The Internet Archive Hero Award, as designed by Taekyeom Lee.Taekyeom Lee is an educator, designer, maker, and researcher.The associate professor of graphic design at Indiana University Bloomington is not only committed to teaching his students, Lee believes in sharing knowledge of art and design that inspires the broader community.In 2021, Lee was an artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Fascinated by art featured in the Archive’s collection, he wanted to turn the works on the page and screen into a tactile experience.Lee has built 3D printers based on the open-source project, RepRap. During the residency, he took a book about Korean ceramics published in 1966 from the archive’s collection, traced the shapes and turn them into 3D models, and built a DIY 3D Printer to make physical small-scale vases out of clay. Lee documented the process and created a series of videos for others to replicate the machine to print clay with an open-source plan.“The goal of the Archive is to gather data and archive as much as it can to share with a broader community,” Lee said. “But everything has been digitized. I asked, ‘What if we can materialize the digital data from the archive so we can actually touch it’? So we can restore healthy relationship between the digital and physical worlds”Among Lee’s 3D creations: A replica of the Internet Archive’s Funston Avenue building.Brewster Kahle presenting Sir Tim Berners-Lee with the 2025 Internet Archive Hero Award.The 3D printed artifact was used as a trophy for a Democracy’s Library award in 2022 and was recently modified for the 2025 Internet Archive Hero Award. Made out of Polylactic Acid (PLA), corn-based bioplastic, the 120mm (approximately 4.7 in) tall building model is lightweight and hollow. Lee added a special slot for USB drive inside, which can be loaded with files relevant to the award recipient; when Sir Tim Berners-Lee received the award in 2025, the drive was loaded with Wayback Machine archives of his original website at CERN from 1990. The idea of adding the USB slot was ignited from the conversation with Brewster Kahle when he showed an old trophy package with a USB drive.“It’s a trophy, but at the same time it’s the library itself,” Lee said.The 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award will be presented to The Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 21st in San Francisco. Join the celebration in person or via livestream.Lee, 42, is a first-generation college student who came to the United States from South Korea to attend graduate school in 2011. He received an MFA degree in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.In his work, Lee is an avid user of the Internet Archive – tapping into its collection, including vintage art books. He said he appreciates it as a credible source of data for his research and teaching, which focuses on unconventional materials and digital methods to create 3D graphics and designed objects. He said Wayback Machine is very useful tool to study the evolution of GUI (Graphic User Interface) and usability. Lee also has a particular interest in improving visual accessibility for people with low vision and vision impairements, having experienced some lingering vision issues himself from a retinal detachment.Lee said he supports the Internet Archive’s mission and enjoys his partnership with the organization.“I’m an educator. I believe in the value of sharing knowledge and make it accessible – especially from the past. Innovation starts from connecting dots from the past to present and to future” Lee said. “Now, there’s so much information on the internet. What the Internet Archive has been doing is so valuable in making that information accessible to everyone.”When Lee completed his 3D printer, he was eager to find the proper channel to show others bolt-by-bolt how they, too, could create it. He is proud to be an educator. “I really enjoy the process of sharing it as open source. So it can go further and empower makerst,’” he said.After the Artist-In-Residence, in 2023, Lee received a message on LinkedIn from a civil engineering student, Ryan Zhang, at the University of Waterloo in Canada who followed his plan to build a 3D machine. In the post, Zhang said “His easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials and a general guide to how the printer should function were of great help.” Lee said “It really made my day. I was so happy,” Lee said. “It was my goal to share the knowledge – and it actually reached someone.”To learn more about Lee, explore the following resources:A short video about his residency at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/taekyeom-lee-internet-archive;Link to videos of building a DIY ceramic 3D printer: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcYkbdrqZJf_u4xgj_zYr6wPriauxqYYK&si=ogAIGfRVWpu5KoNQ Instagram posts on his 3D printing: https://www.instagram.com/p/CgEuR14FSRl/; and https://www.instagram.com/p/CfuLpmNlHZZ/His Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/taekyeomHis website: https://portfolio.taekyeom.comThe post Building the Hero Award: The Story Behind Taekyeom Lee’s 3D-Printed Model of the Internet Archive first appeared on Internet Archive Blogs.