Institute For The Future

Manufacturing: Do It Yourself?

3D printers have lead to rapid prototyping and a made a significant impact on product design. However, rapid prototyping is now morphing into rapid, high-end manufacturing such as hearing-aid production. Early versions of machines that can fabricate electronics and displays alongside mechanical structures will be more widely available by the end of the decade.

3D printers will continue to lower cost for experimentation and small-scale production. In the long run they may lead to microniche production aimed at diverse, idiosyncratic communities previously ignored by mass producers. Microniche, in turn, may lead to peer-to-peer design where objects can be shared online as easily as we currently share music. The rise of open-source product design is inevitable.

A more extreme scenario plays out with the deconstruction of the global economy as each home turns into a personal factory. Although this view is most likely wrong, it does point to the inevitable upset in our traditional producer-consumer models.

Want to learn more? Check out our 2007 perspective "Manufacturing: Do It Yourself?" for more information and an interview with Sci-Fi writer Bruce Sterling and IFTF researcher and co-editor of BoingBoing, David Pescovitz, on desktop fabbing, new innovations to come from 3D printing, and the environmental implications of widely accessible 3D printing.

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You can find the complete set of our 2007 TYF perspectives here. Or search for each separately.