I know it is probably unwise to criticize a band of people  trying to 3D print their own firearms. But, I feel I must state this, if only for the record, if only to let me sleep better at night someday in the future.

The people at Defense Distributed are sociopaths who by refusing to consider any possible consequences of their actions are exhibiting an almost childlike asinine level of  irresponsibility. The media, by giving young Cody a platform to express their views and obtain funding, are culpable in letting a lone gunman not only hijack their editorial pages, blogs and TV for his own ends but also in letting him build his gun. Without media attention the “3D printed gun” would not have been possible. Through their irresponsible reporting they have made from a non-event a deadly device that will at one point kill someone. The most likely victim, one of the people making this thing.

It is through media attention that we see Cody’s pathology emerge. If you see the YouTube videos the student becomes a leather jacketed sunglasses wearing “eating Diane Finestine’s lunch”, “Joe Biden this is no country for old men”, “How’s that national conversation going” corny one liner bad boy who AR-15 in hand interjects himself into the US national gun debate. Look at the changes coming over him in the videos, ever more bombastic, self-absorbed and macho. Driven with a desire to be famous he has grabbed his 15 minutes of fame with a secure pistol grip and Rambo stare.  Motivated by a wish to delta his Twitter followers and be someone he is driven to complete his mission. Not a student of law but rather an actor on the world stage, a mayor influencer in a grand national debate a Navy Seal  in the culture wars. The New York Times, CNN, NBC, BBC News, etc. He is somebody. Somebody who has a natural gift for PR. A deadly troll wants to be famous and has found his shtick in making guns. A quote from Cody and co. describing their inspiration, “We could be like arms manufacturers”, “That’d be cool.” “What about 3D printing?” A quote from me, “this will end well.”

Dear reporters, you have created this monster, this self promotional manipulator who bereft of any engineering or 3D printing sense will probably end up hurting himself. Everything they’ve done so far could have been done better by a few experienced engineers & 3D printing people over a weekend. The real tragedy here is that the most likely short term outcome of this entire thing is that Cody will on live TV lose several fingers and may suffer from severe burns once his poorly designed excuse for a firearm explodes in his hands.  Not only is the idea ill conceived but the materials are poorly chosen with heat deflection temperatures and strengths far below those required for a firearm. Some basic research would have uncovered much better suited 3D printing materials. Orientation and layer direction also does not seem to have been taken into account. The design is also in my opinion not adequate not taking into consideration the forces at play. What we can learn about the design choices they make seem bereft of a basic understanding of the plastics involved, mechanical engineering and 3D printing. The Liberator is a dangerous thing, not because it will somehow change America but because it will at one point rupture while being fired and possible really harm the operator of the weapon. The other victim will be irony. No doubt that this is going to be the worst thing thats happened to the word since Alanis Morisette.

Despite the existence of this thing, I still maintain that on current generation home machines it will not be possible to make a working reliable firearm. A gun that is better than a few things one could collect from Home Depot.  There are far better production technologies available for producing arms in the home.

But, if this idea is promoted enough it will at one point lead to a 3D printed weapon being produced. This will be untraceable and you will by no means whatever be able to detect it or stop it from being produced. It may not work well but could be used to threaten, rape, kill and hijack. Because the most dangerous thing about this is that it radically lowers the barrier for a criminal to obtain something they can use to credibly threaten someone else and coerce them into doing their bidding. By mentioning this gun the media and letting them do their story we are making this outcome more likely. We should stop talking about this and ignore this entirely because that will make it less likely that such a thing will be produced and less likely that people will get hurt. Not mentioning this will at  least slow its development.  You can not unmake an idea. Eventually with 3D printing everything that can be made will be made. We need to realize this and as a society be responsible. And promoting a dangerous idea just because it is hip and interesting is not being responsible.

This is akin to in 1995 giving a gigantic amount of media attention to someone who wants to publish the Anarchist’s Cookbook online. Imagine all the fear then? And now terrorists can use the internet to exchange lots of information but I am betting that this level of exchange and the ensuing dangers are  far lower than what we would have feared back then. But, the simple mentioning over and over again of this possibility would be enough to make it self-fulfilling just like the internet itself was a self- fulfilling prophecy. Will the internet make it possible to exchange all information? Yes. Is this inherently dangerous? No, unless people who want to do dangerous things seek and find this information.

We are basically good people and so far the 30,000 people who have 3D printers at home haven’t been making guns, because they don’t want to kill people but make nice lovely things. This idea has been around for decades but no one (outside R&D for the military) has picked this up, why? Because these people were intelligent enough to realize that the outcomes of this would be negative. Being grown ups, they were able to think about the consequences of their actions.

This entire “3D printed gun’ story  is akin to there being no occurrences of anyone stabbing anyone in the eye with a fork. Someone coming up with the idea to stab people in the eye with the fork because they believed that in general you are free to do what you want. That someone then detailing how to stab people in the eye with forks. That person then repeatedly explaining the concept to the mass media over and over again. And…all of a sudden people start getting stabbed in the eye with forks. Will this mean that forks are dangerous? No, it means that if you give someone a stage from which to shout their dangerous idea, you make it more likely that this idea will come about. This is not true of all ideas, some can be stopped because they are aired. But, others like the “stabbing people in the eye with forks” or “you can now 3D print a gun” idea can not be stopped because once the genie is out of the bottle there only remains the inspiration for the individual to carry out the act in isolation. This is similar to the “lone school shooter” idea whereby mentioning this in the media causes more school shooters to emerge.

It is much easier to make a weapon with CNC, and plans for CNC weapons have been online for a while now.

If you were really interested in making guns at home aren’t there many tools that would be much better suited for the purpose than a 3D printer? Reamers? Drills? CNC?

Could you make a gun out of clay by using that as a mold? Yes. Should we regulate pottery wheels?

This thing has the functionality of a zip gun (maybe) and would not be up to the standards of a weapon made with pipe and other materials from your local hardware store. So what is the story exactly?

This just the perfect storm of “new technology 3D printing”+fear+guns=story.

How will this help American gun owners? They can buy guns? So why would they want to make them?

Isn’t there a risk that criminals and the insane, who can not buy weapons will use them?

Isn’t the best possible use case for this weapon the hijacking of an aircraft?

In the interests of liberty should you do product development for Al Qaeda? A group much more likely to benefit from this technology than NRA loving Americans?

How many aircraft can  Al Qaeda hijack using this weapon for it to still be a victory for liberty?

If Americans die due to terrorists using this weapon will it still be a victory for liberty? What number of deaths will be OK?

Does the risk that a person unable to obtain a firearm because they are insane or a criminal using this to kill someone outweigh the perceived benefit to American gun owners?

Does lack of criticism from the NRA imply that the NRA thinks it is a good idea that the criminally insane and convicted or active criminals will have an ability to produce their own  firearms?

“The goal was, the political goal was, universal access to the firearm.” So this is a political goal that may kill someone? Is it worth it, did you get to the part in your course about proportionality yet?

Would this project be worth it if someone died?  Would the people at defense distributed be able to live with that? From interviews it seems they have not considered this or do not mind.

Does something like the precautionary principle or any kind of reasonable weighing of the outcomes apply here?

“If the police can have it, if the military can have it, then you can have it.” Isn’t the modern state based on a monopoly of violence by the authorities?Is a asymmetry in weaponry needed to keep a stable society? So I should also be allowed poisonous gas? Nothing is to be forbidden or restricted? How about basic laws that we’d like to make so that we all get along?

He seems to imply that he’s read the Leviathan, has he?

“The political “discussion” about mental health, the background check, and gun control is invidious and follows a disciplinary desire. Remember that power produces truth. Individual subjects are made administrative objects through a documentary process: The mental health evaluation, the questionnaire, the application. The tendency is toward an ultimate result where no one really meets an artificial behavioral “norm,” and all are unfit to own a weapon. Case in point.
This is not a discovered truth about reality. Power produces.”

Read that few times and tell me what you think. Does this imply that because at one point maybe the criteria for insanity will become broader it is a good idea to give weapons to insane people now? Because maybe at some different future “the government may  take our guns away”, we should make them available to bank robbers and psychopaths now? In other words, we may at some point reach a slippery slope so we must now do something that endangers people?

“Don’t we all have the capacity for evil within us, is an essential question and I think yes of course, …. this ability to do harm that lies in all of us. But regardless of if there will be more murders in the end or more gun crime in the end we still think there is a liberty interest in allowing you to have access to those things.”

Is anyone actually listening to what this guy is saying? How can someone say this and still be considered to be of sound mind? He is accepting of the fact that a certain number of people may die but thinks that regardless of the number of these deaths “the liberty interest” outweighs the number of deaths be they 1, 10 or 100,000? He accepts that what he is doing will kill people but wants to press on regardless? Regardless. His idea of what liberty is and his actions in bringing this about outweighs any possible consequence? If I think that something promotes liberty I can do it regardless? More importantly I should let nothing stop me? Someone should tell these guys that we live in a world with consequences. There is no save game, no do over.  What if we disagree on what liberty is? What kind of 3rd grader man is the measure thinking is this? So by the amazing logic driving these people someone who wanted to detonate a nuclear weapon would be justified in doing this as long as they thought there was a “liberty interest” involved?  And even if 300,000 people died it would totally be OK because the abstract idea of liberty is much more important than any number of human lives. What are the criteria for liberty interests and who sets them?  Its like someone gave a third grader access to a thesaurus, Hobbes and 3D printing and they understood none of those things but were able to parrot a few things just enough to get invited to all the TV channels.

“Oh Definitely, this is the problem of liberty generally, people are gonna be free to be stupid, they’re gonna be free to mess up, they won’t build it right, and they might hurt themselves.” Finally I think he’s said something I can agree with.

Tipped off by the 3D Printing subreddit, I just read a paper on PLOS ONE about an open source 3D printable optical equipment library. This is, in one word, fantastic.

The paper initiated a, “library of open-source 3D-printable optical components to provide an extremely flexible, customizable, low-cost, start of a public-domain library for developing both research and teaching optics hardware. The results show that using this open-source optics method can reduce costs of many optical components by 97% or more.”

By using 3D printed components this library should greatly expand the number of people that are able to experiment and play with optics.  The cost of an optical rail went down from $320 per meter to 12 per meter. A lens holder went down from between $20 and $180 to 24 cents. A base went down from $150-730 to $3. These are amazing cost reductions and illustrate 3D printing’s role in making technology more accessible.

“For example to outfit an undergraduate teaching laboratory with 30 optics setups including 1 m optical tracks, optical lens, adjustable lens holder, ray optical kit, and viewing screen, the total cost would be less than $500 using the open-source optics approach as compared to $15,000 for commercial versions, providing over $14,500 in savings.” This could have as a benefit that optics can now be done in the home and also in High Schools.

A lens holder. 

The OpenSCAD designs as well as the Arduino control software were  posted to Thingiverse. You can see and download them here from Joshua Pearce’s Thingiverse. Pearce was one of the authors of the paper and also authored a paper on the Recyclebot so is quickly becoming one of my favorite people in 3D printing.

Open source optical rail using OpenBeam.

The team used OpenSCAD to make the designs and printed them out on a RepRap. They also used other open technologies such as OpenBeam (an open source extrusion beam project), OpenBeam is making huge strides lately and is increasingly also used in 3D printers for the chassis. They also made a Filter Wheel changer which usually costs around $1500 for $50 using an Arduino and 3D printing.

Open source 3D printed, arduino controlled filter wheel changer. 

The authors point out that the accuracy of the RepRaps needs to be improved to get better results. The dimensional accuracy of ABS/FDM is good though and it is relatively tough so I hope that this will be a great solution for schools, colleges and enthusiasts to get into the DIY optics game.

When I read this I felt head slappingly dumb for a moment since this system works similarly to Materialise’s Rapid Fit system that produces jigs for the testing of mass produced parts. These are made by SLS and are extremely accurate and also use 3D printed parts in combination with beams. I’m an idiot for not connecting these two things earlier and realizing that this should be possible. The extreme accuracy of RapidFit though does point to further possibilities in refining and improving the optics library using high end machines.

P.s., A great thing about the paper was the acknowledgements where, “The authors would like to acknowledge helpful designs and discussions with M. Kreiger, G. Anzalone, T. Tam and thingiverse user ordaos.”

In a story scripted for Good Morning America 83 year old Hugh Lyman invented the Lyman Extruder II, a simple desktop open source machine that converts ABS plastic pellets into filament. Mr. Lyman also won a $40,000 prize with his invention and in case you were wondering supplements his making activities with fishing and golf.

I thought this was a wonderful story and it is a significant invention. I was also moved by Mr. Lyman’s YouTube comment, “This is an open source project free to the world.” Not only by the quote but because it was  a YouTube comment by an 83 year old inventor who had just really pushed 3D printing forward. Modernity still surprises. As does YouTube with no crappy comments and no people falling to the floor and flopping around like fish for once.

Effects of Lyman 

Filament currently retails for $40-$50 online in several 3D printing material stores and 3D printer retailers. By letting people buy pellets the cost per kilo might be reduced as much as ten fold. You can buy pellets from $5 to $10 a kilo and much cheaper even if you buy direct from large distributors or plastics majors.

Cheaper 3D printing 

This extruder will therefore have a significant effect on pricing. If you wanted to print a mug it would have previously cost you $5 and now perhaps $0.5. This is a huge difference for 3D printer operators, you can make many more things at lower cost. Many more designs will become feasible at this price point. You also now don’t really have to think about using up material but can rather impulse 3D print many more things. Many more desktop 3D printed products now make sense. And for many things the price differential between the 3D printed thing and the mass produced item at the store has eroded or even disappeared altogether. This will make desktop 3D printing a cheaper hobby, more useful for some business applications and significantly reduce the TCO of the machines in any application.  ABS based FDM printers in one fell swoop just became 10 times cheaper to use. This will push the demand curve for the technology significantly outward.

Example of installed base improvement  

Better still this points to proof that indeed this market can be improved quickly by inventions that improve conditions for the installed base of 3D printers. If the software gets better, everyone with a 3D printer benefits. If lasers get better any SLS printer gets better. If resins get better Objet benefits etc. If materials get stronger they can be immediately deployed on compatible machines.  This is different from traditional manufacturing whereby each new technological innovation can not be immediately applied to existing factories. Because 3D printing is a 3 factor input process furthermore any of these 3 factors (machine, file, material) can be readily identified and improved upon, this is much more difficult in a fragmented complex mass manufacturing supply chain. It is in this manner that developments in 3D printing will out pace technological developments in mass manufacturing. 3D printing innovation can simply enter into use much more quickly.

Example of business problems and realities being solved by a Maker for Makers

The reason these materials were so expensive in the first place is that the market was too fragmented with too many different 3D printing solutions consuming different materials. There were lots of small vendors that placed small orders and fragmented these even further by wanting lots of different colors. This meant that these vendors could not achieve the low cost and scale that was needed for cheap filament. They bought from small time distributors or intermediaries and traders and were nuisance customers which also drove up the cost. I know this because I’ve been working on this problem for some months and came close to cracking it but, well, moving right along. Also with prices & margins artificially high everyone was not exactly keen to cut prices so prices stayed high. And what ended happening in the end? This whole inefficient chain of vendors was circumvented by a tool made by a maker making 3D printing more efficient. This is not only significant for now but points to this happening more in the future. You might be able to rip off a guy who wants to print out a term paper or airline ticket but you can’t indefinitely rip off a guy that wants to print everything.

One to many

Another great effect is that now its much simpler to give away things. Like this key chain? Keep it. This gets 3D printed things into many more people’s hands. By giving away more things and letting people keep lots of things and making it cheaper to sell 3D printed things we can turn these products into ambassadors for the technology. We can give away things that illustrate the capability & cost of these machines. Most importantly the people that have these things can now tell their story to their friends and family spreading the technology further around the world.

More failure=yippee!

With lower costs we will all be able to fail harder, better, faster and stronger. We’ll be able to make many more versions of things and test out many more things. We will be able to more easily test out each other’s designs and print out things with more whimsy or more adventure. This should in time lead to better product development in 3D printed things. We should see better things emerging more quickly than they have. More beautiful and functional things should also get made, all with more rapidity. This will also lead to increased demand for 3D printing.

But..this gets better yet, FilaMaker, Recylcebot and FilaBot

But, this story gets better still. There are a bunch of other similar project out there such as Joshua Pearce’s Recyclebot (more info here at RepRap).  FilaBot is a KickStarter funded project to make a personal filament maker. FilaMaker is a project by Marcus Thymark to combine a grinder with a filament maker (good name, Marcus Thymark, sounds like he should be invading Carthage or something). You can see a video below of Marcus’ grinder.

Recycle your 3D prints.

So what would a reliable grinder+filament maker mean? It would mean that you could recycle your 3D prints. Don’t like your mug or fractal whatnot, just recycle it. Bored with your keychain, turn it into a new one. This would also in and of itself significantly reduce the cost of 3D printing because not only is the kilo price much lower but you would iterate while reusing material and only keep what is perfect or memorable. Keep a picture frame, fridge magnet or gift and all other things would be in flux. This would greatly reduce the environmental impact of the entire 3D printing ecosystem and also lead to increased adoption. Also, we can now totally hit on Greenpeace chicks.

3D print for free! 

But..does it get better still? Oh yes it does, because a reliable grinder & filament maker could recycle household waste and turn that into 3D printing filament. So take your old Coke bottle tops and turn them into a nice Coca Cola red 3D printed bracelet. This would be a huge reduction in the environmental impact of 3D printing in the home and indeed make closed loop recycling in the home possible. It would also make 3D printing free. We could print whatever we like. And it would cost us nothing. This should help drive desktop 3D printer adoption as well.

Wow, so nothing bad’s going to happen?

Mmmm…well first off we have to be sure that these machines will even work repeatably at scale. Can they produce the correct diameter’s consistently?  Will there be bubbling and breakage. And since these things are rather slow, can you leave it on overnight without it burning your house down? We have to realize also that sooner or later someone is going to get very ill from putting the wrong kind of plastic in the machine or from fumes. If you melt PVC you might expose yourself to dioxin. Styrofoam has fun carcinogens too. Other plastics can also release dioxins when melted or burnt. Many melted plastics release fumes that to a more or lesser degree are harmful to us. So incorrect or possibly also correct usage of these devices could lead to people developing cancer. This doesn’t have to stop this thing in its tracks but should give us a moment to take pause. But, then again cigarettes give us cancer and people use those things all the time and they don’t even let you 3D print. But, because of this it is unlikely that these devices will go beyond the kit form. Perceived liability will also deter investors.

Speaking of investors, what about other negative things?

Well, if we do go on there is one more rather negative thing. In order to explain that I have to take you to a land far far away, a magical enchanted land of sunshine, dreams, hopes and possibility. This land is inhabited by a mystical and very powerful tribe of creatures with otherworldly names such as  Thiel, Khosla, Efrusy & Doerr.  The name of this magical land is Sand Hill Road. This tribe of creatures is called the VC’s. The VC’s are fearless, brainy, influential and very good at one thing: risk. Just how good are these creatures at judging risk? They’re amazing, thats why they all live smack dab in the middle of an earth quake zone in a city guaranteed to at one point fall into the sea. Yes, kids, these guys know risk like no one else.  These gallant and courageous creatures fear only three things: capital gains, hardware and the Emperor of Trolls, Myhrvold. When Myhrvold stomps around the wastelands of Texas the VC’s scurry and hide in their restaurants but other than that these proud creatures are free to roam the far corners of the earth. When Lord Myhrvold returns to his castle to cook up his potions they come out, blinking their eyes adjusting to the bright sunny glow of  their land paved in sun, bar charts and gold. These creatures are super smart, like owls every one. They feed only off of dreams and Excel. They are the guardians of invention deciding which idea becomes a thing. And they make amazing things such as social media video app platforms and also sometimes media video social app media platforms or sometimes even app social media video platforms and many amazing things like that.  Recently I even heard that they made a social app video media platform. Theres talk, but only talk, of them even perhaps getting together to, wait for it, make a social video media app platform. Truly world changing stuff! And to think they had humble beginnings in boring things such as semiconductors, these creatures have come a long way indeed. The tribe is really more of a heard but a herd that pretends its not a herd if that makes sense kids. Just imagine a group of mythical zebras pretending that they all don’t have stripes. And also pretending never to talk to one another.  Just like a magic lamp you go to them and rub them the right way and they grant you a wish. This wish is called a term sheet. But, unlike a genie you must never ever let them grant you your first wish.  What you really want is a second term sheet.  Also, unlike a genie you can not wish whatever you want but rather only wish something really really big.  VC’s never grant small wishes. Besides the rubbing you need a few things as well, some shiny PowerPoint as an offering, some yummy Excel to sustain them and some  items called barriers to entry, business model, defensibility and a dream. These all combine to form a magical potion and if the potion is just right  magical potion, the VC’s will grant you your wish.

So a few days ago our young hero Brock, good at Lacrosse, arrogance and pivot tables, jumps out of bed to work on his magic slides. And the numbers are good, yummy tasty VC numbers. Because Brock is going to take the VC’s fear of hardware away with these yummy tasty consumables numbers. Its not a machine, its HP. Its not an industry, its Gillette. You see, what we’re selling them a 3D  printing solution and the 3D printing material is a part of that, this is a platform. And with those yummy margins on the material the whole potion just makes sense. He just knows the VC’s will grant him his wish and he’ll be in his own jet faster than you kids can say abracadabra. But, then Brock reads about an 83  year old man who has just won a prize for something called a Filament Extruder. Brock breaks down crying sure that the mystical people up on that hill of greenbacks will never make his dreams come true. 30 years in the trenches at McExcel are to be his lot.

So kids, the moral of the story? Brock is fucked. The VC money to this market just went poof, like Amp’d mobile poof, gone. This is the downside, we bootstrap and kickstart from here on out.

In a world where anyone can make anything many things will be copied & reverse engineered. Many things will be remixed. Many things will be adapted upon, changed radically or altered ever so slightly. It will be easy to download objects and tweak them. People will work on things together and designs will be passed around the world. In such a world we must be mindful of attribution. Attribution will be key to encouraging invention & innovation by letting people reap the rewards of their creations. If things are not correctly attributed we reward only those that copy and not those that put in the hard work. We risk ending up in a world without fundamentally new ideas and without true innovation.

I will write more about this in a later post but I think its about time for us all to accept that we will soon no longer be living in a world with any defensible intellectual property. I think that this is inevitable and it is from this operating assumption that I write this post. The one thing we should hang on to is attribution. When a movie is downloaded you at least know its from New Line Cinema or the Michael Haneke directed it. You at least know the movie by its original title and can enjoy and recommend that film to friends. You could later on buy the movie or friends of yours could or you could become a fan of Mr. Haneke. In this manner Mr. Haneke profits from any and all interactions people have with his film and indirectly could monetize even free downloads.

With things it is different. If you design a lovely chair, I could download the file adapt it and change the name of the chair. I could take your form, innovation or design and remove all trace of you. It would be difficult for anyone to then find out who you were and that you designed this chair. The object is different from the movie, it is not a shared experience per se but a thing. Because of this you could not profit from the success of this thing in any way. It would be easier to copy, steal and adapt than innovate and do research.

True artists and inventors would not be rewarded and unable to make any money off of their innovations. The outmoded Intellectual Property system is a plaything for big companies and is not capable of dealing with the speed of a 3D printed world. Since it is concerned with individual objects and comparing their relative uniqueness, age or primacy it will be too slow to make any real impact on what is actually happening with 3D printed things. If a court could make a ruling in Belgium on a case of infringement within two weeks it would be irrelevant in a global context despite copyright and other treaties. Also, by then this thing will have mutated perhaps a 100 times in as many jurisdictions. When does one copy become a new thing? Since the system is set up to rule in cases of individual items it is always going to be behind the times. If Mary copies a chair and then Tom adapts it and Leandro adapts it once again and then Min downloads the original and changes that while Moses combines both chairs then who infringes when? If Mary is found to have infringed on the original, then what about the others? The court would have to determine infringement in each and every case individually.

Previously copyright worked because book printing companies and TV stations were centralized businesses that were easy to find. In a world of decentralized production there will be no one to go after. There will always be someone somewhere who doesn’t have a mortgage, doesn’t have kids in college but does have a 3D printer.

Knowing what the source is of your objects is therefore very important. There will be no enforceable penalties from a centralized trademark bureau that can ensure that a trademark or name is your own. With trends and global information flows accelerating “flash in the pan” hits will become the norm as well as tiny successes. By the time the trademark infringement email arrives most of the monetization of that trademark that is momentarily in the spotlight might have already occurred. By the time the letter falls on the doormat, it could already be over.

What we need for objects is a combination between Flickr and Twitter. We need a timeline that establishes when a thing was made. We need a public database where one can upload a thing to the world, establish what it is, who made it and what rights are assigned to it. Shapeways and Thingiverse both could have this role but as they are being run by commercial parties for financial gain it is doubtful that they could be the best custodians for this kind of information in the long run. With commercial interests at stake, they might cave to people abusing the IP system too quickly. eg what if someone uploaded a Ford part to Thingiverse today? Would Makerbot keep the part live? or take it down? I would assume that Makerbot’s deal to sell several thousand 3D printers to Ford’s engineers might influence their decision. This points to a need for a Wikipedia-like organization to safeguard the public timeline of all the worlds designs. This would answer the oft heard online chorus yammering for sauce. The all defining sauce, or source. Where does this thing come from, what is it, who made it and when was it made? It is only through publicly safeguarding source that we can entertain the possibility that in the future there might be some way to make a living as an artist, designer or inventor.

Above is an image for the Mal1956, a copy of the Eames Ottoman. For an excellent article explaining the merits of this case here is a piece by preeminent IP lawyer Ernst Louwers.

I think that there are a number of similarities between paper printing and 3D printing but would council against directly comparing the paper printing industry, market, cost reductions and growth with that of 3D printing.

There are a number of fundamental differences at the moment and here I pick out 8 ways in which the current state of the 3D printing industry is different from the state of the DTP/PC/printer industry before its mainstreaming:

1. Ecosystem: With paper printing entire industries & ecosystems coalesce around technologies such as inkjet, laser printing & toner. This is not the case with 3D printing where there are many different technologies that have very little to do with each other and there is no ecosystem around them with many being developed by one company.

2. Shaving Cut: With paper printing the ink is very expensive but paper is cheap. This means that even though the printing ink is a ridiculously expensive compound and gives companies inordinate margins, the cost per print for the consumer is still low. This is because paper is cheap. This means that HP can have sweet margins in paper printing while still making the technology usable. Meanwhile in 3D printing everyone copied the HP/Gillette business model but they made a mistake. The 3D printing material is both the paper and the ink. So yes, the margins are ridiculous but they are limiting their market size and revenues significantly because the technology is too expensive. By limiting the applications 3D printing has and by unnecessarily inflating costs so that less things can and will be printed they are keeping people from using and adopting the technology. All the 3D printing companies are guilty of this and it is really inhibiting the growth of the market.

3. PostScript: With paper printing there was PostScript. Before PostScript paper printing was a mess and it is with the adoption of PostsScript that the entire DTP, print at home, print at the office thing actually worked. 3D printing has no PostScript. This means that you don’t know what you’re going to get, you don’t know if it will work, theres no universal path from app to machine and theres a lot of ambiguity.

4. Ease. It is easier to use Microsoft Word successfully and consistently than it is to use a 3D modeling application.

5. Bleed. Word and other business productivity applications had crossover effects with home use leading work use to bleed into the home igniting the DTP and PC revolutions. The work user base for 3D modeling and CAD is much smaller than PC.

6. Need. As part of their lives people have to make documents and often print them. The PC and DTP revolutions made ingrained user behavior and needs easier to accomplish. 3D printing does not do this but is a new thing for users to do. It might make their lives easier somewhere in the future but there is little immediate benefit.

7. No Spellcheck. In addition to PostScript there is no spell check for 3D printing. With making a Word (or WordPerfect 5.1! ) file you could see what you were doing, edit it yourself and spell check. There is no spell check to check if your thing will work in 3D printing. You also won’t even know if it will print in the first place. There is file repair software but there is no integration between these high end packages and the 3D design application.

8. Many people can write. Many people can write and could use PC’s and printers from the get go. But, not many people can 3D model, design or have a sense of design. For the PC and DTP we had to learn GUI’s and what software is but for 3D printing we will have to learn to 3D model (or other input) and learn how to speak design.

Image, Creative Commons Attribution Jake Sutton.

3D printing is not being held back by machines, its man that is restraining this revolution. In the tool chain from the ideas in our heads to the final product many steps are precarious ones. 3D design software is too difficult as is file repair and conversion. But, it is at a step before this, in our minds themselves that the greatest blockades are to be found.

The Diamond/Diabetes/Distraction Age

I do think that we are approaching an age where people want to understand their supply chain, know where there things come from and want to have things be just so. I do think we want to design and make our own things. I do think we want to individualize and make our mark on the world. I definitely think that we want to continue to differentiate ourselves and in a populated media and commercial landscape it is becoming hard to do. I do think we want to create and do think that we love the idea of 3D printing and machines that can make everything.

In living a digital existence we have been divorced from real things. We want to reconnect with our world, with our hands, with other people, with the things that surround us. Screens will no longer be enough. Higher resolution will no longer be enough. More things will not please us anymore. By moving into a time of post-consumerism towards increased awareness and meaning we will bring about a new age in design, manufacturing and cultural life. But, how to let go from these brands that hold us back. How to let go from the idea that meaning, design or inspiration must be provided by an authority figure somewhere?

The Singer Problem

People will enthusiastically tell you that we will have machines that make everything on the desktop and use them to share things and make everything we need just as we want it to be. Such a statement, if left unqualified, is bull. The sewing machine has been around for over a 170 years.  We could today use these machines to make all of our own clothes and give them precisely the look and fit we want. We however do not do this. Even enthusiastic sewers and fashion designers don’t make all of their own clothes. I’ve previously called this the Singer problem. Maybe sewing is too difficult, seen as a girly thing to do or seen as a low wages job or maybe the time just doesn’t pay off for many people part of the modern world. Truth is that if we were really on the path to a universal making revolution, sewing technology would be on the forefront.

The blank canvas problem

Want to confound someone? Freeze them in the headlights? Give them a blank sheet of paper and ask them to draw something. Many will not be able to draw. Many will be afraid of drawing. Many will get stuck, unable to express themselves. Many will not even start, unable to know where to go. Unable to decide where the first ink is to touch the page. Many will be unable to tell you what they want to draw but are unable to do. The corollary for this is, sustained creativity comes from constraints. Dilbert can be consistently engaging for decades because it has a limited universe, set ideas, set characters and similar stories. Dilbert is limited to its panels and format and because of this consistent quality can be achieved. Given fewer constraints it would have been harder.

Many will be frozen in a 3D printed age. Understanding the technology but unable to express themselves due to the wealth of infinite possibility.

Design is other people/No Exit

At the same time adults will rely on others to make their branding, design, style and fashion choices. We stop making things at one point. Afraid of what others will think. We conclude that we can not draw, or not draw well enough as compared to others. We are afraid to make something to show off our own thing. We  flock to the safety of brands. Its got a polo horse on it and everything, I must be stylish, I must be safe. Instead of making things ourselves we spend our time trying to choose products, choose things other people have made that are just right in terms of cutting edge, us and stylish. We read Vogue and it tells us what to wear. We stifle our own creativity and rely more and more on institutions to decide for us what we must wear or have in our houses. If we are to all 3D print, we have to start believing that something is valuable because we have made it. We have to start believing that we don’t really care about other people’s opinions. Rather than reflexively saying that we don’t care but meanwhile don’t have an actual opinion on anything, just parrot institutionalized opinion. We have to start believing that something can be beautiful just because we think it is.

From mind to product

There are two solutions I can think of that would sweepingly remove all of these issues. 1. a growing and vibrant maker community that connects with the mainstream through the idea of making coupled with people’s experience of photography that went from being an expert activity to a everyman one. A broadening of the idea that the supply chain of all your things is important, coupled with some slow food thinking and a shirking back from the excesses consumerism. This would gradually usher in the age where everyone can at least believe that they could be designer. It is not 3D printing that will let designers go the way of the professional photographer, it is people’s self confidence in their own ability.

2. A technology that lets anyone think of a certain shape and then 3D prints this shape. If I need to choose which of these two options has the greatest chance of succeeding, I’d bet on 2. There’s a guy called Jack Gallant at UC Berkley, he and his team are using fMRI scans of the visual cortex to see images in your brain. MRI images can already be turned into 3D prints. So it is a question of time for them to be extracted from your mind and then turned into 3D prints. At such a time you could actually think of an object or shape and we could 3D print it. This would be a sea change since it would mean that you could 3D print your dreams or any visual thoughts. What does Vogue have on my brain? What does Ralph Lauren dream that I can not? I can exactly tell you the shape I want this thing to be. This will be a huge impact for 3D printing technology and design since then the path from dream to thing is clear and all other designers, brands and  institutions will seem like distractions. Below and above some initial experiments that showed people movie trailers and asked them to reconstruct them. It is the tool chain that restricts us and the tool chain which will be impacted the most by this technology. The tool chain makes us not able to express ourselves directly. The toolchain of Hermes is what lets them construct and distribute their vision of things. It is this that will be altered by a technology that would let us think of something and then make exactly that. Then we can welcome everyone to a 3D printed world.

Here are some previous posts:

The Sistine Chapel in an Age of Screens.

Dear HP, Brother, Xerox, Please Make a 3D printer.

Punished for Quality.

Dieter Rams versus Jony Ive.

In living a digital existence we have been divorced from real things. Our high speed lives consist of 1′s and 0′s, flitting between apps and scanning continually from screen to screen. We spend our lives watching birds fly on phones and detectives solving crime on TV. We kill thousands of people on our Playstations and drift into low impulse  control existences. We are obese and listless.  Gaming and watching we railgun our way into type 2 diabetes. We seek stimulation and excitement from bright screens and ignore the real world around us. The feedback loops on games grow ever shorter divorcing us from the slower and more boring feedback loops of the real world. We are level 60 warriors on a server park in northern Oregon and level 0 doers in our own homes and lives. The imagined world of TV’s and photoshopped magazines grows ever more beautiful. Marketeers invest billions to seduce us. New devices are more portable and screens propagate to surround us. Amidst the seduction of the screens our own lives pale by comparison. They are not as exciting, not as continually interesting. We withdraw into a digital world and ignore the real one.

The Sistine Chapel

I was in the Sistine chapel last year, generally seen to be one of the most interesting architectural and artistic sights in the world. A beautiful thing to gaze up at when you are in Rome. I’ve been 4 times and am amazed and wowed every single time. It is a rare and edifying place to be and fills me with the joy of artistic appreciation, it delights my heart. This time it was nearly Easter and a door on the western wall was opened to reveal an archway and room normally not seen by the public. Crowning them were two beautifully carved angels elegantly set in stone. I could see workers prepare for the papal address, guards guard normally hidden archways, priest like chess pieces glide across the room. Two older clergy were whispering off in a corner, there was even a Swiss guard, other men who had the look of those that had been doing this for decades look seriously at lists and clipboards while workers moved chairs and anachronistically shiny stage trusses with animated Italian seriousness.

Amidst this uncharactaristic look behind the scenes of the Catholic church, near one of its holiest days tourists milled trying to surreptitiously take photographs of the walls and ceilings above them. Most ignored the men working in the next room but I was fascinated by something I was not likely to ever see again, the supply chain and organization behind Urbi et Orbi. I was touched by the seriousness, routine and mundaneness of it. Stacked chairs being moved for the rebirth of Christ. Checklists and walkie talkies for a ritual that is thousands of years old. Black robed men solemnly sending texts. Men with earpieces circulating, walking, meeting, working for a God. As an atheist I found their work poignant and was glad I got to see it. Still, I could not resist those finely drawn frescoes above and turned my gaze to Michelangelo’s bodies in motion, still one of humanities finest artistic achievements, a man lying on his back telling the story of his God. Adam and Eve, the story of creation all brightly rendered while the paint drips into his eyes. But, not even this was the most poignant thing I saw that day. While looking down momentarily I saw a boy of about 10.

He was not looking up at the ceiling. He was looking at his iPhone. He held it horizontally and his head and his upper body periodically turned from side to side. He seemed to be navigating through some space landscape or piloting some kind of craft on a faraway universe. I understand that art appreciation might not be central to a ten year old. But, as he held his digital pacifier, enthralled by the action within, he was missing the sight of a lifetime above. Furthermore his mother held the back of his head with an open hand, navigating him around passersby. This done with a skill and routine that deflated me. And thus the little man walked, crisscrossing the stone flooring and being elegantly steered around a clump of Japanese tourists, narrowly avoiding a glancing cranial impact from a low hanging Nikon, while being again with much professionalism lead around a clutch of Spanish teachers listening to a guide before leaving the room. His eyes never leaving the screen, an iPhone controlled automaton rocking with the sway of images. Not looking up once. He didn’t look up once. She didn’t stop and ask him to look up once. Not once. I’m sorry I’m getting repetitive here, but not once.

It would be OK if the kid didn’t pay much attention in Rome in general. I would understand that to a certain extent. Maybe he’s not into the Vatican museum. Maybe the sumptuous halls and galleries wouldn’t tickle his fancy. I don’t myself have children but I completely understand that every once in a while it could be very tempting to toss a shiny technology brick at a child in order to occupy their minds. In these outstretched galleries with their artifact laden beautiful spaces stretching across the ages one might perhaps have a mind otherwise occupied. One could consider this a preamble and ignore its significance. Then later on in your walking tour,  in one of the most important artistic spaces in the world as well as one of the centers of a major world religion I would expect at least a glance up. If only to say one has been there or to justify the time. If only to have looked at the thing but once.

But, the kid didn’t. He was guided round the room like a zombie, a character in a computer game: not seeing, not realizing, not exploring, not living. Were not talking here about making the kid sit through the Matthäus-Passion for 3 hours. We’re not talking about signing him up for the Art History course at the Harvard Extension. We’re talking about making him look up for five minutes from a shiny tablet. We’re talking of perhaps letting his curiosity extend beyond the borders of a 640 by 960 pixel screen for a few moments.

And so we zombie like stroll through the world. Our eyes locked on those screens and bright continually moving pixels. We grab our phones when left alone a moment. We sit across from each other our minds millions of miles away. We sit close and focus on events happening elsewhere. We are downloaders not up loaders in this life. We dream of gaming marathons and worry about how many people follow us on Twitter. We focus on taking the best picture while not being there. We watch TV shows about interesting people with interesting lives filled with excitement while our lives are mundane, consisting only of their adventures.

Worse still, as characters in soaps become our friends, as the people of “real …. of ….” become our neighbors and we root for 3D markup toiling against other 3D markup inside the memory of consoles, our memories become more those of the stories told to us rather than the ones we ourselves make. Our frame of reference becomes the “hero always wins” and all “solutions are simple”, black and white worlds of TV and the movies. Our lives become the “save now win later” universe of games. Our joy increasingly comes from identifying and experiencing these artificial worlds as we ignore our own. At least if we only dreamed all day we’d be actively making those dreams. He we are pacified, here we are in the Matrix trapped in vats of our own construction.

The sheer vastness of time spent in front of screens skews our views of reality as well as taking us away from it. Their easy narratives are so much simpler than our complicated world. The people on screens are always so much prettier than we. Their lives so much more resolved. Their surroundings often more beautiful. Their excitement seems to make our existence so much less exciting. And the sheer number of points of success, relief, closure and resolution in their lives makes ours seem tirelessly difficult by comparison. The virtual world is thus also making the real look harder and makes it harder to enter into again.

My favorite statistic from CSUN, “Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours. Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500.” So if they continue with that habit then by the time they’re 40 they’ve watched over 4 years of TV continuously. 4 years of your life. 4 years spent watching NCIS, Storage Wars & some competition where they try to find the best whatever…… And how about this chilling statistic, “Percentage of 4-6 year-olds who, when asked to choose between watching TV and spending time with their fathers, preferred television: 54.”

I know I know, how wonderfully luddite of me to rage against TV. But as the virtual continues day by day to grow more compelling with higher resolution, better stories and better visuals our screens will in future enrapture us even more. As we look from screen to screen and not at the real earth, not at leaves, the sky, our friends faces or at raindrops snail trailing across our windows our interest will ever more be captured by those screens. Our lives are worth more than that. Your life is worth more than that. Turn of that TV, close your Macbook, put away that smartphone. Live.

Given enough eyeballs, all things are shallow.

Iterative product development, using 3D printing in combat.

Mission Possible, full face masks.

3D printing a blank canvas.

Dear HP, Brother and Seiko, please make a 3D printer.

Punished for producing quality.

Dieter Rams vs. Jony Ive.

3D printing verus Mass production, 1% of everything.

Images Creative Commons, Attribution. Fransisco Antunes. Freeparking. Briyyz. Ideacremanuellapps.

My parents bought a Kenwood stereo in 1987. They still have it, it works perfectly and has never been broken. I bought a Maglite for myself in 1993, I will probably never have to replace it. In 1996 I bought a Carhartt hooded sweat that over the past 16 years has faded somewhat and looks a little worse for wear but I’m still wearing it as we speak. I have a Henkels knife set that is 15 years old. My dad still has a Marks & Spencer woolen sweater from 1982 that he wears.

Heroes

These products are my heroes. They work as advertised, have long lifespans and deliver on quality as well as value. In a world of disposable products they persevere by focussing on making the best products they can. They buck the trend to ever more beautiful landfill and ever more fleeting romances with products. They don’t make tops or T-shirts that you wear for one season only to toss out. They don’t make consumer electronics that are built to fail. They don’t focus on marketing and imagined value but deliver on real value. Ideally these companies should be rewarded for their quality. They should be the stars, the heroes and become successful through word of mouth and the appreciation of their products. A question: Who makes the best quality cars in the world? Name the top ten car brands in the world in terms of reliability.

Car quality

The TÜV is a german engineering organization that tests and validates cars and many other things besides, their TÜV reports use feedback and testing of cars to measure the overall reliability of cars. If one looks at the TÜV report quality surveys of cars the Porsche 911 is almost always on top. This, as well as the iconic design, history of the marque, price and marketing helps to shore up the Porsche brand. It helps people buy the car and this revenue feeds back into making better cars. It is as it should work, all is well with the world.

But, if we look at car quality over the years we can see some surprises as well. The Mazda MX-5 also appears near the top of the quality surveys. In the 2005 survey for cars that are between 10 and 11 years old it is in second place behind the 911. In the 2004 report for ten to eleven year old cars the MX-5 has a fault rate of 12% compared to an average of 26% and only is preceded by the Mercedes SL, S and Porsche 911. Its worst result over all surveys since 2004 is 20th place for the 2006 model year. But if we look at that ranking, it has the Mazda 6 in 12th place the Mazda 5 in 7th place, Mazda 3 in 3rd place and the Mazda 2 in second place. The Mazda car models seem to be named for their expected positions on quality surveys. The average fault rate in a Mazda 2 is 2.4%, 2.6% in a 3 whilst the average fault rate overall for cars 2-3 years old is 5.1%. The fault rate on several 10-11 year old Mazdas is much lower than that of some very popular 2-3 or 4-5 year old cars. Look at this summary of recent Mazda survey results from a Mazda press release:

J.D. Powers in Germany
•    Mazda3:  Highest-scoring model of all 117 models on survey
•    Mazda3:  1st in the compact class
•    Mazda2:  1st in B-car class

J.D. Powers in the UK
•    MX-5: 1st in the Sports Car category, ahead of luxury models cars like Audi TT, the Mercedes-Benz CLK and SLK

Auto Bild 100,000 Endurance Test
•    Mazda3:  Finishes test without breakdown, earns top score
•    Rankings:  Mazda has three of top four models (Mazda3, 5, 6) from 80 models

Latest TÜV Report Germany
(from over 7 million inspections per age-class, 215 models in total)
•    3 years old:  Mazda2 (2nd), Mazda3 (8th)
•    5 years old:  Mazda2 (6th), Mazda3 (10th)
•    7 years old:  Mazda2 (6th), Mazda3 (7th)

Mazda? Really Mazda?

And yet, I doubt many really considered Mazda to be very high in quality. Did you when you started reading this consider Mazda to be one of the best car brands in the world? If I were to ask you how good Mazdas were what would you have said? Even if you knew about the statistics, would you have felt that Mazda was amongst the best cars in the world? Was Mazda on your list of top ten car brands? Statistically according to surveys it is probably one of best car brands in the world, but Mazda has been unable to sell this quality aspect well. The same thing goes for Subaru. The Subaru Forrester has placed very high in the TÜV surveys. Despite a poor, for the brand, showing in the recent survey coming in 69th place and one showing in 22nd place, all other surveys the Forrester is in put it in the top ten of all cars.

Quality against the odds.

The remarkable thing about both Subaru and Mazda is that both are not premium brands but compete with premium brands in quality rankings. Both make very affordable cars much lower in price than many of their competitors in their class. So they have less margin and less revenue to spend on development. Yet they have higher quality. At the same time it is good to note that both Mazda and Subaru are small. If we look at November autosales for the US market Mazda sold 21,691 cars and Subaru 28,206. Daimler sold 32,649 cars and GM 186,505, Ford 177,092 and Toyota 161,695. Kia, Nissan, VW, Chrysler, Honda, BMW they all sold more cars than these two brands. If we look at the total number of produced cars in 2011, Mazda is in 16th place with 1.1m cars while Subaru is in 26th place with 528,234 cars. Over the same period GM sold 6,867,465 cars, Volkswagen  8,157,058, Toyota  6,793,714  and  Hyundai 6,118,221. Ford, Nissan, PSA (Peugeot and Citroen), Honda, Renault, Suzuki, Fiat, BMW and Daimler follow each making between 3m and 1.8m vehicles. Compared to these companies Mazda and especially Subaru lack scale. So, they have less volume over which to spread out their innovations and processes.

But, amazingly totally uncomprehendingly amazingly to me Mazda and Subaru manage to outcompete much larger brands in quality even though several of these brands sell at a significant premium and all have much larger vehicle volumes. This is virtually impossible to me. Cars is almost a pure scale play. To be able to make a better car while selling it cheaper and making less of them is an incredible achievement. But, why aren’t these brands being rewarded more for their efforts through vehicle sales? The most obvious reasons to me are that both Mazda and Subaru suck in the styling and design department. Their relative lack of success is due to a focus on quality and due to our searching for the wrong clues when assessing quality.

1. You can’t feel quality but you think you can. Through material selection and engineering you can engineer tactile experiences for the consumer that give that consumer a better feeling of quality without having to actually make a quality product. e.g. the cover of a MacBook feels very high quality irrespective of the quality of the device.

2. Companies can put effort in either perceived quality or actual quality. Perceived quality is what the consumer sees and this would result in higher sales.  When you close a car door it makes a resoundingly reassuring thump. If you look at this metal frame bolted onto a chassis that is a car you probably already start to realize that the thump has been faked. And you’d be right. The sound and feeling a car door makes when being closed is an important differentiator for consumers. The “car door closing experience” is a key indicator of overall car quality for the consumer. Car companies spend an inordinate amount of effort in engineering car door closing sounds and the feeling the door makes when it closes. So if I’m better and making my door closing experience than you, then I will sell more cars and have a higher perceived quality even though you may make better cars.

VW cars are good and also widely admired for their interior trim. Higher interior trim leads to a better tactile experience and a better perceived quality. The buttons on VW cars just feel right and are very solid. Meanwhile Subaru is not very good at this aspect of car building. From this review, “But the interior doesn’t feel very premium at all. There are too many hard plastics and mis-matched colours and grains.” Or this review, “The usual Subaru story here. It depends on how you define quality. You get superb longevity and reliability, but many of the cabin materials look and feel cheap.” This is exactly the point for me. Both VW try to make good cars but VW concentrates its efforts on perfecting interior trim which gives a much higher feeling of quality. Meanwhile the nice people at Subaru are trying to work on other aspects of the vehicle.

3. We look for indicators of quality in all the wrong places. If you walk by a restaurant in a foreign country a nicely worded menu in perfect English with some good graphic design will give you a feeling of quality about the restaurant and may cause you to eat there. But, bereft of information and devoid of methods by which you can fairly and critically evaluate the tourist restaurants in your current location you grasp irrelevant information and make your decision based on that.

4. Excellence in sales and marketing is not an indication of product quality but we feel that it is. Meanwhile, excellence in sales and marketing might actually be an indicator of bad quality and we never realize this. A well worded menu might actually mean that the restaurant is crap so it has to focus on things like menus in order to survive. So the restaurant that looks the best might be the worst. But, because our clues depend on what we can perceive we focus on things like graphic design and the english on the menus because we can not determine food quality. So we end up always eating in the worst restaurants.

5. A brilliant marketeer is most likely not a brilliant quality guy. But, you won’t be able to know if a company is quality or marketing driven from the outside looking in.  One guy will be in charge though. I’m a marketeer, an excitable likes to think of himself as a dreamer chap who thinks in big ideas and inspiring things, sales, sale cycles, online and understands people and trends and all that fun gooey soft marketing stuff. I am not well suited to sit somewhere behind a production line and do six sigma optimization and implement ISO standards and continually day by day ensure the quality of that production line does not slip. Ask me to show consumer’s X Company’s quality and I could sell it brilliantly. Asked to ensure that Y Company ramps up this quality and I would fail. So companies that look like they have amazing quality might actually just have amazing marketeers, while companies that don’t look very special might just have bad people selling the story.

6. Quality oriented people are modest. When selling things modesty is not always the best policy. People who are very focussed on quality are humble and modest and always trying to improve themselves. They are more likely to qualify their statements and speak modestly about themselves or their products. People who don’t care much about quality are better at selling the story. Look at the difference between for example the Subaru website and other car sites. The Subaru site has a vehicle comparison tool to let you compare your Subaru with other cars. Also compare the copy of the Subaru site and the modesty of their language and images with other manufacturers bombast. I’m willing to bet that the nice people at Alfa Romeo have never thought for a millisecond about implementing a vehicle comparison tool on their site.

7. Quality is harder to get right than marketing and quality costs more. Companies take a long time to develop the habits, infrastructure, methods and policies that ensure quality. They have to continually invest in process optimization and R&D to stay ahead of the curve. Investments in quality will leave much less money left over for styling, marketing and sales and this will be detrimental to long term performance.

8. A lone focus on quality is a riskier path than a more diversified brand or experience. Toyota got hit hard when doubts about Toyota quality began to emerge. Imagine a similar crisis with Alfa Romeo. Would it have hurt them as much? No, Alfa is an emotional sell. Many would have just shrugged and said, “well I never bought it for the quality”, “but it still feels like such a sporty drive” or “I knew that already.” Also by focusing on emotion Alfa creates a deeper brand and deeper connection than a rational quality connection. And quality is something that can be disproven, something a brand has to earn every day. Emotion? Excitement? Styling? Is something you can pay someone to easily implement for you.

9. Higher quality products are likely to increase confidence in other products in that category and might cause people to leave the brand. A friend of mine has driven Lexus for 10 years and has had next to no problems with it. Because of his confidence in Lexus, his overall confidence in cars has increased. He can’t help it but he feels more confident about the driving experience and car quality of all cars. He hasn’t had problems in over a decade so doesn’t really remember car trouble as trouble. He therefore is not sufficiently pricing this into his car buying decisions and is now looking further afield at cheaper and more exciting brands.

10. Consumers who are more focused on quality are more modest people, they are less capable salespeople for you. People who buy Subarus are likely to be no nonsense people who weigh their options and make the most rational choice. They are less likely to be swayed by branding or marketing and emotion. These are just the type of rational individuals who are not good at being salespeople for your brand. Meanwhile people who buy Alfa Romeo’s are likely to be people who will not shut up about how amazing their car experience is. These people are likely to believe the hype and feel a strong emotional connection with their car and this is what these passionate individuals will be able to convey. This will help emotional brands and hurt rational ones.

11. Selling crappy things is a good business model even though its bad for everyone, it gives outsized returns to those selling crappy things. Or, the Hong Kong Jade Market problem. In Hong Kong can buy jade for a good price at the Hong Kong jade market if you are a shark. Non sharks will probably pay too much or not get jade at all.  Once upon a time every stall would sell real jade at a good price. Then haggling tourists would come and the guy with the lowest quality would be able to give the tourist the best deal and so sell more. The high quality handmade, true jade guy could not compete with the low quality guy and so would go out of business. The fake jade guy would make even more money and in time would drive other people out of business. Cheating and producing low quality goods became the only way to survive in a market with little transparency, reputation and much focus on price. So over time there have been more dishonest traders and lower quality jade (including last time I was there some pretty amazing jade looking plastics) and more ripped off tourists. Meanwhile the tourists all get nice low prices and feel like they’re getting a wonderful deal.

12. We are hard wired to mistake beauty for quality. Symmetry can indicate that an individual is less effected by disease and more healthy and therefore a better partner. Symmetry is therefore the basis of much of our conscious and unconscious thinking about beauty. Symmetry, Golden ratio thinking and beauty ideas influence us disproportionately.  When we see a beautiful person we are more likely to ascribe good qualities to that person and think that they are better people. The same thing is true about products. If a product is not as pretty we will undervalue it, not only because of its relative looks but we will also underestimate other aspects of this product as opposed to a pretty one.

In our current flat and diversified world its difficult to build a reputation especially with many more competitors entering the market all the time and many more products being introduced. I got inspired to write this article after spending many hours looking for quality suppliers for products on Alibaba and being unable to find quality and sometimes picking the wrong ones based on the wrong information. At the same time, after having deftly avoided many a tourist trap and visiting Spain many times I managed to in a choice between a crappy tourist restaurant and an honest eatery with good food make the wrong choice. I chose based on the wrong cues, the “hygienic marketing information.” I think in a globally competitive world we will all increasingly make the wrong choices. I think we’ll be seduced by the marketeers again and again while the quality people take the more difficult path and do not get rewarded for it. I’m especially worried about fonts of quality such as Japanese industry who make high quality amazing value products but risk being undercut by the Chinese and out marketed by everyone else. I’m concerned that good things and good companies will lose out to bad things and bad companies. Thank you for getting through this piece!

Given enough eyeballs, all things are shallow.

Iterative product development, using 3D printing in combat.

Mission Possible, full face masks.

3D printing a blank canvas.

The Sistine Chapel in an age of screens.

Dear HP, Brother and Seiko, please make a 3D printer.

Dieter Rams vs. Jony Ive.

3D printing verus Mass production, 1% of everything.

DamianMory’sPhotography, AldenJewel, PudPudduck, WM Jas, X-Ray Delta One, MSMCComb.

Dieter Rams is one of the most innovative and significant designers in the world today.  His ten principles of Good design are:

1. Good design should be innovative — It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty just for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must clearly be seen in all of a product’s functions. Current technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.

2. Good design should make a product useful — The product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose, in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product’s usability.

3. Good design is aesthetic design — The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

4. Good design will make a product understandable — It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

5. Good design is honest — It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

6. Good design is unobtrusive — Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

7. Good design is long lived — It does not follow trends that become out-dated after a short time. Well designed products differ significantly from short-lived, trivial products in today’s throwaway world.

8. Good design is consistent in every detail — Nothing must be arbitrary. Thoroughness and accuracy in the design process shows respect towards the user.

9. Good design should be environmentally friendly — Design must make contributions towards a stable environment and sensible raw material situation. This does not only include actual pollution, but also visual pollution and destruction of our environment.

10. Good design is as little design as possible — Less is more – because it concentrates on the essential aspects and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

It must therefore be horrible for Mr. Rams to have so influenced Ive and Apple so. Apple copies his esthetics but pisses over his ideas. Instead of Good design Apple makes bad design. Something that is holistically created to look beautiful, to feel as it looks and whose marketing seamlessly flows into the look and feel of the product but it is actually a bad product. Close your eyes and touch a number of smartphones and ask yourself, “which is the most expensive?”, “which is the sexiest?”, “which feels like it would last the longest?”, or which of these feels most like a horcrux? And, at least when I tested this repeatedly, you will invariably choose an Apple product.

In any product category look at the principles of Good Design and ask yourself which company seems to fit these principles? It is often Apple except for when the key environmental aspects are concerned.  Apple steals the “Design” bit and forgets the good. Press a button on an Apple product and note that the press is exactly in tune with the look of the thing. It feels weighty and durable. Brush your hand over an Apple thing and it feels sleek and somehow right and long lasting. Hold an Apple product and compare its heft and how it feels in its hand to competitors, Apple feels superior in every way. Brush over and Apple laptop and do the same with several others. Ask yourself which feels more like art?

By designing holistically, using 3D printing in its design and development extensively, iterating and by putting design first Apple has conquered the world of consumer electronics. A big part of its victory is the wholesale theft of Dieter Rams’ esthetic. But, while Apple steals the looks and many ideas for its products from Rams, Apple’s completely betrays Good Design. Apple makes disposable products, $2000 laptops that after 18 months lose their battery power whilst the casing of it is engineered in such a way as to make it nigh impossible to replace the battery. Apple releases new products at messianic global events that result in millions of people lamenting the sorry state of their two year old “old phone” and pining for a new even sleeker model. By tapping into a cycle of want and need Apple engineers obsolecence and floods the world with millions of products designed to break just in time for the new update.  Apple is quite simply put the chief exponent of Bad design.

Look at this principle, “Good design is honest — It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.” Apple does the exact opposite of this, using Rams’ esthetic and way of working but continually makes things look more innovative, valuable and powerful than they are. Apple manipulates everyone all the time with promises that can not be kept, every new product a new revolution that will change everything. Every new version does not live up to the hype but instead of turning our backs to this company we crave even newer and more perfect exponents of promises that will never be kept.

If we look at other principles then Apple copies them slavishly and then omits some crucial details. “Good design should be innovative — It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty just for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must clearly be seen in all of a product’s functions. Current technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.” Apple copies existing product forms slavishly. Apple as a company is centered around novelty for novelty’s sake. Apple is great and showcasing the essence of innovation in functionality.

Apple as a business does nothing for the environment and indeed is less responsible and less involved with this than competitors. Apple is all about superficiality. It will lie to you beautifully and while you believe that everything you touch is so good for you it is actually bad for this planet. This has annoyed me for ages and I’ve been waiting so patiently for all this Apple fetishism to die off. Don’t get me wrong, as a company Apple is incredibly good at executing and they have done many innovative and significant things. Its just that perverts Good design by its Bad design and that this is placing a disproportionate and unnecessary burden on the environment. Apple could still be a fantastically profitable company if it showed an interest in the environment and took a modicum of interest in sustainability. The positive impact it could make by just any incremental environmental improvement spread out over the millions of devices it makes could be huge. And yet they don’t do it. They make beautiful things with terrible souls. Therefore,

Jony Ive’s Ten Principles of Bad Design. 

1.  Make superficial products. It has to look good, little else matters.

2. Design holistically in order to maximize hype. Make sure the branding, marketing, hype, rumors, look and feel of the product all coincide perfectly. Designing the lie is much more important than designing the actual thing.

3. Promise revolutions. Always frame everything in a revolutionary context, everything is evermore revolutionary all the time. Overclaim always. Ignore previous work in any field and ignore competing products.

4. It has to look slick. Everything slick, slippery and oh so polished and glossy.

5. Lie well. People will believe what you tell them to if you make it compelling enough. This is much easier than actually making a good thing.

6. Patronize the user. You know best, the user must be a rat in your design maze. They must be forced to interact with the device exactly how you want them to.

7. Keep the user out. The user must not be able to open their product or change it in any way.

8. Make sure the product always has a limited life span. Preferably make it so that products begin to fail around the launch of its replacement.

9. Fake mystique. Frame your products, your launches, your company and your people in a completely different light than others. Present your products as completely new product categories and always portray yourselves as being fundamentally different from others to mask the herd behavior you initiate and the little value you add.

10. Steal from Dieter Rams. Take all of the Design bits and leave out all of the Good bits.

Given enough eyeballs, all things are shallow.

Iterative product development, using 3D printing in combat.

Mission Possible, full face masks.

3D printing a blank canvas.

The Sistine Chapel in an age of screens.

Dear HP, Brother and Seiko, please make a 3D printer.

Punished for producing quality.

3D printing verus Mass production, 1% of everything.

All images by ReneSpitz. Creative Commons Attribution, no derivs.

Many people have been talking lately of 3D printing versus Mass Production. The implication is that localized individualized production will supplant the current manufacturing paradigm with a third industrial revolution. We will all become manufacturers and make exactly what we want using 3D printing. Although I applaud such optimism and would postulate that 3D printing will bring about a third industrial revolution I don’t think it is “going to go down” in that way. Instead, I think 3D printing will develop in a more concentrated manner and focus on Bleeding edge consumers and 1% of all goods.  3D printing will not be used by “everyone to make anything” but rather be used by some to make the things they care about most. Furthermore, I believe that through this path 3D printing will come to slow down mass production and ameliorate the heavy burden that mass manufacturing is exacting on our planet.

The power of unique

To me the great potential of 3D printing is in its ability to create unique things that are exactly suited to their purpose. A titanium hip replacement made to your exact dimensions, a memento that exactly encapsulates a moment, a gift that sums up your love for someone, a better fitting golf glove.  All things made specifically to give the highest utility for you at that moment. You designed it, you styled it, you described it and you made it. Products created in this fashion will be immensely valuable to their creators and to others as well. By enabling the manufacturing of ideas, the 3D printing industry could anticipate on and respond to demand for any type of specific goods. I don’t believe that 3D printing will make manufacturing universal just as even something as basic as literacy is not universal even now. I also don’t think we’ll take the time to design and 3D print things we don’t care about. I do however anticipate that those most ambitious for the improvement of things will migrate to 3D printing.

Mary, who is most passionate about interior design will make her own lamp, her own expression of what she wants and needs. So when others turn to Mary on advice on how to procure the missing puzzle piece for their interiors, Mary will answer, “oh, then darlings, why don’t you just 3D print it?”

Likewise when uncle Bob approaches hip audiophile cousin Tommy to ask him which headphones to buy, Tommy will tell him that he must 3D print them in order to get the perfect headphone fit. Across the spectrum, the consumer experts in each field: fashion, consumer electronics, interior design, jewelry, automotive etc. all will migrate towards 3D printing. Because eventually the experts will want to assert their expertise by creating a bowl that’s better than all those boring bowls that you can already buy; or a lamp that is prettier than all those boring Ikea lamps. And why are Ikea lamps boring? Because everyone else already has them. This is the trap that successful mass production companies have they try in vain to stay ahead of an excitement curve. But, the spread of their products makes them less exciting because people can no longer differentiate themselves through those products. Iconic things that spread status  (iPhone) avoid this trap. But, this puts consumers that are looking for new things in a bind. 3D printing gives these expert consumers a way out.

Precisely because these experts that surround us seek expertise and perfection they will turn to perfecting their own experience first and foremost. You know that neighbor with the gold speaker cables? That is the kind of person I’m talking about. Once these people have migrated to 3D printing they will create a market for FabLabs, 3D printing services, home and office 3D printers, 3D modeling tools etc. This natural market will continue to propagate. Eventually the most informed and wealthy consumers will migrate to this market ensuring a momentous boost to the 3D printed economy and perhaps even self reliance. The people turning to 3D printing initially will be the “lighthouse”, avant garde, early adaptors/adopters; this thin sliver of the population that is always seeking better things. The people that have paid $1000 for DVD players and a $1000 for BluRay players when both came out. Lets call them the Bleeding edge consumers, always on the fore front of new trends. Perhaps they’re only a small percentage of the population and perhaps they would only consider using 3D printing for that one specific use case. Because of this lets conservatively estimate that people will turn to 3D printing in only 1% of products that are created.

Meanwhile Happy Meal Toys and cheap LCD TVs will still be made. Hermes bags will continue to be eye popping, in price at least. The storied, complex and cheap will survive. I will continue to buy bigger televisions and pay attention only to how much I pay per inch. Because this is the trap that mass production has set for itself. It has both over delivered and failed to deliver on two key points. These points are Manufacturing Complexity and Marketing Promise.

Manufacturing Complexity

The increase in the complexity of the cheap consumer products we can buy today is staggering. I can now buy a camera with 12.1 Megapixel, a 3 inch LCD and 3X digital zoom for $99 (I actually made this post a few months ago, now I can get a 5x optical, 4x digital and 20x combined zoom camera with optical image stabilizer 16.0 megapixel 1/2.3-inch CCD compact camera for $79)

If you read this post in a few months the same camera will have 14 megapixel, a few months later still it will have 20.  I can remember how crappy and expensive the first digital cameras were. But, this statement about the  12.1 MP camera will be made meaningless in months as the incredible level of competition in digital cameras results in leaps forward in price, software, mega pixel and above all complexity. In their hunger for higher resolution, Mass Production camera companies continually increase the amount of resources that they need to consume in order to achieve current revenues.  Indeed in my opinion the search for “higher resolution” in televisions, computers, computer games, consoles, phones and cameras is one of the single most environmentally destructive things we do as humans. It forces entire industries to have to make more complicated things that eat up more and more of the earth’s resources. And they only do this because we by now expect every new thing to have a higher resolution than the thing it replaces. More resolution translates into bigger storage and higher bandwidth usage and the knock on effects of higher resolution permeate industry. But, why exactly do I even want a higher resolution camera?

The Resolution Trap

I have a four year old Nikon D40. It has 6.9 Megapixel, an amount that should be appearing in camera phones soon. Over the past years Nikon has replaced my camera so often that I am currently unable to discover which camera in Nikon’s line up is its successor. I can understand that my camera is noticeably better than previous cameras. I can see how more zoom and software might help me in some situations in take better pictures, but the megapixels themselves? I fail to see how any increase in megapixel beyond my current camera could translate into better pictures for me.  Will seeing the pimples on my face really give me a better holiday snapshot? Because this is where we are currently with the resolution of our TVs and cameras. In my opinion there is just no higher utility in increased megapixel beyond this point. We have reached a point of megapixel saturation whereby any additional increase will only make you look uglier. Higher resolution will not turn us all into Cartier Bressons. The resolution trap is an example of mass production painting itself into a corner by increasing the level of manufacturing complexity to unsustainable levels while failing to deliver increased utility for consumers.

The Fern like global reaches of this supply chain and fierce competition between the players in it “make it so” that we get better digital cameras each season. Millions of people dig up the earth, pump oil, refine it, make it into plastic, make it into components, assemble it, assemble it into more complex parts, Ship to china, Ship to Indonesia, together with Ghanaian wood pulp, American chips, Taiwanese boards, Swedish design and a Japanese seal of approval.  This is the most staggeringly complex system that man has ever devised. Your mobile phone is a Gizeh Pyramid construction project with parts and materials from 10 countries and raw materials sourced from Australia to Saudi Arabia. Only this pyramid has to be cheaper and do more every few months.  You might think that you travel but I guarantee you, your camera has already logged more Frequent Flier miles than most ever will. The most well traveled thing in any American household is probably the laptop. The collective journey that  all of its constituent parts have undertaken in order to be reformed into your Asus or Dell is staggering. It is also clearly, unsustainable.

More Beautiful Landfill

Mass Production will only bring us a world where our landfill is ever more beautiful. We will just keep throwing away prettier, newer & more complex things at ever more accelerating rates. We will in fact be hoovering the world’s resources into a self defeating search for happiness through consumption. As marketing and disposable income spread around the world many more people will want and be able to buy mass manufactured goods. The current negative impact on our environment is already noticeable but is only being created by a small segment of the world’s population.

If we look at OECD statistics we can see the Domestic Material Consumption of the OECD countries (under Environment Material Resources). This is the sum total of all materials extracted and used in an economy from biomass and metals to construction materials. It excludes all exports. Per capita material consumption for the OECD countries is 17.9 tonnes. In 22 of the richest countries in the world  17.9 tonnes of stuff each year is used. Per person. Per year. Portugal, a country that saw great economic gains over the period 1980 to 2005 (the period the study covers) saw its per capita Domestic Material Consumption increase 118% over the period. Similar growth in developing nations would put an inordinate burden on our planet.

But, even without such increases the path mass production is on is clearly unsustainable. The OECD has 1.1 billion citizens and for every one turns 17,900 kilos of this earth into things each year. A passenger car such as the Toyota Corolla weighs 1270 kilo. Per person we use up 14 passenger cars worth of material per year.  Or to put it differently 11,933 1.5 Liter Coke bottles of material are extracted and turned into things every year for every one of the 1.1 billion citizens of the OECD countries.11,933 Coke bottles of this earth turned into tables and cameras for you, me and every one of the citizens of the OECD. Close your eyes and try to imagine 11,933 Coke bottles for a second. That is just one part of your environmental impact.

3D printing will combat this but it would be foolish to try to compete head on with such an established destructive system. Rather, 3D printing should seek to “hoover up” all those consumers that seek to create better and more perfect products and give them an outlet in 3D printing. This will slow the growth of Mass Production by diminishing some of the time and attention given it. It will also cause 3D printing to bloom while in Mass Production’s shadow.  The supreme irony of course is that it is precisely those most powering the unsustainable steam roller of Mass Production that will flock to 3D printing. Your neighbor, the one with the gold speaker cables, he has these giant beechwood sarcophagi  in his living room. They’re speakers and cost $5000. It is this kind of person that finances the expansion of mass production into ever more complex goods. So with each new convert 3D printing wins an extra person while Mass Production loses one of its most strident adherents and financiers.

3D printing will in fact slowly deflate the bubble that is Mass Production. Not deflate it entirely, mind you. Just make it stop growing and shrivel a bit, like a day old party balloon. And another irony, next to a search for perfection what other thing will most power consumers to become producers and move to the 3D printing camp? Disaffection with marketing.

Marketing Promise

The other culprit of the self defeating Mass Manufacturing revolution is Marketing Promise. Marketing was invented because factory owners worried that their high throughput, low unit cost factories would run out of paying customers for their products. They worried that once they had sold everyone two pairs of shoes they would go out of business. So marketeers began to create demand and sell these products with promises.  At first their promises were centered around the features of the products themselves but soon marketeers started promising ever more outlandish things completely unrelated to the product. Each new toothpaste was going to make you even more beautiful and even happier than the last. And because marketing is a big business now and the inundated herds seem oblivious to the most obvious messages; the promises marketing makes will only become more and more outlandish and more and more unrelated to the products. If they we’re just talking about increases in megapixel, the marketing folk would just talk about the products and the marketing message would be centered on the product.

But, they don’t do that. Its about lathering on layer after layer of imagined brand value on any product they can find. Its about getting the message out to as many people as is possible. As this imagined value, supported only by marketeers promises, piles on more and more costs are added to the product in a search for higher margins.  By now much of our lives are spent watching advertising and its becoming increasingly clear that even though there is a staggering increase in the sophistication and performance of many products these products are still falling short of the promises made in their marketing. Its incredible that we can go from 1 to 2 to 3 to 12 to 20 megapixel with falling prices in cameras. But, instead of lauding that, the camera manufacturers promise us better birthdays, more fun, more friends. Their lies and exaggerations will only increase in severity as time goes on. As they promise more, mass production has to work harder to increase functionality but with the marketing promising “happiness for $99″ mass production’s best efforts are doomed to fall short. A camera manufacturer is thus trapped into consuming more and more of the earth’s resources in a vain attempt to please a consumer with a better camera while that consumer is waiting for their promised happiness. We must fess up to the truth, a camera will never make us happy.

Everything you own sucks

There has been a widening credibility gap between the promises and what is being delivered for years now.  And even though some marketeers struggle with the underpinnings of their industry they also need to keep telling us lies.  They can not admit that they’ve been lying to us for so long. Also they’ve been obscuring an even darker deeper secret. That secret is that Mass Production is by design unable to give us the “best of anything.” Mass production can provide us with wonderfully complex things and cheap things but it can not give you the best shoe, camera or shirt. Mass production is bound to making millions or thousands of things for the largest identifiable group. They have to make things for many people for their model to be viable. This standardization means that by design everything you own is mediocre. Its meant for the many, not for you. All mass produced things suck. All mass produced things are in fact designed to suck. Conceived to appeal to the largest identifiable group they can not meet the precise needs of any one individual. They are OK for all and perfect for none. Once someone realizes this he will be on his way towards 3D printing, inexorably.  And who will these disaffected  people be? The early adapters/adopters, this Bleeding edge.

Cost Gap

Simultaneously mass produced good’s high margins  are narrowing the costs between mass produced things and 3D printed things. Even though the unit cost of 3D printed things is much higher, the increase in the specificity of the design and the corresponding higher utility of this design to its designer more than offsets this price difference. Furthermore, other things like limitations in materials will be waved away initially in light of the consumer seeing themselves as a pioneer. After all, these people aren’t just any consumers, these are the people that bought the first DVD players, the first BluRay players both for $1000 each. These Bleeding edge consumers have been continually exposed to the worst of the high promises, teething problems and failed initiatives. They’re a hardy lot. Once they have nestled itself in a comfortable nook of 3D printing the long drawn out deflating of Mass Production will really begin. Slowly much of the cutting edge will lose its shine and the creativity, innovation and effort will be directed to 3D printing. Mass production will continue to exist but not be a store of much new value and hopefully as the years go on its rapacious appetite for more and more of the world’s resources in name of higher resolution and other false dreams will diminish. Instead more value will be created in wish fulfillment.

3D printing is a wish fulfillment technology

At its most abstract 3D printing is a wish fulfillment technology, a Santa industry and all of us are its elves. But, in order for 3D printing to be able to equal the manufacturing capability of mass produced cameras would take many years and might never be possible. Better to hack and work with those technologies to use them as Lego blocks to build what you need, right now. Better to be the parasite on the planetary cancer that is mass production. Instead of a Santa that would truly let anyone make anything all the time at home with their own tools and printers it would be a selective Santa. For those who take their time and investigate it can make just the things that they need. For others it will be too much of a hassle. In this way a particular type of person will be attracted to 3D printing. This person will either be interested in the technology an sich or in the things people can make with this technology.

It is this small group perhaps numbering less than 100,000 today that is pushing the technology forward. These are the elves, the vanguard. They come to 3D printing to fulfill their own wishes but some are finding out that it is as a vehicle for another person’s wishes 3D printing can make money for them.  It is by understanding 3D printing and its constraints that elves can make money by anticipating the products and processes that will entice others to join the 3D printing camp.  These elves and the existing 1 billion dollar revenue Business to Business 3D printing industry will create both the demand and technology needed to fulfill these wishes while attempting to predict the wishes people will have.

In this manner 3D printing will bloom in mass production’s shadow. Meanwhile mass market 3D printing services and 3D printers will be launched and they will drag in more people. The fanfare will be focused on these projects but the real action will be the babbling brook of individuals deciding that they need perfection for that one thing. Gradually, slowly and surely mass production’s power users will amble over to 3D printing. The Engadget addicts, Apple fanboys, Wallpaper junkies, those most interested in better and best. It is they that will make 1% of all things with 3D printing. 1% of everything doesn’t sound like much. It seems a lot less exciting than “distributed manufacturing”. a superabundance of goods, a 3D printer on every desktop, everyone in the world making everything they want, tea earl grey, hot. I do however believe it to be a realistic estimation of the annual revenue of the entire 3D printing industry by 2020.  1% of the 17% of world GDP that is manufacturing would amount to a $100 billion a year market. Just a tiny sliver of that will go a long way to supporting a whole lot of elves and help defeat the rapacious bane of our world that is mass production.

But, wait a minute…

Is 3D printing even better for the environment? As a process 3D printing has several intrinsic advantages that make it more environmentally friendly than mass production. By producing close to the consumer less carbon is emitted. By using less material because it is an additive process we harm the earth less in creating things. By producing locally or in the home 3D printing could be coupled with a recyclebot that would offer closed loop recycling and cradle to cradle within the home. Tired of your plate? Toss it in the recyclebot and make a new one. Potentially fewer higher utility things could replace many mass produced ones.

But, 3D printing’s greatest environmental benefits lie in the way that it simplifies manufacturing. A camera supply chain comprises of thousands of individually motivated suppliers in many countries and it would be complex and difficult for a company to, even if it wanted to, audit and reduce its impact on the environment. Spot markets and tiered distributors obscure how camera parts are made and what impact individual parts, processes and their raw materials have. In mass production where investments in tooling, factories and processes will make less environmentally friendly production the norm for a long time regardless of technological advances. Locked into a low cost production paradigm mass production companies could also find themselves unwilling or unable to adopt newer greener technologies.

Compare this with a 3D printed part. This has one company making the central input: a 3D printing material.  If a strong and useful biodegradable material would emerge for one 3D printing process it could in one fell swoop make anything made with this process environmentally friendly. Without a plethora of suppliers pressure could be brought to 3D printer manufacturers and material manufacturers to make more environmentally friendly materials. It would be easier for them to comply since their own material supply chains are relatively very short. In this way any gains in materials would translate into huge efficiency gains for the entire 3D printing market. Even if the 3D printer manufacturers would not play ball, people could hack their own 3D printers to take newer and more environmentally friendly materials. Several material innovations could in this way transform 3D printing into a green process and with it make everything made with 3D printing environmentally sustainable. I don’t think a comparable innovation could happen within mass production. This is why I believe 3D printing is humanity’s hope.

Humanity’s hope

This is going to sound over the top. But, I’ve thought about this for a very long time and I mean it. The true potential of 3D printing is not in that it democratizes innovation, manufacturing and design. These factors will in their own right will have a significant impact on the world. A much bigger benefit of the technology is that it would indirectly or directly make all the world’s things better by accelerating and making more granular product development. But, the greatest potential the technology has is to let us have our cake and eat it to. With 3D printing we could, if the process became green, make everything we want in a sustainable way. We could give in to our cravings for new sunglasses and toys while not destroying the planet with our consumption. In the process we could use 3D printing to make better and better products rather than just trendier or newer ones. We would not have to consume less or give up the products we love but instead create what we want when we want it. In this way 3D printing could fulfill our wishes without filling our landfills.