacher who pointed him in the direction he would follow. She told him that all the things around him have been designed by someone and he could be that person.

On this episode of Make:cast, Jason joins Community Editor David Groom and me for a conversation about his design work.

Jason Pohl

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DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty
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