Future Now
The IFTF Blog
From rapid prototyping to personal fabrication
I've spent the last couple days working on an article for a technology magazine on the future of personal fabrication. I've long been fascinated by things like Neil Gershenfeld's Fab Lab project, and so jumped at the chance to learn more about these technologies, and where we might go with them. Here's a draft of the piece.
Where do you find the future? As William Gibson famously said, the future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed. So the trick is to know where to look. If you're interested in the future of innovation, one of the best places to look is in product design studios.
Look past the nearly-inevitable industrial chic décor and black clothing, and you'll see two interesting things: CAD (computer-aided design) systems, and rapid prototyping machines. CAD has been around for years. Two methods for rapid prototyping have become especially important. Both are additive processes, and build up objects one layer at a time, like rows of bricks in a wall. In inkjet manufacturing, an inkjet printer sprays fine beads of plastic or resin instead of ink. In laser sintering, a laser draws the shape of an object in powder. The laser fuses the powder into a solid; the object is then covered with another layer of powder, and the process is repeated.
Rapid prototyping machines are to CAD as printers are to word processors: they turn digital files into physical objects. By letting designers to move between the screen and the world, they've quietly transformed design. Design teams can work faster, and catch problems early, when they're cheap to fix: correcting a problem with a product in production can be a hundred times more expensive than fixing a prototype. Users can also be more intimately involved in the design process. Snowboard manufacturer Burton used to spend months making prototype bindings; by laser sintering their own, a design can go from the computer screen to the slopes in two days, and users can compare several prototypes in a week. White-water sports company Watermark rapid prototypes new kayak shells, carves or sands changes in the prototype to improve its stability and handling in real-world conditions, then uses a laser scanner to read those changes back into the CAD file. Other companies bring user perspectives into the design process in more indirect ways. Computer peripherals maker Logitech follows conversations in game chat rooms, to see what hard-core players say about new their mice. Intel and Motorola sends anthropologists around the world studying cell phone users, while H-P researchers look at printer use in the home and office.
Harvesting insights from users is one thing; translating those insights into products is another, especially since high tech consumer products have a genius for encompassing conflicting demands. The first Apple mouse developed in the early 1980s had to be more reliable, easier to use, and 98% cheaper than the $700 Xerox PARC prototype that inspired it. Ever since, users have demanded products that are faster, more powerful, and more functional—and smaller, cheaper, and easier to use. Add networked, energy efficient, environmentally sustainable, and recycleable, and you have a perfect storm of contradictory demands. Balancing these needs—or better yet, finding new technologies that can satisfy them all—requires something more than conventional problem-solving techniques drawing on textbook knowledge. General problem-solving techniques like TRIZ offer ways to balance conflicting needs, by analyzing problems in ways that reveal hidden continuities between them. Most design studios have evolved their own methods for exploring solution spaces, ranging from special review processes to designing project teams consisting of members with varied backgrounds.
And where to look for new solutions? Advances in materials science, nanotechnology, computers are obvious places to look for things that will boost power, speed, or strength; but designers and scientists across a range of fields are discovering that biomimicry—reverse-engineering natural materials and processes—is a rich source of new ideas. Cutting-edge sciences are already intersecting with biology—nanoscientists at MIT are using proteins to assemble nanowires, for example—but designers have also been impressed at how Nature routinely uses self-assembling, biodegradeable materials to create things that balance contradictory demands. Spiders' silk, for example, is much stronger than steel, and much more flexible.
So materials scientists are now studying geckos to understand how they can cling to smooth surfaces, and reverse-engineering the composites that make abalone shells hard and the adhesives mussels use to attach themselves to rocks. Others are focused on natural processes. Robot designers at Stanford and NASA are studying insect locomotion to design landers that can scurry over uneven Martian terrain, while sociologists are studying insect colonies to gain insights into how self-organizing systems work. Architects have long copied natural forms, but are now learning how to emulate natural processes: the prize-winning Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe, has a zero-energy ventilation system based on the climate controls in giant termite mounds.
Ironically, the world created by rapid prototyping, engaged users, and design practices may contain the seeds of its obsolescence. Several trends are pushing past the boundaries of today's design-centered world, into a world in which more design and manufacturing are distributed and outsourced—this time to consumers.
Start with design trends. The world's most influential designers and technologists—people like John Thackara, Donald Norman, John Maeda, and Neil Gershenfeld—are converging on a consensus that, as technologies become more complex and ubiquitous, they also have to get simpler. If these thinkers have their way, unusable but museum-beautiful products will be out; real designers will make products that balance power and ease of user; are customizable and hackable; communicate with other devices (since most objects will have computing and networking facility); and won't consume much energy when they're used, or landfill when they're discarded.
And products are more likely to be customized and hacked, for we're creating a generation of users who build virtual things for fun. Online video games like World of Warcraft, Sims and Second Life let players design everything from weapons to castles to characters: without realizing it, millions of avid gamers are playing with fun-house versions of CAD systems. Even if one in ten thousand players develops any real facility with design tools, given that tens of millions of people spend time in these worlds, that's a few thousand people as comfortable designing virtual things as they are mashing up songs.
They'll also be able to share their designs with each other, build on each other's ideas, and get feedback from user bases numbering in the millions. Danish toymaker Lego's online Factory lets users—one almost wants to call them designers—upload and share their creations, and purchase kits to build popular designs. Think of it as open source toy design, and its potential is apparent.
Finally, rapid prototyping is morphing into rapid manufacturing. Hearing aid manufacturers Siemens and Phonak already are laser sintering silicone earbuds encasing super-small hearing aids, and makers of artificial limbs and orthodontics are following suit. At the opposite end of the scale, aerospace companies are bringing rapid prototyping to the factory floor to make small runs of highly complex aircraft parts. (Boeing spun out its On Demand Manufacturing subsidiary in 2002.) Within a decade, some rapid prototype machines may cost less than a thousand dollars, and personal fabricators—machines that can take designs for both complex structures with logic, sensors, actuators, and interfaces—will cost as much as commercial photo printers do today.
Once rapid prototyping morphs into rapid manufacturing and personal fabrication, the dynamism of open source software will migrate from the arcane worlds of operating system software to the everyday worlds of toys, clothes, and electronics. Just as the Internet has empowered consumers, created new opportunities for businesses, and redrawn the boundaries between consumers and producers, changes in design philosophy, user demands and abilities, and rapid prototyping, will combine to democratize design.
And what happens to companies in this world? They don’t go away; but the ones that can design products that encourage user customization, and support consumer experimentation, will be better-placed to harness these new trends.