What products or services do you provide?

As expert anatomists and designers we provide a variety of products and services at the intersection of anatomy and design. For products, we have designed what we call “active learning kits” that we sell to college-level vertebrate or comparative anatomy courses; these include our Dogfish Shark Skull Active Learning Kit and our Cat Skull Coloring Kit.

For services, we specialize in creating both digital and physical models of animals, animal anatomy, and human anatomy. For example, we helped a professor that had microCT scans and photographs of insects create photorealistic, 3D digital models that could be shared on Sketchfab. We helped another professor that had digital models of bird and alligator limb bones 3D print physical models for manipulating and formulating hypotheses about potential joint movements. And we helped another professor with digital models of primate brains create models that students snap apart into superior and inferior halves and then snap back together magnetically.

We also specialize in working with professors and other researchers to design, create, and maintain outreach websites that engage the broader public in science and tell the story of their work (as an example, check out this site we built for the Meta-Morphosis Project based out of the Bern Natural History Museum and University of Bern). Research projects create so much output, in the form of data, publications, presentations, etc. but very little of this output is accessible to the broader public. We make websites that bridge this gap and clearly demonstrate the impact of the research both for the funding agencies and the broader public.

If you have a need related to anatomy or design and you’re not sure if it’s a service we provide, please contact us – we’d love to talk with you!

Where are you based? Do you have a physical location I can visit?

Our workshop is based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We do all of our manual work (e.g., 3D printing, physical model making, prototyping) there and we ship all of our physical products directly from our workshop. However, our workshop is not currently open to the public or for customer visits. We hope to open up our space in the future so we can welcome community members and customers into our workspace!

Do you ship internationally?

Yes! We’re happy to ship outside of the United States.

Do you have a phone number?

Yes! We have a phone number that customers can call to connect right away with a member of our team. However, we currently only disclose this number after first making contact with customers to avoid receiving spam or unsolicited calls. Please reach out to us first by email at contact@3danatomystudios.com; we reply to most emails within the same day (max 1-2 business days). If we send you a quote, if you make a purchase from us, or if you hire us for any project, we include our phone number in all our correspondence so you can easily contact us at any time by phone, if you wish.

Are you a for-profit or not-for-profit organization?

We operate as a “beyond profit” company. We are structured as an LLC (limited liability company) but we do not currently make any profit on the sale of our products and services and any profits we may make in the future will be donated to charity. So the answer to this question is actually “neither”; we are neither a “for-profit business” nor a ”not-for-profit organization”, in the traditional meaning of these terms.

When people talk about “profit,” they’re normally referring to any money that is left over once a company has collected all of its revenue (money the company brings in) and paid all of its expenses (money the company pays out). Expenses include the wages, salaries, and benefits for all the company’s employees. Often, the owner or owners of a company will not collect a wage or salary but rather pay themselves with the profit (i.e., the leftovers). If the company has a bad year, the owner might lose some money (a net loss rather than a net profit) and if the company has a good year the owner would make money.

Based on this definition of profit, you might be wondering, couldn’t an organization call itself a non-profit but still pay their workers (including executives) very high wages or salaries since those count as expenses? Yes! And this is not necessarily inappropriate; if the workers are highly skilled, if they take on high risks, or if their cost of living is high, a high wage or salary makes sense. The important point here is that we assign too much significance to the terms “for profit” and “nonprofit.” These terms don’t actually tell you that much; if you want to know how a business makes and spends its money, you need to understand the nature of their revenue and expenses.

We do not make a profit currently for a couple reasons. First, we are still a relatively young company (we were founded in 2021) and we are not yet making enough revenue to reach the salary level that we would like for our workers (thus, we have nothing “left over”). Second, we price our products and services to just cover our expenses, including labor, benefits, general operating expenses, etc. That is, we charge our customers what it costs to provide them with goods and services but not more than that (which would otherwise be “profit”). Of course, with this approach there can be unintended excess (if our revenue happens to exceed our expenses). If this were to happen, we would either reinvest that excess in the business or donate it; however, it would not be distributed as profits to the members.

Who owns and/or runs 3D Anatomy Studios?

3D Anatomy Studios is owned jointly and entirely by its working members (we have no outside/non-working investors or owners). Our current members are all professional scientists and educators who are passionate about improving research, education, and outreach in organismal biology. Traditionally, being an owner of a company means that you receive a share of the company profits in proportion to how much of the company you own (i.e., your ownership share).

Since we do not make a profit as a business, members do not receive any shares of profit. Currently, our members only receive money from the company based on the number of hours they work and the nature of the work they perform; essentially our members only get paid for their labor, not based on any cash investment.

3D Anatomy Studios is also run entirely by its members and each member has an equal vote in all decisions (“one person, one vote”). Since most of our members have a full time job outside of 3D Anatomy Studios, much of the day-to-day operations and decision-making is done by our Founder and (currently) sole, full-time working member, Aaron Olsen. All our members meet virtually twice per month to make any big decisions together. The term that best describes the ownership and governance structure of our company is “worker cooperative” or “employee-owned company.”

We informally involve our customers in our decision-making by regularly meeting with them (both in person at conferences and virtually) to get their critical feedback on our products and to hear about any challenges they have that are not currently being addressed. As we continue to grow as a company, we are thinking of ways we can more formally involve our customers in our decision-making, such as in the form of an advisory board or panel.

What is an “active learning kit”? How do your products differ from other anatomy models?

We use the name “active learning kit” for our classroom products because we have designed them to engage students in hands-on, active, and higher-order learning about the form and function of organisms. We think of this as the next generation of learning tools for organismal form and function.

Historically, anatomy learning models have been designed as “demonstration” or “reference” models, meaning that students can point out and identify structures on the model but that’s about it. The active and higher-order learning that is possible with our products distinguishes them from other products on the market that continue the historical practice of simple demonstration models.

We know from pedagogy (the science of how people learn) that active learning is the most effective for both the depth of learning and retention of that learning. Bloom’s taxonomy is a frequently used guide for designing active learning tools and ranks cognition or thinking from “remembering” (the lowest level of cognition), progressively up through “understanding,” “applying,” “analyzing,” and “evaluating,” and “creating.”

We use Bloom’s taxonomy, core concepts, and core competencies to define pedagogical objectives (also known as “learning objectives”) for our active learning kits before we design them (we call this a “pedagogical schema”). We then design the kit and the activities for each kit specifically to meet those pedagogical objectives. You can find the pedagogical schema for every one of our kit activities by viewing the “Educator Guide” of that activity.

Customers often tell us how much faster their students learn a particular concept with our kits. But more than that, they tell us how much their students enjoyed using the kits. Our customers have even told us that our kit activities were their students’ favorite activity during the whole course. By designing our classroom products around pedagogical best practices, we don’t just help educators improve their students’ learning, we also help them increase their students’ excitement and enjoyment of learning.

How much do your custom model making services cost?

This depends on the size and complexity of the model we’re making. For all custom services, we start by asking the customer what they would like for us to do and the intended purpose of the model. For larger projects, we might even do one or two virtual meetings to make sure we understand the full scope of the project. This active communication with the customer at the start helps us more fully understand the customer’s goals and make recommendations, where appropriate, on how best to accomplish these goals. We then create a quote outlining the total cost of the services, the payment plan, etc. All of this upfront work is provided free of charge and the customer then decides whether to proceed or not with the project. As a general rule, given the time and expertise required, any custom project would have a minimum cost of $250.

Are your active learning kits intended to replace specimens and/or dissection?

Some of our customers use our active learning kits as a complement to specimen dissection whereas other customers use our kits as a replacement for dissection. Both of these groups of customers find the kits to be effective for their particular use!

As biologists and anatomists we highly value the role of specimens and dissections in education and research and the organizations that preserve and make available specimens for education and research (e.g., natural history museums). We learned (and continue to learn) about anatomy through the use of specimens and dissections. Additionally, all of our products are based on dissection of real specimens. It’s impossible to fully replicate the detail of a preserved specimen and the learning gained through dissection. So we fully support the use of ethically sourced specimens for dissection in a classroom or research environment.

For educators who use dissections in their class, our kits are a great complement to dissection because they help students gain a general conceptual understanding of the anatomy, how the parts relate to each other through color coding, how they fit together through assembly and disassembly, and how they move through motion simulation activities. These learning objectives are difficult (if not impossible) with preserved specimens.

For educators who are unable to use dissection (e.g., due to inadequate ventilation or wet lab space, insufficient budget for consumables, disinterest or discomfort on the part of students, etc.), our active learning kits are a great way to reintroduce hands-on, active learning into an anatomy course. Dissection is a form of active learning. Our kits provide a means to replace dissection with a different form of activity learning that is simply more conceptual in nature.

Are your products open-source?

Certain parts of our products are open-source! For example, the activity guides for our Dogfish Shark Skull Active Learning Kit are published under a CC NC-BY-SA license. This license allows anyone to copy, redistribute, and adapt the guides as long as (1) we are attributed as the creators with a link to the original guides, (2) the guides are not used for commercial purposes (e.g., they can’t be sold), and (3) any new version of the guides is shared under the same license. We’ve even made the activity guides available as a Google Doc to make it easy for anyone to create their own copy and make changes.

Our activity guides are open-source because we want to encourage educators and other users of our kits to modify and create their own activities based on what works for them and share those activities with others. This way, those who use our products can make our products better for everyone. We believe in open-source because it empowers everyone to help make something better, incorporating the wisdom, creativity, and experience of a large group of users. Simply put, it makes for better products.

We are continuously exploring new ways to create and contribute to open-source resources. While our kits themselves are currently copyrighted to ensure that we can continue producing them in a financially sustainable manner, we’re thinking of how we open up the kit design as well. Until then, you can find freely downloadable scans of our specimens on our Morphosource page (a data repository for anatomical data) and you can find freely viewable digital versions for some of our models on our Models page.