Even more mainstream media space for Evan Malone and Fab@Home on CNN late last week. Over the last three months we have seen this story picked up in the world’s largest media outlets. Thought it would be neat to note another down here as well to go with the Economist (sorry subscription required) picking up the story a few weeks ago. I wonder what the correlation would be between a technology being “discovered” by the mainstream media and when it actually has a major impact on the world?
Gartner actually have a model for this (see below) called the “Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology”, and you can see the 2005 version on Gartner’s site. In 2005 “Inkjet Printing” was right in the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”, but two years later I wonder where Gartner think it is now? My thought is that the technology is getting close to the “slope of enlightenment”. Fact is that there are a lot of technologies that just go by the wayside on those lists never reaching adoption. But judging by the ongoing media interest 3D Printers doesn’t look like it is going to be one of those areas.
Look at these beautiful carved doors from Flickr. I’ve always admired the incredible detail and beauty that goes into work like this. Anyone can appreciate it, but it’s not the kind of detail you usually find in the average person’s home. There’s a reason for that. The artisans who create these kinds of work in many cases no longer exist. As well as the naturally prohibitive nature of carving - it takes so much time.
There is one other point that I think is important about carving for a home. It’s very personal. So personal in fact that most people wouldn’t consider doing something like this for their home unless it celebrated something about them, their family or their beliefs. To hire an artisan to undertake something like that for a family home, while I am sure would strike many as a wonderful dream (as it obviously did in the past), would seem extravagant now.
However, modern technology is getting us much closer to a point when you can have your custom carvings in any home. Below I have inserted a demonstration video of the Craftsman CompuCarve from Sears, which is also known as the CarveWright System. It’s a home based CNC machine retailing for less than $2000 which allows you to personally do the kind of carving you would have only dreamed of in the past. It comes with a software package that allows you to do your own design and while it’s had some tough reviews there are a fair amount of very positive reviews as well. It certainly opens up a new world to the home DIY artist as you can see from the extensive results they have on their own site. Of which the image below is one example.
OK, a lot of you will think that this is kind of a strange post on a blog that’s about making and designing things. Especially since recently I’ve been focused on 3D printers, and fabbers and other fun stuff like that. But with that in mind I wanted to get back to looking at why I want a 3D Printer and the connection between “distributed manufacturing” and “distributed creativity”. What sparked this was this interview in Ping Mag with insanely creative Japanese Typography Designers, Tetsuya Tsukada and Hidechika from Dainippon Type Organization.
Even for those who don’t have an interest in Japanese, Chinese characters or typography you’ll soon be able to appreciate the incredible creativity of the guys’ work. Their major creation is to experiment with the Japanese phonetic alphabet and use it to make Chinese characters that have different meanings. It’s the English equivalent of taking your name, rearranging the size and shape of the letters in it so it now visually resembles a different word (one you ideally hope is a lot cooler and describes you). One example they have is with the name “Takahashi”, which they rewrite so it says “Master” (which also happens to be the name of a popular game player in Japan). You can still read the characters for “Takahashi if you look carefully, but if you were to look at it quickly you read “Master”. It’s a potent mix of language, creativity and meaning.
As they’ve developed this technique Hidechika and Tetsuya have also partnered with major Japanese stationary company Kokuyo to create a toy they call “Toypography“. Reminiscent of tangrams. it takes English and Japanese words and allows you to create the chinese character equivalent. As well as being fun for the language learner this is just fantastic design and I personally want a set right now! They have examples in the article on Ping Mag and it’s also garnered attention from teachers both in Japan and overseas (Kokuyo’s involvement is not unusual for a stationary company as they are involved in educational tools as well as goods). While it’s a long tail market it’s not hard to think that this could be something that really takes off. The comments on their blog are already asking “where can I buy these”.
So here is where I get to my point. And this is just my opinion but it’s my opinion as a consumer with a really strong interest in this product. I happen to think that this is a great example of where a “distributed creativity” model could be of great advantage to the designers as well as to consumers like me. Honestly Hide, Tetsuya, I want these! And I’d love some now, and though my Japanese is reasonably good, even I don’t want to go through the process of finding out if/when/how I can buy these and get them to my home in New Zealand, or as gifts to friends in San Francisco. So what’s my suggestion? I suggest you sell some of your designs to me (and other consumers for that matter). I could download them as a pdf and then print and cut out. That way I could be playing and using them right away. And so could thousands of others who are interested. Basically I’m interested in your creativity but there is a distribution problem in getting to me when really there doesn’t need to be.
Now I know there is some risk of some ingrate thief taking your idea and building a copy cat product. But the same risk is there if you just sell the physical product (in fact it’s probably greater because the ingrate will want to match everything about your product to piggyback on your branding as well). Even in the Ping Mag article there is an example where someone has poorly copied your ideas. However I think the benefits of being able to share the value you have in your design by putting that into my hands in a real world way is much more valuable to you as designers. Also the coverage you get from being able to get in front of so many more people globally is also of a huge benefit to you.
This is where the coolness of “distributed creativity” comes together. Two insanely creative guys in Japan can spread their idea to me physically without having to pack or ship a thing or engage a manufacturing partner. I’m willing to pay for the design and find my own way to the physical creation. I won’t pay as much as for the physical product, but I’d pay you the margin, and directly to you at that. I’d also then have a customer relationship with you directly and you with me. Anytime you design something else in the future I’d be interested. I think that’s of huge benefit to you as well.
I think there are lots of cool designers out there with the kind of funky, thoughtful expertise that these guys show. While all design doesn’t lend itself well to a distributed creativity model yet, I think that designers and craftspeople who embrace distributing their creativity will open themselves up to a whole new world. If anyone else has any example of product designers who really lend themselves to this type of idea then feel free to leave their sites in the comments.
Fabjectory is a fascinating business founded by Second Life resident Mike Buckbee, focusing on building “virtual objects in real life”. They will fabricate your Nintendo Mii avatar, or your avatar from Second Life, or even something you’ve drawn up using Google Sketchup. Already Fabjectory has got a lot of media interest including mentions in the Wall Street Journal and Wired.
Mike blogs too and has posted a really interesting piece of research from William James Proctor, a Graduate student in the School of Arts and New Media at the University of Hull. William’s paper examines virtual worlds and how virtual players in those worlds shop. The ultimate aim of the research is to discover whether it’s possible to prototype real world businesses within a virtual world before spending so much money to start it up for real. His conclusion is that there is a lot of potential from both a marketing and product development perspective.
While it might be interesting to prototype businesses within a virtual world to test it on “real” people, you have to ask, do avatars of real people act like real people? Do they make their buying decisions as an avatar as they do in real life? In my opinion they won’t always because of the nature of games. They are using the game as an escape from their real world persona and creating a new persona who takes more risks. I think a lot of mistakes could be made by companies that rely on data coming from a virtual world environment and try to apply that to the real world since I believe people just won’t act the same way.
At the same time I do think Mike’s business and other businesses that are starting to blur the line between virtual and real world are going to be extremely interesting to watch in the future. They embrace the idea that your virtual world is a part of your life that you require services in order to develop. In their virtual world I think it’s very debatable whether or not players are interested in a business that are only test beds for a real world release. But those businesses that blur that line, adding services in the virtual world and then bringing that to real life create the exciting aspect of turning bits into atoms. Those types of businesses I believe are not only more interesting, they are a much greater opportunity in the future for designers, makers and consumers.
On May 2, 2007 at 2pm (CST), “LIVE” from the RAPID 2007 Show in Detroit, Paul Dvorak of Medical Design Magazine andTony Lockwood of Desktop Engineering Magazine will moderate an important live webinar on the current state of the rapid prototyping industry. The event will cover the latest 3D-Scan-to-CAD and rapid prototyping technologies with a special focus on real-world applications. It will be hosted by Roland ASD and presented to a live audience at the show and via Web cast.
Seriously, being on the cutting edge of innovation causes one huge problem. What to name things? I have kids so I have been through this dilemma personally before, but at least kids are physically different. When it comes to concepts knowing what to name something is very difficult. With fabbing, rapid prototyping, 3d Printers, Desktop Manufacturing etc., since we are in such an early stage of the technology it’s been impossible for there to be a convention on naming. But yesterday American Science Fiction Author Bruce Sterling has written a post on his blog going through the different names and coming up with what he thinks will be the winners. He’s picking that the entire field will be known as “additive fabrication” and the technology that sits in your home will be “3D Printers“.
Personally I like 3D Fabbers but it’s not up to me to decide, as Bruce says, “users and the general public will slowly center on the terminology that makes the most sense for their use of the technology in particular applications”.
To get an idea of what commercial 3D printers are out there, here’s a video from Thinglab of Z Corp’s latest entry-level full colour 3D printer. The ZPrinter 450 is a one-stop automated printing device that can materialize your CAD designs into a full color 3D model up to dimensions of 203 x 254 x 204 mm (8″ x 10″x 8″) with a speed of 2 to 4 layers per minute. At just under US$40,000, it’s the first to break that price-level, making it more affordable for designers, engineers and architects to further promote and communicate their ideas in real models that customers and clients can see and hold.
Helsinki based Freedom of Creation (FOC) is a design and research firm that specializes in designing for Rapid Manufacturing, which is basically designing on 3D software, feeding it to your 3D printer and printing out your design. Founder Janne Kyttanen’s underlying philosophy with his design is to break through all constraints that traditional designers deal with. Basically what he can do on his computer, he can make. What sets their products apart from others is that their designs are locally manufactured via 3D software, thus minimizing distribution costs, stocking costs, and need for assembly. While their FOC Collection is mostly lamps and accessories, they have partnered with other companies in designing for commercial products such as bespoke footwear.
Here’s a short interview with Kyttanen on BusinessWeek (mp3) last year which gives a quick overview of what FOC and rapid manufacturing are about. His advice for young design grad students looking to create without limitations? To knock on a lot of doors, make a lot of emails and calls to design firms that have 3D printers. My advice? Sign up as a beta user with Ponoko and design without limitations! And while he says the 3D printers around are at the cheapest US$20,000, we know what affordable open-source fabbers are available now (see previous posts). FOC will launch new products in Milan from April 17 to the 20th.
Thanks to dezeen blog for bringing FOC to my attention.
Over on Ars Technica, Nate Johnson has done a great review of the Fab@Home Project. Fab@Home is revolutionary in that it is attempting to create a desktop fabricator cheap enough for at home use (hence the name). It is the brainchild of Cornell student Evan Malone with help from Dr. Hod Lipson, his mentor for his PhD. Nate has done a great job and the article is definitely worth a read - points of particular interest for me:
Fab@Home have a Wiki, with photos, videos and other information on the project.
Koba Industries sell pre-cut parts so you can build your own Fab@Home even if you don’t have the tools to do the cutting.
Koba also sell an entire Fab@Home kit, assembly required, if that’s your preference for US$2995.
They need help upgrading their software! It’s available here on Sourceforge so if you are that way inclined…
Evan has done the whole thing as a labour of love. Unfortunately the project won’t help him get his Phd, so he is finding time tight to make upgrades to the project. The Ars Technica article has made the front page of Digg though so hopefully that will get some more people interested enough to dive in and give Evan a hand with things like the software, and also with tweaking it for improvements.
Interestingly Evan’s Phd Advisor Dr. Hod Lipson, also wrote an article in IEEE Spectrum two years ago echoing many of the sentiments of Neil Gershenfeld. And even though he makes some pretty strong connections between the science fiction nature like possibilities of fabbing at the time, I think even he would be surprised to see two years later how an open source type model is producing an exciting prototype and garnering so much interest.
An article in the New York Times that was sent through to me a few days ago from one of our friends is causing a bit of a storm on the tech mega-news site Slashdot. The NYT article itself is a review on 3D scanning technology. It focuses a lot on the scanning of objects and then printing them. My personal opinion is that it’s much more interesting to talk about designing objects and then using the fabricator to create; after all, scanning someone else’s creation and just printing it is pretty boring really - where’s the creativity in that?
The comments on Slashdot are pretty interesting though and it’s great to see the huge interest in the technology. Some of the comments include:
When you think about it, modern society is moving more and more to the production of “intellectual property” (i.e. an idea as something you can own) rather than the production of physical goods. A modern individual has the capability of mastering their own music and movies, post-processing and distributing their own photographs in both digital and physical form, creating their own PCB-based electronics, designing their own Microprocessors, building their own vehicles (airplanes are a big one!), and many other tasks that used to require massive resources and tens-to-hundreds of employees.
- Intelligent Blogger
Now I know about the “never say never” line in technology, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that while the productive capacity of the home user will scale up, you will never get to the point where manufacturers of physical items will be squeezed out the way manufacturers of virtual goods (music, movies etc) have been. There’s a fundamental difference between copying Britney Spears’ latest warblings and copying a Ferrari.
- MrNaz Really, replicator technology instantly solves a vast amount of global issues. You no longer have hunger. You no longer have theft since there is no value in stolen objects. You no longer have a “drug problem” since everyone who wants drugs can replicate themselves into a stupor without harming anyone else, and darwinian processes will quickly weed people with those addictive tenancies into oblivion. Likewise, there will be little need for war since there are no resources to argue over, and even if there were you would be assured of mutual destruction since anyone can replicate any weapons they can imagine. - http://www.keirstead.org/
“In most cases, from the examples I’ve seen, the rapid prototyping tools can’t currently create a durable item” - From my purchasing experiences in the past decade, it seems most items are not durable anyway.
-InnerWeb
You want to really stretch your brain…
Ask yourself, what would Nintendo do if they could build a game machine incorporating a 3d printer?
Custom trophies from virtual games.
3d avatars like the “Mii” that you can actually hold….
- Peter
That’s just a few of the neat comments that the story has inspired. The idea of 3D replicators is one that really captures the imagination. I’ll admit there are a lot of negative comments too. There are issues with intellectual property protection, environmental issues and also fear over the economic implications. That’s natural with any groundbreaking technology, but ultimately I believe the benefits will outweigh the negatives. It’s going to be a fun ride to see how it plays out.
Slashdot | The Modern Ease of 3D Printing