Fabricated E-Book

Hod Lipson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 460

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Fabricated tells the story of 3D printers, humble manufacturing machines that are bursting out of the factory and into schools, kitchens, hospitals, even onto the fashion catwalk. Fabricated describes our emerging world of printable products, where people design and 3D print their own creations as easily as they edit an online document.

A 3D printer transforms digital information into a physical object by carrying out instructions from an electronic design file, or 'blueprint.' Guided by a design file, a 3D printer lays down layer after layer of a raw material to 'print' out an object. That's not the whole story, however. The magic happens when you plug a 3D printer into today’s mind-boggling digital technologies. Add to that the Internet, tiny, low cost electronic circuitry, radical advances in materials science and biotech and voila! The result is an explosion of technological and social innovation.

Fabricated takes the reader onto a rich and fulfilling journey that explores how 3D printing is poised to impact nearly every part of our lives.

Aimed at people who enjoy books on business strategy, popular science and novel technology, Fabricated will provide readers with practical and imaginative insights to the question 'how will this technology change my life?' Based on hundreds of hours of research and dozens of interviews with experts from a broad range of industries, Fabricated offers readers an informative, engaging and fast-paced introduction to 3D printing now and in the future.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Chapter 1: Everything is becoming science fiction

Chapter 2: A machine that can make almost anything

Printing three-dimensional things

The ten principles of 3D printing

Chapter 3: Nimble manufacturing: Good, fast, and cheap

Somewhere between mass production and the local farmer’s market

The blank canvas of the 21st century

Chapter 4: Tomorrow’s economy of printable products

Like ants with factories

The experience economy

A future economy of printable products

Chapter 5: Printing in layers

A manufacturing process at heart

Two families of printers

Cleaning up design files

The raw materials

Chapter 6: Design software, the digital canvas

A word processor for drawing

Today’s design software

What you design is not (necessarily) what you print

The next generation of design software: digital capture

Chapter 7: Bioprinting in “living ink”

The printer of youth

Tissue engineering

CAD for the body

The future

Chapter 8: Digital cuisine

Digital gastronomy

Feeding the quantified self

Processed food

Chapter 9: A factory in the classroom

Make to learn: Children’s engineering

Not a national crisis . . . but learning should be enjoyable

Now let’s see you draw that abstract equation on a graph

Barriers to classroom adoption

The road ahead

Chapter 10: Unleashing a new aesthetic

Computers that act like nature

Printing wavy walls and custom gargoyles

Chapter 11: Green, clean manufacturing

A tale of two plastic toys

Greener manufacturing

3D printing a more beautiful landfill

Chapter 12: Ownership, safety, and new legal frontiers

Printing weapons, drugs, and shoddy products

Rip, mix, and burn physical things

Exclusivity vs. the freedom to innovate

Chapter 13: Designing the future

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

A bicycle for our imagination

The language of shapes

Changing the shape of design tools

Chapter 14: The next episode of 3D printing

The three episodes of 3D printing

Cofabrication of multiple materials

Moving from printing passive parts to active systems

The final episode—from analog to digital

Machines making machines

References

About the Authors

Credits

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1

Everything is becoming science fiction

Place: Your life

Time: A few decades from now

. . . even in the future, it’s still hard to get up in the morning.

The smell of freshly baked whole wheat blueberry muffins wafts from the kitchen food printer. The cartridges to make these organic, low-sugar muffins were marketed as a luxury series. The recipes were downloaded from different featured artisan bakers from famous restaurants and resorts.

The first time you showed the food printer to your grandfather, he thought it was an automated bread machine—an appliance from the 1980s that took foodie kitchens by storm. He couldn’t understand why you wanted to print processed food until his anniversary came. To celebrate, you splurged on deluxe food cartridges and printed him and your grandmother a celebratory dinner of fresh tuna steaks, couscous and a wildly swirled chocolate-mocha-raspberry cream cake with a different picture within every slice.

Managing your diabetes has gotten easier since the health insurance company upgraded your food printer to a high-grade medical model. New medical-grade food printers for diabetics read streams of wireless signals from a tiny skin implant that tracks your blood sugar. When you wake up in the morning, the FoodFabber receives the first reading of the morning and adapts the sugar content and nutritional balance of your digitally cooked breakfast accordingly.

After breakfast, it’s time to check the news. The top story is an update on a rescue operation of several miners who have been trapped underground for a week. Their mine shaft collapsed, stranding them deep underground. At first rescue teams tried to dig them out until their shovels nearly triggered a deadly rubble slide.

Fortunately, the mining company followed federal safety regulations and properly equipped its miners with regulation safety gear. 3D safety printers are a standard tool that mining crews carry with them into deep mine shafts. Before they descend into the shaft, technicians make sure each printer has updated design files for every essential machine part that will go down into the mine. The 3D printer goes down with other machinery in case a part breaks and needs to be quickly replaced deep underground.

Today’s news update on the mining disaster reports that the portable safety printer has become an unlikely hero. For several days, the trapped miners have been conversing with above-ground technicians over a limping wireless connection. Both teams—one above and one underground—are working together to refine the printer’s design blueprints for the replacement parts.

What should have been a short, standard rescue operation has grown complicated. Just printing a few replacement parts would have been easy. The reason the rescue effort has been delayed is because the design for the broken part keeps buckling after it’s installed because of unexpected high levels of humidity inside the mine shaft.

The good news is that the situation in the mine looks brighter today. The reporter explains that the third attempt to print the replacement part passed its stress tests under simulated conditions at the mining company’s headquarters. Today the miners will print the updated design underground and, if that works, start rebuilding their damaged machine tonight.

As you leave your house for work, a crane and a lone construction worker toil silently on an empty lot across the street. Your neighbor’s construction project is the talk of the neighborhood. A few weeks ago your neighbor knocked down his old-fashioned wooden house to fabricate a new eco-friendly luxury home.

He waves from the mailbox and shows you the marketing brochure. The new home is a luxury model from a company called FoamHome and will be completed in two more weeks. FoamHome’s catalog explains that each home’s walls are constructed with built-in weather sensors. The roof, when it’s laid on top at the very end of the process, will contain solar panels. Walls will be fabricated with electrical wiring and copper pipes already in place.

Together you and your neighbor watch the construction crane slowly maneuver a gigantic nozzle over the top of the new foundation. The nozzle simultaneously scans the landscape and adapts the blueprint, as it squeezes out a paste made of a blend of cement and some synthetic building materials. The crew member’s job is to make sure no one walks on site during construction. The brains of the outfit is a small computer attached to the construction crane that guides the fabrication process.

The neighborhood has been watching the FoamHome project with great interest as the home’s walls slowly grow. What was that old joke about the early days of factory automation? “All you need these days to run a factory is a man and a dog. You need the man to feed the dog and the dog to bite the man if he tries to touch anything.”

So far, the slowly growing house looks gorgeous, its walls curved in organic patterns and soft curves and hollows. Nobody could build a house like this with frame carpentry, no matter how many people worked on the construction crew. No one has yet seen the inside of the new home, but rumor has it that your neighbor ordered designer inner walls that will look like they’re made of old-fashioned brick and mortar.

Finally you reach your office and catch up on the details of the final stages of a long investigation you’ve been leading for months. Your team was assigned to investigate a new sort of black market, one that deals in replacement body parts. More and more patients, desperate for replacement organs, are purchasing them from uncertified rogue bioprinting services rather than a certified medical provider. Bioprinting custom body parts continues to be a controversial topic in the public mind, more polarizing even than the stem cell, abortion, or cloning debates of your grandparents’ generation.

It’s gotten too easy to get replacement organs made. The cost of a high-res full body scan has plummeted in the past few years. People like to get them in their 20s and save the data for later, just in case if something goes wrong and they need a quick replacement organ. Sometimes it’s their joints that fail. In reality, the most common use of “body design files” is for cosmetic surgery, to recapture the tight wrinkle-free skin and body of youth.

Bioprinting isn’t the problem. In fact, most people believe that bioprinting is a life-saving technology. The challenge is what to do about the growth of these new black markets. Regulating the production of new printed body parts is difficult since the cost of bioprinters has also plummeted. Black marketeers snap up cast-off medical bioprinters for less than the price of a new car as last year’s bioprinter models are sold off each year by hospitals and surgical clinics.

During the investigation, you’ve learned that most of the time black market organs actually work pretty well. The problems arise from faulty design files or sloppy organ makers who cut corners and don’t use a sterile printing environment. In a recent case a few patients died from uncertified “vanity organs” they purchased to improve their athletic ability and appearance. Their families are trying to figure out who to sue: the rogue manufacturer, the bio-ink supplier, the organ designer, or the company that certified the design.

Black market bioprinters range from well-intended, would-be healers to deadly, profit-driven peddlers of rogue, counterfeit flesh. Some call the competent and hygienic black marketeers heroes for helping ill people obtain vital new organs at a lower price. Others deplore the organ merchants’ eagerness to profit from buying and selling essential tissue to vulnerable people, especially in cases where the new printed organ is poorly crafted.

At the end of the work day you stop by your daughter’s middle school. You’re one of the parental sponsors of this year’s Science Fair. Your daughter’s teacher tells you that 3D printers are disrupting the culture of the Science Fair. Lazy students 3D print elaborate objects with little effort and no skill—they just need to have a good design file. Many lower income students do not have home 3D printers so they aren’t getting the design time and practice they need for a level playing field.

There’s another twist. The teacher explains that for this year’s fair, parents will serve on a clean-up crew. Last year after the fair ended, the school’s custodians complained that the gym floor was littered with the debris of dozens of frenzied printing demonstrations. Even worse, for several days after the fair, students and teachers stumbled over dozens of mouse-sized, ready-made robots that clanked and rolled around school hallways. Some printed robots recited appropriate and preprogrammed bits of scientific lore. A few of the roaming robots, however, seemed to have mastered a few unauthorized and slightly more colorful bits of wisdom.

When you and your daughter get home, your spouse shares good news. His 3D printing manufacturing business just got accepted into an aerospace cloud manufacturing network. Cloud manufacturing is a new way to make things that’s starting to replace mass manufacturing. Cloud manufacturing—like cloud computing—is a decentralized and massively parallel model of production. Large companies order parts and services on demand from a vetted network of several small manufacturing businesses that have joined forces to manufacture specialized parts.

Cloud manufacturing is catching on quickly in the electronics, medical, and aerospace industries. These companies need complex, highly sophisticated parts, but not in huge batches. Clouds of small manufacturing companies save the big companies money. Cloud networks tend to be located near their clients so there’s less long-distance shipping of printed parts. The companies keep designs for product parts in digital inventory and make just one or a few at a time. Cloud manufacturing networks have been a boon for regional economies everywhere, creating local jobs in specialized small manufacturing and services companies.

Your spouse’s particular cloud consists of small companies that fabricate specialized fuel injector parts for military and commercial airplane manufacturers. To get into this particular network, his business had to demonstrate its manufacturing prowess by 3D printing sample airplane machine parts in a specified time frame. The manufacturing network stress-tested his sample parts and they performed well. After some negotiation on profit margins and manufacturing capacity, his business was admitted into the network.

Finally, the day winds down. Your son likes his bedtime routine in which he brushes his teeth and you tell him a story once he’s in bed. Tonight you discover that, as usual, his toothbrush has somehow gone missing. He thinks he may have left it at his friend’s house yesterday. You could run to the store to buy a new one, but there’s an easier way.

You boot up your home Fabber and let your son eagerly scroll through several different toothbrush designs. Several different companies sell designs on the Fabber but your son already knows he wants a zBrush—still a bargain at 99 cents. Your son likes the fact that there are several different cartoon figures offered for the toothbrush handle. You authorize his purchase and scan your son’s custom measurements—the size of his hand and shape of his open mouth—with a small wand attached to the Fabber.

The Fabber starts printing. On its glowing screen a list of design credits scrolls past that resembles those of a movie—from the designer of the toothbrush program to the company that owns the copyrights of the designs for the cartoon figures. The new toothbrush will be ready for use in 15 minutes.

As the Fabber prints you tell your son his bedtime story. It’s about the old days, one of those “when I was your age” tales. Your son listens skeptically. He has a hard time believing that when you were young, each toothbrush looked alike. If you ordered something from the Internet it took forever—24 hours—until it was delivered to the door.

“Wow,” he says politely. “Life must have been hard back then.”

Chapter 2

A machine that can make almost anything

What would you make if you had a machine that could make anything?

In England a technician scans the feet and ankles of Olympic sprinters and puts the data into a computer. The computer does a few quick calculations. The technician 3D prints new track shoes that are customized for each athlete’s unique body shape and weight, gait and tastes.

On the other side of the world, NASA test-drives a version of its Mars Rover in the Arizona desert. On board the Rover are several custom-made 3D printed metal parts. Many of these parts have complicated shapes made of curves and inner hollows that could not have been manufactured by anything other than a 3D printer.

In Japan, an expectant mother wants to create the ultimate commemoration of her first ultrasound. Her doctor edits her ultrasound image and 3D prints a precise, highly detailed replica of the fetus. The result, an avant-garde 3D printed plastic tribute to the tiny fetus, encased for posterity in a block of hard transparent plastic.

These modest manufacturing miracles are already taking place. In the not-so-distant future, people will 3D print living tissue, nutritionally calibrated food, and ready-made, fully assembled electronic components. This book is about a new way of making things. In the following chapters, we explain 3D printing technologies and design tools in simple language. For readers of a technical bent, a few chapters delve deeper into the details of 3D printing’s current and future. We then explore the downstream implications—economic, personal, and environmental.

3D printing opens up new frontiers. Manufacturing and business as usual will be disrupted as regular people gain access to power tools of design and production. Intellectual property law will be brought to its knees.

A printed full-scale bench in stone-like material

Image courtesy of Andrea Morgante and Enrico Dini, D-Shape

Some people remember exactly where they were when they watched the first moon landing. Others remember the confusing first weeks when the Berlin wall came tumbling down. I remember the first time I heard about 3D printing.

The time was the late 1980s. The place, a tedious engineering seminar on manufacturing engineering. The classroom was warm. The professor had the misfortune to have a droning, unintentionally soothing voice that lulled my classmates and me into a sort of group stupor.

The classroom door banged open, disrupting the peaceful drowsy calm of the afternoon’s lecture. An unfamiliar man burst into the room. Our surprise visitor announced he was a salesman from a company called Cubital Systems. We had never heard of Cubital Systems, which at that time was one of the two companies in the world selling commercial 3D printers.

The salesman animatedly waved a plastic object over his unruly mop of hair and announced that a manufacturing revolution was brewing. “I am holding the future of manufacturing in my hands,” he boldly claimed. “This plastic object was made by a laser that ‘printed’ plastic.”

Intrigued, my classmates and I stirred curiously and wondered why he had come to our class. At that point, sensing our interest, our professor wisely handed over the classroom to his animated visitor. We learned later that the Cubital salesman had been invited by our professor as a guest lecturer.

A skilled showman, the salesman ceremoniously paused, relishing our confusion. In the quiet that followed, he asked a student to turn the crank sticking out of the plastic object. I can still hear the crisp clicking sound in the classroom as my classmate energetically turned the crank for what seemed like an endless minute. Inside the device, complicated interlocked gears tugged one another into motion.

Our sleepy brains struggled to life and we whispered questions to one another. “Did he just say that he printed that thing using a laser?” My classmates and I studied the grinding gears, trying to figure out where this unexpected entertainment was going.

Carl Deckard and Joe Beaman inventing the first Selective Laser Sintering printer (circa 1986) at the University of Texas

Image courtesy of Carl Deckard and Joe Beaman

We became even more confused when the salesman dropped his next bombshell. “All of the gears, handles, and knobs that you see here were never assembled. They were all printed in place as a single, preassembled bunch of distinct parts.”

The confused buzz in the classroom increased in volume as our energetic visitor gleefully closed his presentation with a final data point: A computer, not a human, had been the guiding “hand” that steered this miraculous machine through the production process. The salesman rummaged through his bag and pulled out a piece of paper he waved in front of us. The page showed a photograph of a computer on whose screen was a design file for the same plastic object he had just shown us.

The Cubital salesman smiled and asked whether we had questions. Somnolence forgotten, my classmates and I peppered him with questions. What did he mean he “printed” all the plastic parts using a laser? And what sort of manufacturing machine could possibly fabricate something made of interlocked parts that didn’t need to be assembled? Could it print in materials other than plastic? And, of course—how much would it cost to get such a machine for oneself?

Traditional manufacturing felt instantly obsolete.

I still remember that day. Our guest lecturer’s enthusiastic pitch convinced me that this miraculous machine would indeed spark a revolution in the way we make and design things. I’d never seen such a close connection between the software design of an object (design software was a new and growing passion of mine at that time) and its physical manifestation.

That day was two decades ago. The revolution we were promised didn’t happen as quickly as planned. A few years later, Cubital went out of business. Like many pioneering technologies, Cubital’s 3D printing process was too complicated and slow, and its machines were too expensive for margin-conscious manufacturing companies to embrace.

I sometimes wonder where that salesman went after Cubital folded. His sales pitch—unabashedly dramatic as it had been—was dead on target. It’s just a matter of time until regular people will rip, mix, and burn physical objects as effortlessly as they edit a digital photograph.

Printing three-dimensional things

Like the magic wand of childhood fairy tales, 3D printing offers us the promise of control over the physical world. 3D printing gives regular people powerful new tools of design and production. People with modest bank accounts will acquire the same design and manufacturing power that was once the private reserve of professional designers and big manufacturing companies.

In a 3D printed future world, people will make what they need, when and where they need it. Yet, technologies are only as good as the people using them. People might fabricate weapons and create unregulated or even toxic new drugs. Our environment may be littered with quickly discarded print-on-demand plastic novelties. Ethical challenges of bioprinting will make stem cell controversy seem simple in comparison. Black marketeers will be tempted to earn quick and dirty profits by making and selling faulty machine parts whose shoddy construction could fail at a critical moment.

When most people first hear about 3D printing, their mind leaps to their old, familiar desktop printer. The biggest difference between an inkjet printer and a 3D printer is one of dimension. A desktop printer prints in two dimensions, spraying colored ink onto flat paper documents. A 3D printer fabricates three-dimensional objects that you can hold in your hand.

3D printers make things by following instructions from a computer and stacking raw material into layers. For most of human history, we’ve created physical objects by cutting away raw material or using molds to form new shapes.

The technical name for 3D printing is “additive manufacturing,” which is actually more descriptive of the actual printing process. 3D printing’s unique manufacturing technique enables us to make objects in shapes never before possible.

3D printing is not a new technology. 3D printers have been quietly doing their work in manufacturing machine shops for decades. In the past few years, 3D printing technology has been driven rapidly forward by advances in computing power, new design software, new materials, and the rocket fuel of innovation, the Internet.

This printer costs about $10,000 USD and is the size of a microwave oven.

Image courtesy Stratasys Inc.

Computers play a critical role in the 3D printing process. Without instructions from a computer, a printer is paralyzed. A 3D printer comes to life when it is fed a well-designed electronic blueprint, or design file, that tells it where to place the raw material. In fact, a 3D printer without an attached computer and a good design file is as useless as an iPod without music.

The way the 3D printing process works is as follows. The 3D printer, guided by instructions in the design file, squirts out or solidifies powdered, molten or liquid material into a specific flat pattern. After the first layer solidifies, the 3D “print head” returns and forms another thin layer on top of the first one. When the second layer solidifies, the print head returns yet again and deposits another thin layer on top of that. Eventually, the thin layers build up and a three-dimensional object forms.

3D printers don’t cut or mold things into shape the way humans or traditional manufacturing machines do. Making objects in layers opens up the ability to physically output a broader range of digital concepts. If a shape’s design has precise internal hollows or interlocked parts, a 3D printer is the first output device that can realize such designs in the physical world.

3D printed parts and products are creeping into everyday life. Your car’s dashboard was designed with the help of 3D printed prototypes to make sure all the various parts fit snugly together. If you wear a custom hearing aid, odds are good that it was 3D printed using optical scan data that captured the precise shape of your inner ear.

Dental labs print custom crowns in less than an hour from X-rays. Printed titanium and ceramic replacement knees are walking around in bodies all over the world. If you’ve had the good fortune to fly in Boeing’s new premium airplane, the 787 Dreamliner, you’ve placed your life into the hands of at least thirty-two different 3D printed parts.

The secret to 3D printing could be summed up as follows: 3D printers are more accurate and versatile than any other mode of production—be it a human or machine—at fabricating a complex design into a physical object, combining raw materials in ways that were once impossible.

Today, the average home 3D printer can make a plastic object as large as a shoebox. Industrial-scale 3D printers can fabricate an object as large as a car or as small as the barely visible head of a pin. Some people have rigged up custom 3D printers that can print large concrete structures the size of a small house. Other researchers have printed at the micro-scale level, making objects whose details are barely visible by the naked eye.

On being digital (and analog)

In the mid-1990s, ecommerce and digital media were in their infancy. In his wonderfully prescient 1995 bestseller Being Digital, Nicolas Negroponte predicted the demise of “entertainment atoms.” Years before the great transition to digital media actually took place, Negroponte correctly predicted that purveyors of entertainment in physical form—traditional book publishers, video rental stores and big television networks—would meet the same fate as the dinosaur.

The demise of centrally controlled mass media and book publishing was just the beginning. The end of the 20th century was about information becoming digital. The 21st century is going to be about bringing the virtual world into closer alignment with the physical one.

The virtual world is a place of freedom where gravity is optional. In a video game, characters can leap over buildings, grow themselves a new arm, and morph into different physical shapes. The virtual world is easy to edit and revise. It’s impossible to change the color of the bark on a real tree, but simple to edit its image in a digital photograph. The behavior of the virtual world can be programmed. If the details of a physical object are captured in a design file, the digital “raw material” of the design is modular, made of tiny discrete on-screen bits of light, or pixels.

3D printing technologies will close the gulf that divides the virtual and physical worlds. Of course, a skeptic would quickly point out that the digital and physical worlds already intersect at several points. After all, design and manufacturing processes have been driven by computers for decades. Mass production these days is nearly fully automated (except for the last step—the human-intensive assembly line).

The convergence of the virtual and physical worlds will be a slow and subtle process. It will happen in phases. First we will gain control over the shape of physical things. Then we will gain new levels of control over their composition, the materials they’re made of. Finally, we will gain control over the behavior of physical things.

Control over shape

A 3D printer can carefully interpret a digital design file, bringing us one step closer to tapping into the rich creativity and freedom of the virtual world. If you watch an animated movie, it’s clear that the scene on-screen was created on a computer. Dinosaurs roam through modern subway stations. Flying robotic soldiers shaped like buzzards shoot deadly lasers at whatever crosses their path.

If a movie switches back and forth between animation and reality, to the viewer it’s immediately apparent that there’s a clear demarcation between the rich computer-rendered world that’s the product of several fertile imaginations… and real life. One way to appreciate the promise and peril of 3D printing is to ponder the tyranny and rigid rules that govern the material world. Since 3D printers build objects in layers, they can make shapes that were once possible only in nature. Curves, hollows, and complicated inside chambers become possible.

The challenge is that atoms come together in unpredictable ways. A digital design can look stunning on the computer screen, but literally collapse when manufactured, unable to survive the discipline of gravity and materials limitations. In contrast, the digital world offers our imaginations intoxicating flexibility and creative freedom. The digital world eagerly embraces forms that are impossible in real life.

Control over composition

In the second stage of convergence, 3D printing will give us precise control over what things are made of, or their material composition. Multi-material 3D printers will open the door to the production of novel objects. This new class of object will be made of precise blends of raw materials whose combined whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Imagine a water color kit where blue can be mixed with yellow to form a nearly infinite number of different shades of green. In nature, 22 amino acids combine in different ways to create proteins of staggering variety. A multi-material 3D printer armed with precise instructions from a design file will be able to blend familiar raw materials into novel combinations.

When 3D printing technology evolves, we will see the fabrication of objects made of currently unfeasible blends of materials. We will see machine parts that can heal from failure. Or mesh that can stretch to nearly ten times its original length. Medical devices will respond to a particular patient’s blood type or detect changes in temperature.

The second avenue of control over composition lies in a slightly different direction. 3D printers will someday fabricate controllable materials. In the virtual world, all information, no matter how complex, ultimately boils down to its bare essence, two base units: a 1 or a zero.

In contrast, physical things are made of rich, non-modular swirls of raw material whose base units are atoms that are unruly and hard to control. Because of the material diversity found in the physical world, “analog” materials are difficult to capture in digital form in a meaningful way. As a result, analog materials are difficult to precisely copy, control, and program.

Incompatible atoms are a manufacturer’s nightmare. True, a 3D printer can’t smash open atoms to make them more malleable. What a 3D printer can do, however, is to artfully blend together once-incompatible raw materials into a single printed object.

Electronic circuits are notorious for the fact that their metal parts must first be made separately from their ceramic and plastic parts and assembled later. The fact that the raw materials that make up a circuit’s critical components must be made on separate manufacturing machines has dictated that circuit boards be flat and made up of several thin layers.

If the components of electronic circuits didn’t suffer from the curse of incompatibility, we could create circuits of all shapes and forms. If we could combine conductive and non-conductive materials together on a 3D printer, we could co-fabricate circuits of all shapes and sizes. We could print mechanical devices whose circuits are already built-in, whose complexity rivals that of the biological world.

Multi-material 3D printing is in its early stages. This toy is actually a sophisticated engineering project made of several different raw materials that were blended together during the printing process.

Image courtesy of Objet Inc.

Another way to gain control over the material composition of objects is to voxelize them. A voxel is the physical equivalent of a pixel. Voxels could be tiny, discrete pieces of a solid material. Or voxels could be tiny containers that hold whatever you put into them.

We’re just learning to 3D print objects made of voxels. Objects made of voxels offer an alternative to the analog materials that comprise most physical things. If you can make something from voxels, you’re one step closer to making it behave more like a programmable object, to controlling its behavior. Control over material composition of physical objects opens the door to the next stage, control over the behavior of physical objects.

Control over behavior

Consider a wooden kitchen table. If you were to use an optical scanner and scan its outer surfaces, you could turn the scan data into a design file. Once the table’s physical dimensions successfully made the leap into digital format, it would be easy to temporarily gain full control over the table’s design by using design software.

You could edit the table’s design file, then 3D print out a new version of the table. However, unless you printed the new table in billions of tiny voxels, the new table would be analog. Its materials, its parts and pieces, would remain innate, unintelligent, continuous, and passive. If you could 3D print the new table in voxels, however, a world of new possibilities would emerge.

As electronic components continue to shrink in size and increase in computing power, someday we will be able to 3D print voxels containing tiny circuits. Like graphic pixels whose perfect merged union creates a beautiful, high-resolution digital image, a perfect union of voxels would create intelligent, three-dimensional active physical objects.

Voxels give birth to intelligent and active raw materials. Instead of 3D printing passive parts as we do today, in the future, we will print active systems, for example, a working cell phone. 3D printers would create smart fabric, ready-made robot life forms, and machines that learn, respond, and think. We will print physical things that contain the intelligence of digital things.

Someday 3D printing will bring artificial intelligence from the computer into the real world. Robots are old hat. Cyborgs are a cultural relic from the 1990s. The future lies in programmable matter, raw materials whose behavior we can program and 3D print in a chosen shape.

MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld, in his book When Things Start to Think, predicted that programmable matter will contain a mind of its own.1 When things start to think, digital processing power will literally find legs and walk into the physical world. 3D printed programmable materials will form their own physical body, complete with mechanical and tactile capacities.

Perhaps one day, 3D printed robotic life forms will emerge from the printer complete with batteries, sensors, and circuit-brain already inside. New-born 3D printed robots will take their first hesitant baby steps out of the print bed and put their electronic circuitry to work learning their way around. Perhaps someday 3D printed robots will return to their 3D printer to invent new features for their “birth machine,” for a health check, to recalibrate or replace printed parts.

Faxing things

The ultimate convergence will arrive when we effortlessly shape-shift between being physical and being virtual, when physical objects smoothly transition from bits to atoms and atoms to bits. In the same way an online document can be printed on paper, scanned, and then printed again, someday physical things will migrate between bits and atoms and back again.

In Being Digital, Negroponte cautioned that the physical world won’t lend itself easily to digital format. Atoms are heavy and expensive to ship. Physical inventories take up space. Atoms insist on stubbornly clinging to one another in strictly defined ways.

Negroponte wrote, “If you make cashmere sweaters or Chinese food, it will be a long time before we can convert them to bits. ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ is a wonderful dream but not likely to come true for several centuries. Until then you will have to rely on FedEx, bicycles, and sneakers to get your atoms from one place to another.”2

3D printers may someday be the ultimate fax machines. If the virtual and physical worlds were to truly become non-exclusive, we could effortlessly fax things from place to place. Years ago, when I was a graduate student, a few of my colleagues were working hard to figure out how to do this. They were developing optical scan technologies and testing out their accuracy on a primitive 3D printer.

I admired their vision, which even today is still decades ahead of its time. However, as far as I know, they were never able to overcome a few core challenges. First, an optical scan captures only the surface details of an object. Most objects contain important internal structure. Second, my former colleagues could only print simple inanimate objects made of a single material.

Today we can “fax” simple physical objects. I worked on a project with a colleague of mine, an archeology professor. He deciphers ancient cuneiforms from several thousand years ago. His research regularly takes him to archeological sites in various countries in the Middle East.

Recently my colleague returned from a trip abroad, perturbed that he could not bring invaluable information home with him. Ancient cuneiforms are valuable objects whose finders promptly submit them to the governments of the country they’re digging in. Archeologists attempt to capture what they can by taking pictures and painstakingly scribing the shape of the characters. The challenge, however, is that there’s nothing like the real thing.

My colleague and I decided to do an experiment to see whether we could “fax” priceless cuneiforms from one place to another. We agreed that we would CT scan a few of the cuneiforms he had on hand in his own collection. Then we would turn the scan data into a design file and re-create exact replicas of the cuneiforms on a 3D printer.

If our experiment worked, we figured that the next time he went abroad, my colleague could convince the local authorities to let him CT scan priceless local artifacts. Then he could send the design information to a nearby (or distant) 3D printer to share with anybody else on the planet. He could offer his host country an invaluable preservation service as well, since they, too, could store the data from cuneiform CT scans and 3D print replicas.

CT scanned priceless artifacts can be 3D printed for preservation and educational purposes. On the left is the original cuneiform and its 3D printed replica on the right. An enlarged image of the replica is below.

Image courtesy of Cornell University. Curator David I. Owen; Design: Natasha Gangjee; Photo by Jason Koski

We discovered that “faxing” cuneiforms was surprisingly easy. First we converted the CT scan data into a design file. Then we 3D printed exact replicas of rare and precious cuneiforms in different sizes and from different materials.

Best of all, in the process we discovered an unexpected bonus in this cuneiform fax experiment: the CT scan captured written characters on both the insides and outside of the cuneiform. Researchers have known for centuries that many cuneiform bear written messages in their hollow insides. However until now, the only way to see the inner message has been to shatter (hence destroy) the cuneiform. One of the benefits of CT scanning and 3D printing a replica of a cuneiform is that you can cheerfully smash the printed replica to pieces to read what’s written on the inside.

The ten principles of 3D printing

Predicting the future is a crapshoot. When we were writing this book and interviewing people about 3D printing, we discovered that a few underlying “rules” kept coming up. People from a broad and diverse array of industries and backgrounds and levels of expertise described similar ways that 3D printing helped them get past key cost, time and complexity barriers.

We have summarized what we learned. Here are ten principles of 3D printing we hope will help people and businesses take full advantage of 3D printing technologies.

Principle one: Manufacturing complexity is free. In traditional manufacturing, the more complicated an object’s shape, the more it costs to make. On a 3D printer, complexity costs the same as simplicity. Fabricating an ornate and complicated shape does not require more time, skill, or cost than printing a simple block. Free complexity will disrupt traditional pricing models and change how we calculate the cost of manufacturing things.

Printing functional objects. These 3D-printed scissors work “out of the box”—no assembly or sharpening required.

Principle two: Variety is free. A single 3D printer can make many shapes.Like a human artisan, a 3D printer can fabricate a different shape each time. Traditional manufacturing machines are much less versatile and can only make things in a limited spectrum of shapes. 3D printing removes the overhead costs associated with re-training human machinists or re-tooling factory machines. A single 3D printer needs only a different digital blueprint and a fresh batch of raw material.

Principle three: No assembly required. 3D printing forms interlocked parts. Mass manufacturing is built on the backbone of the assembly line. In modern factories, machines make identical objects that are later assembled by robots or human workers, sometimes continents away. The more parts a product contains, the longer it takes to assemble and the more expensive it becomes to make. By making objects in layers, a 3D printer could print a door and attached interlocking hinges at the same time, no assembly required. Less assembly will shorten supply chains, saving money on labor and transportation; shorter supply chains will be less polluting.

The plastic parts in this image look like assembled bricks but were actually 3D printed, pre-assembled, in a single print job.

Image of vehicle printed on ZPrinter 650 courtesy of 3D Systems

Principle four: Zero lead time. A 3D printer can print on demand when an object is needed. The capacity for on-the-spot manufacturing reduces the need for companies to stockpile physical inventory. New types of business services become possible as 3D printers enable a business to make specialty—or custom—objects on demand in response to customer orders. Zero-lead-time manufacturing could minimize the cost of long-distance shipping if printed goods are made when they are needed and near where they are needed.

Principle five: Unlimited design space. Traditional manufacturing technologies and human artisans can make only a finite repertoire of shapes. Our capacity to form shapes is limited by the tools available to us. For example, a traditional wood lathe can make only round objects. A mill can make only parts that can be accessed with a milling tool. A molding machine can make only shapes that can be poured into and then extracted from a mold. A 3D printer removes these barriers, opening up vast new design spaces. A printer can fabricate shapes that until now have been possible only in nature.

Principle six: Zero skill manufacturing. Traditional artisans train as apprentices for years to gain the skills they needed. Mass production and computer-guided manufacturing machines diminish the need for skilled production. However traditional manufacturing machines still demand a skilled expert to adjust and calibrate them. A 3D printer gets most of its guidance from a design file. To make an object of equal complexity, a 3D printer requires less operator skill than does an injection molding machine. Unskilled manufacturing opens up new business models and could offer new modes of production for people in remote environments or extreme circumstances.

Principle seven: Compact, portable manufacturing. Per volume of production space, a 3D printer has more manufacturing capacity than a traditional manufacturing machine. For example, an injection molding machine can only make objects significantly smaller than itself. In contrast, a 3D printer can fabricate objects as large as its print bed. If a 3D printer is arranged so its printing apparatus can move freely, a 3D printer can fabricate objects larger than itself. A high production capacity per square foot makes 3D printers ideal for home use or office use since they offer a small physical footprint.

Principle eight: Less waste by-product. 3D printers that work in metal create less waste by-product than do traditional metal manufacturing techniques. Machining metal is highly wasteful as an estimated 90 percent of the original metal gets ground off and ends up on the factory floor. 3D printing is more wasteless for metal manufacturing. As printing materials improve, “Net shape” manufacturing could be a greener way to make things.

Principle nine: Infinite shades of materials. Combining different raw materials into a single product is difficult using today’s manufacturing machines. Since traditional manufacturing machines carve, cut, or mold things into shape, these processes can’t easily blend together different raw materials. As multi-material 3D printing develops, we will gain the capacity to blend and mix different raw materials. New previously inaccessible blends of raw material offer us a much larger, mostly unexplored palette of materials with novel properties or useful types of behaviors.

Principle ten: Precise physical replication. A digital music file can be endlessly copied with no loss of audio quality. In the future, 3D printing will extend this digital precision to the world of physical objects. Scanning technology and 3D printing will together introduce high resolution shapeshifting between the physical and digital worlds. We will scan, edit, and duplicate physical objects to create exact replicas or to improve on the original.

The titanium heel of this shoe was 3D printed in a single piece.

Image courtesy of Kerrie Luft

Some of these principles already hold true today. Others will come true in the next decade or two (or three). By removing familiar, time-honored manufacturing constraints, 3D printing sets the stage for a cascade of downstream innovation. In the following chapters we explore how 3D printing technologies will change the ways we work, eat, heal, learn, create and play. Let’s begin with a visit to the world of manufacturing and design, where 3D printing technologies ease the tyranny of economies of scale.

Chapter 3

Nimble manufacturing: Good, fast, and cheap

At my auto mechanic there’s a sign taped to the cash register that says “You can have it done good, fast, or cheap. Pick any two.” This enduring joke sums it up. But what if my auto mechanic is wrong?

Halfway across the world, a distant toothbrush factory sells children’s toothbrushes for 10 cents apiece. This factory employs advanced machines and technicians. That sounds good, like a high quality outfit. The factory’s daily output of toothbrushes is over 300,000 pieces a day. That’s fast.

Could it be that my salty old car mechanic got it wrong after all? Maybe you can have it done good, fast, and cheap, no compromises necessary. But maybe he wasn’t wrong. There’s more to the story than at first meets the eye.

Mass production is riddled with hidden costs and delays. If you consider the big picture from the perspective of a company rather than the consumer, mass production is not cheap. Nor is the process of transforming a design concept into a mass-produced product particularly fast. If you desire anything other than a product aimed at the lowest common denominator, mass-produced products are not particularly good either.

Small-batch mass manufacturing is an oxymoron. The lower the product’s end price to the consumer, the more critical are high-volume sales to the company. This is why the toothbrush factory—to earn back the investment involved in producing a simple plastic toothbrush—sells its mass-produced wares in big batches. The size of a minimum order is a whopping 28,000 toothbrushes.

Another hidden cost lies in the product design process. Factory production is merciless. Translating a design concept into a profitable mass-produced product is similar to the sacrifices made in adapting a complex novel into a blockbuster movie. Even a simple design for a plastic toothbrush (which looked fine on the computer) will behave in unpredictable ways when subject to the rigors of an industrial-strength plastic molding process. The laws of economics are similarly ruthless. New design concepts are subject to forced trade-offs between product quality and cost to manufacture.

A factory and an assembly line are an ideal way to cheaply make identical products in high volumes. However, such efficiency is not cheap. Behind even a simple plastic mass-produced product lies an invisible cast of thousands. Companies must invest in skilled technicians and engineers to properly transform a design into reality, to calibrate factory machines and oversee assembly lines.

At the heart of the dilemma of good, fast, or cheap lies a basic rule of economics called economies of scale. Economies of scale are the invisible foundation that supports our modern industrial economy. Economies of scale are what make mass-produced products profitable.

Economies of scale drive down the consumer price of mass-produced products and increase profits for a company. However, to earn back the upfront investments in design and production, companies must sell large volumes of the same product. Only after a significant number of identical products are sold does a company begin to profit from its initial investment.

One of the biggest hidden costs of mass production is the sacrifice of variety. To enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, a company must resist the temptation to change a product’s design unless there’s a large enough market opportunity to justify the investment. Each design change, each minor upgrade or variation hits the bottom line.

This is an injection molding machine in a factory. Injection molding machines fabricate plastic parts quickly and cheaply but making the mold requires upfront investment and involves design challenges.

Image courtesy of KenPlas Inc.

Mass production can’t offer both companies and consumers good, fast and cheap goods. How about artisan production? Skilled artisans make custom products in small batches—no assembly line or investments in a factory floor needed. Artisans don’t hire teams of skilled designers, engineers and technicians. If a design concept proves to be fatally flawed after it’s rendered in physical form, an artisan may have to absorb the cost of wasted materials. However, since only one faulty product was created, an artisan can quickly edit the original design without having to deal with the financial consequences of throwing away hundreds (or thousands) of mistakes. The downside of artisan production is that it doesn’t scale.

Somewhere between mass production and the local farmer’s market

Mass production is efficient, increasing company profits and lowering consumer prices. Yet economies of scale take a toll on product variety and customization. In contrast, artisan production handles variety and customization with ease, yet output is confined to small batches. 3D printing technologies offer a new path forward by blending aspects of mass and artisan production.

When the platypus was first discovered, explorers thought it was a hoax, that a prankster had somehow stitched together a furry animal with a duck’s bill, webbed feet and a kangaroo’s pouch. 3D printing is the platypus of the manufacturing world, combining the digital precision and repeatability of a factory floor with an artisan’s design freedom.

Like a factory machine, a 3D printer is automated. A digital design file guides it through its paces. The design file succinctly captures instructions for the manufacture of a particular product. This knowledge can be saved or emailed anywhere.

Like a human artisan, a 3D printer is versatile. A printer can fabricate a broad variety of different types of objects without incurring significant upfront investment. On a 3D printer it costs the same amount of money to 3D print 1,000 unique products or 1,000 identical products. The cost of customization nearly disappears.

Despite these advantages, 3D printed manufacturing offers no economies of scale. Like any extreme personality characteristic, the fact that 3D printing fails to provide economies of scale is both its biggest weakness, but also its biggest strength. Harnessing economies of scale is critical to a company whose business model is based on selling large volumes of a commodity product that earns razor-thin margins. However, if a company’s business model is based on selling small numbers of unique, constantly changing or custom-made high margin products, 3D printed production (like the platypus) represents an evolutionary leap forward.

3D printing and design technologies make design and manufacturing more nimble. Small companies have access to powerful tools that were once available only to global corporations. Resourceful businesses, armed with a 3D printer and design software, can provide skilled services of a caliber that were once the exclusive domain of corporate in-house design and engineering departments.

While doing research for this book, we learned that 3D printing is taking root in former manufacturing regions, in the economically decaying rust belt of upstate New York and parts of the Midwest. In these businesses, in many cases, employees are alumni of now defunct local manufacturing plants. When their jobs dried up under the dual assault of outsourced production and factory automation, laid off employees faced a difficult decision: should they move away to where the jobs are, or should they find a way to stay put and somehow make it work?

In the past, no small business could have afforded to buy an industrial-scale 3D printer and pay for enough computing power to run industrial design software. That’s changing. One small business we visited was founded by a man whose career spanned the glory days of manufacturing in the western world. We’ll call him “Mike” (not his real name since his family preferred that their small business not be identified). Mike’s business provides design engineering, prototyping and 3D printing services to regional companies.

We arranged a visit with Mike to learn more. Driving through the Rust Belt was a sobering experience. On the way to visit Mike’s company, when we turned off the interstate highway, our cell phone service disappeared. Local people had moved away, leaving behind half-empty towns and cities staggering under a shrinking tax base.

Outside the car window, the picturesque rural landscape had rolling hills, shabby red barns and grazing black and white dairy cows. The two-lane road periodically cut through struggling small towns with disappearing populations. “What do people who live here do to make a living?” was a question that came to mind.

After a few hours of driving we pulled into the driveway of a well-tended home, Mike’s company’s headquarters. Mike met us at the door and ushered us into his basement workshop and design studio. Part machine shop and part office, the headquarters of this small business looked nothing like the noisy, warehouse-sized production shops of the grand old days when mass manufacturing took place locally. A few computers were tucked away on a desk in the corner of a well-lit room. A pool table sat against the wall, like most pool tables, serving as a handy surface on which to stack boxes and store unused goods.

Mike graduated from high school in the early 1970s. His first employer trained him to be a draftsman. Today it seems hard to believe that manufacturing was once a thriving line of work, a good field for bright and promising young people. Back in those days, however, a person could make a good living by working in the region’s manufacturing ecosystem.

Several decades later, Mike was laid off. The company he had worked at for several years offshored its manufacturing and moved its professional staff to a distant part of the country. Nearly 15 years ago, Mike and his family decided they would stay in their hometown, despite the tough job markets of their deflating regional economy.

Mike’s company is able to practice nimble manufacturing because today, small services firms like his can afford to purchase their own equipment and software. We asked Mike if we could see the heart of his manufacturing operation, the 3D printer. He led us up a flight of stairs as we carefully stepped around several family dogs that swarmed around our feet. In the family living room, we walked past cats languidly dozing on a kitty tree in a corner. In the garage, humbly awaiting its next assignment was a Stratasys 3D printer, slightly taller and wider than a deluxe refrigerator.