I’ve been mildly obsessed with 3D printing since I first learned about it. Also referred to as ‘additive manufacturing’ or ‘digital fabrication’, it’s a process where a three-dimensional, solid object is created by placing down successive layers of material fused together by laser (digital light processing) and a multitude of other methods that are evolving rapidly, almost daily. Most people have now seen some footage of one of these printers in action, probably printing a useless plastic widget or a gun. You know a technology has hit the mainstream agenda when it appears on 60 Minutes. Old media still has a place.

As far as usefulness is concerned, the technology is now starting to reach an inflection point where things get radical, blowing the minds of even the most ardent technologist. 3D printers can create complex moving mechanical parts, often in a single build process, but more radically, they’re entering the realm of the biotechnology used to build human organ replacements, synthetic bones and computer-added tissue design. Add to this the ability to print various forms of computer technology, including microchips, circuit boards and capacitors, and the mind boggles. Yes, all of this is a bit like history repeating itself: making things happen with simple scanning and clicks of buttons on desks. The more important questions about 3D printing are, ‘What won’t they be able to do?’ and ‘How do we make money in a world where Star Trek style replicators actually exist?’

While researching the history of news reports about the internet, I happened upon an article from The New York Times by Robert Reinhold from 1982 entitled, ‘Study says technology could transform society’.¹

It was a story about computers turning into a global network where all information could be transferred, downloaded and manipulated through a few clicks of a button. We’d be able to listen to music, watch movies, do banking and send electronic mail instantly. We’d be able to connect with families around the world live on television screens, most likely free of charge. It predicted social groups forming that defied traditional demographic clustering. It even said that for most developed countries setting up a connection to the global computer network would be less than an average week’s wages. It was rather fanciful thinking, it said, but it may just cause a revolution.

As we all know, we’ve been delivered even more than was promised. Given that we’ve lived through global network formation, we need to open our minds about what 3D printing will do. It’s changed everything in our physical, human-created world. It’s created a fragmentation of the production process to the point where significant parts of human output are decentralised permanently.

In this sense our world becomes one, where everything is information, where knowledge is converted into actual objects and where the internet crosses the chasm from the virtual into the physical.

A virtual physical reality

While technology has already been used extensively in the fields of dentistry, medicine, automobiles and aviation, it’s now entering our homes for the first time. Famed designer, inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller spoke of a future where technology would advance to a point where we could do ‘more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’. Fuller spoke of this phenomenon in 1938 and coined the term ‘ephermalization’ to describe it.

Fuller’s vision was that ephermalization would result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources. His oft-cited example was Henry Ford’s assembly line, which to this day has led to better products at a lower cost, in perpetuity. With 3D printing still largely on the tech-hacker fringes in terms of actual usage, the level of innovation is astounding. This non-exhaustive list provides a perspective of the potential impact of this technology and demonstrates how widely it is being embraced.

• Cars. Entire car bodies have been printed, both replicas and new models. The Urbee 2 is a vehicle for which more than 50 per cent was 3D printed and it can reach speeds of about one-hundred and ten kilometres per hour.
• Tools. Tools of every type, shape and mechanical movement have been made, all of which were printed in metals and even carbon composites stronger than most metals.
• Camera lenses. The current level of progression of acrylic camera lenses that perform at highly functional levels suggests that soon it will be possible to print these using glass, rivalling the quality of their commercial counterparts. This will be at a micro portion of the current cost of buying them.
• Food. Yes, chocolate, steak and hamburgers have been printed. NASA is experimenting with this process for long space flights. Bioengineering startup Modern Meadow has 3D printed meat that’s been eaten. 3D printed food, while it sounds particularly unpalatable, has a significant potential for reducing the impact of modern agriculture.
• Clothing. A 3D-printable, biodegradable, flexible, synthetic fabric that feels like cloth is already here. Known as Cosyflex, this fabric is made using a spray nozzle to create layers of natural rubber-latex polymers and cotton fibres.
• Jewellery. Jewellery can now be printed not just from plastics, but also with precious metals.
• Bicycles. We already have fully functional bicycles made of pieces that click together.
• Musical instruments. Most kinds of musical instruments have been printed and when played they have the clarity of their handmade counterparts.
• Drones. These perfectly flyable aircraft, which are printed in pieces, can be as small as the palm of your hand or large and complex.
• Rocket injectors. A rocket injector was printed by NASA that can generate 900 kilograms of thrust.
• Robots. A joint team at Harvard and MIT has built a mind-blowing, self-assembling robot. It uses shape memory polymers so the bot can configure itself into the correct arrangement after it’s printed.
• Working engines. Engines have been printed as one piece in a single build process.
• Prosthetics. Prosthetics can be printed for commercial or home use. Amputee Richard Van As built what he calls a Robohand to replace his lost fingers instead of paying $10 000 for a commercial prosthetic. The five fingers close when he bends his wrist, and he shared his design online to help others create their own version.
• Body parts. A working printed ear has come out of Cornell University that uses cells from a patient’s rib. Even human liver tissue has been successfully printed by Organovo, a San Diego research firm.
• A house. Engineering professor Behrokh Khoshnevis of California has laid out his plans² to 3D print a full-size house in less than a day, including the electrical and plumbing work.
• Another 3D printer. The open source RepRap 3D printer has made smaller versions of itself, save a few nuts and bolts. In fact, most 3D printers could print about eighty per cent of themselves already leading us to the evolution in technology where hardware is starting to do what software is very good at: making copies of itself.

This list was outdated the moment I wrote it. It can’t not be. The reason is that this technology is in the hands of people who create what they imagine at will. They don’t have to wait for approval or permission. They just do it with open-source machines and software. In fact, there’s no way of knowing what someone has just created in their home as a 3D printing enthusiast. What’s important is what this list represents. At this early stage there’s a staggering scope of possibility for what can be made. From reviewing this it’s not silly to believe 3D printing could make anything. The processes used so far in 3D printing are not nearly as important as the concept that we can make things from digital instructions. We can even make things that make things. Everything — even technology, it turns out — has self-replicating seeds inside itself, just as nature does.

The fact that this part of the revolution is physical puts it directly into the ‘bigger than the internet’ category. All the web has done so far is change information distribution; that is, shift how we get data. Once we shift how we make things it starts to impact where and how we live as much as the industrial revolution did to the agricultural age. It affects what we can make. It affects what everyone owns because they will own their own version of everything. It affects significantly how people and companies will make money.

3D printing manufacturers claim that anything that’s produced at a volume of fewer than 200 000 units will not be able to compete on price. If you stop and take a look around the room you’re in right now you’ll notice that the number of widgets that come from factories is astounding. These kinds of widget will very soon be made in the home. But isn’t that the point? Who would want to own anything that’s designed for the masses when we can have a bespoke version and make our own tweaks.

The history of technology repeats

As with all technology, the prices of 3D printers are in rapid freefall with entry-level models as low as $100. The prices are already at a point where they’re affordable to pretty much anyone in a developed economy. Sure, the industrial high-end versions can run into the millions of dollars, but so do large-scale paper printing devices. The point is, with price no longer the barrier, the only missing link before these printers invade every home with an internet connection is mass pop-culture awareness. We need communities to spring up and find ways of creating in-home use. This will take people from a curious level of awareness to ‘I must have one of these devices’, and that desire is spreading quickly.

Add to this some simple user-centric interfaces of the process and the rest will move more quickly than we could have ever imagined. We already know how transformative digital technology can be. We’ve already experienced the benefits first hand through access to knowledge. We know we’re living through a change that’s human centric and giving the power back to the people. The accumulation of these ingredients leads to a rapid penetration of technology. We already believe. We just need to be informed of what 3D printing can do for us. All forms of retailer need to wise up and start selling them as a necessary household appliance, rather than a hobbyist niche.

While it may be hard to believe that the quality of anything and everything could be better than what comes out of a factory, there are analogies worth remembering.

In 1984 a Kodak photo-processing machine required an investment of more than $800 000 to process film into photos. Today, an inkjet printer that costs about fifty dollars can reproduce digital photos with an unnoticeable difference in resolution. This has also happened with mainframe computing to the point where the super computer that lives in our pocket is our most powerful technological device. It’s clear that technology is disrupting industry and breaking down almost everything that was once mass. Just as large media has had to learn to share the stage with citizen journalism, the factory will soon be sharing the market with digital craftspeople operating out of their home. Desktop publishing is about to be joined by desktop manufacturing.

Smart entrepreneurs are already starting to build ‘bridge industries’ for 3D printing, which will teach and build the market in the pre–saturation phase of the coming years. Online 3D digital print shops such as Ponoko — which produces what you want using your designs or those of other people and sends the finished product right to your door — are emerging. We’re also seeing 3D print shops appear on high streets, shopping centres and office supply stores, all places that could eventually provide the highest quality of ‘personal manufacturing’ available and match the quality of any industrial-level 3D printer worldwide.

The home factory

The ‘home office’ is now parlance of yesteryear. The digital communications tools we’ve become so accustomed to have now invaded the entire home. They’ve left the office relatively freely because all types of web-enabled screens follow us around the house. Every desktop will have a 3D printer on it right next to the 2D version. Of course, we’ll also end up with a 3D printer in our garage or shed to manufacture bigger items, or components such as plastic fenders for that parking miscalculation we made at the local shopping centre. The idea of ‘printing a bumper bar’ for your car isn’t as fanciful as it may seem. Ultimately, it’s a piece of plastic with a certain industrial design. If the design was download from a car company’s official website, for the specific model of car, with a specific design code, and it was printed using the required input polymer formula specified by said car company during the printing, then there’s no reason why this couldn’t become a reality. In fact, it could be cheaper for the end user and more profitable for the manufacturer simultaneously. It’s quite foreseeable for panel beaters to be replaced by car part fitters who work more like a mobile mechanic.

In fact, much of what we buy will be design. The next generation of e-commerce sites won’t be shipping the products or brands we choose online to our doorstep. Instead, we’ll be downloading designs from the global digital department stores, which may be Amazon or another start-up that wants to shake up the world. There’s no doubt that smart brands will want to participate. It’s not as if the global brands of today have a vested interest in manufacturing anymore. They outsourced that in the first shift to globalised markets and cheap labour. If manufacturing, shipping and distribution could be cut out entirely, profitability would be enhanced — but only for those who understand the shift and embrace it. Add to that the environmental benefits of reduced transport loads and wastage in the production process, and excess production of minimum runs. This requires a decision from brand manufacturers to love the customer and not their infrastructure. They need to be agnostic about the system that currently serves them, which is something most legacy industries have struggled with.

Piracy on steroids

The real challenge for the brands that will be affected by 3D printing isn’t about whether or not this new economic construct can work, but rather whether they have the gumption to embrace it. The best example we currently have on hand is the music industry. The world of MP3 downloads and music streaming should have been the domain of large recording industry houses, but instead it has ended up in the control of music newbies.

Let’s imagine designer sunglasses made from plastics and perfectly 3D printable materials. There would be more designs, more often — a fashion retail match made in heaven. In fact, the rate of change will be a vital ingredient to beating the copycats because piracy could be elevated to a level that makes Pirate Bay look like child’s play. An entire internet sharing actual print design files of high-end designer brands will be interesting. Monetisation methods don’t immediately present themselves. They’re difficult to find in a world rife with piracy, but zero-cost digital duplication is an unavoidable reality so it must be embraced with the faith of finding a way to make it pay.

It can only be imagined that this will raise legal quandaries that have previously been unthinkable. Even those brands that choose not to sell their designs won’t be spared the piracy challenge. Every 3D printer will come with infrared and sonar scanners that create digital files for anything we have a copy of. We need to imagine that anything physical will be able to be scanned and uploaded via a device that clicks into our smartphone. It won’t matter whether companies release the digital files of their designs or not because they’ll become freely available regardless.

In order for brands not to get caught napping, they have to realise that they’re not products, but identities. In fact, a 3D digital department store could be just the ticket for improving new product lead times. It could significantly reduce the inter-purchase intervals and upweight the frequency of purchase and fashion cycles. Manufacturers will soon have the potential to engage a globally distributed, free labour force, which is something most information players have in the form of content creators. They, too, can unlock the power of co-creation and the sharing of the financial upside, but they need a platform mentality to do it. They need to have the courage to hand over their brand to the audience and to cede control. Brands will have to be more curated than contrived. Brand owners will have to believe the crowd can create something that they could never imagine. Why wouldn’t they? The crowd already blew our minds when it came to media; they re-imagined every form of communication and there’s more to come. Brands need to allow physical mash-ups to occur to enable the best stuff to bubble up to the top. But it needs to be done knowing there isn’t a clear monetisation path for co-creation. It’s murky at best. The strategy needs to be one of embracing the unknown and of exploring all commercial possibilities.

It’s hard to imagine that a build-stuff-on-demand world will ever exist. But it was probably hard for pre-industrial artisans to imagine what factories and production would eventually become, or how the first transistors would transform us into an information age. What’s certain is that social media and citizen journalism will evolve into social design and social manufacturing. It’s the way it’s always been, excluding the 200-year halcyon period of the industrial era.

Dad vs daughter

I’ve been thrilled to own a 3D printer for a few years now. I purchased one when they hit their Altair moment (the Altair 8800 is regarded as the first affordable personal computer and the spark of the home computer revolution). It’s a pretty impressive party trick introducing someone to the basic idea of 3D printing, helping them work through their initial incredulity, showing them a little video about it, and then helping them print their first item. It’s a social experiment I’ve undertaken on both my 70-year-old father and my four-year-old daughter.

While I was tinkering with my 3D printer in my home office, my daughter came in the room and asked me what that ‘toy’ was, pointing to the printer. She must have heard my wife talk about it. While it’s more than a toy, I can’t quite claim it to be a business necessity yet, though it will be both that and a modern life necessity shortly. I told my daughter it was my 3D printer. She didn’t ask any of the curious questions I normally get, such as, ‘What do you mean printing in 3D?’ She just nodded her head and took it as fact. I asked her if she wanted me to print her something, maybe a toy or some jewellery. I could remember that some of the 3D-printing file-sharing sites, such as Cubify and Thingiverse, had files of really cools things for little kids. She replied simply, ‘Okay Daddy,’ and seemed reasonably excited about the idea of me printing her something right at that moment. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a 3D printer; it’s the future of most everything physical.

So we scanned through the jewellery on the screen, picked out a cool and colourful bracelet, downloaded the file and sent the file to the printer for manufacturing. I pressed the print button and it started printing. During the process of finding and choosing, I was pretty pumped. I was 3D printing my little girl some personal jewellery … on the spot … in my home office. Once the process was underway I said, ‘Look, look, it’s printing it’, to which she replied in a nonchalant manner, ‘Okay. Thanks, Daddy,’ and left the room. Sure, she was excited about the jewellery, but not the process. The process was irrelevant to her; she just wanted the bracelet.

Once the print job was complete, I called her back into my office and said, ‘Look. Here it is, your bracelet. I printed it for you!’, to which her reply was much like the previous one. She said, ‘Thanks, Daddy,’ put it on her wrist and skipped away to get on with her four-year-old life.

My father, on the other hand, had an entirely different experience. When I first informed him of 3D printing, it required a lot of explaining. I told him I’d purchased a 3D printer and he couldn’t quite grasp the fact I was talking about a machine that makes things out of ‘thin air’ in the shape a computer tells it to. It was pure science fiction. In the first conversation we had about it he thought I was having a joke with him. To show him what it was I reached for my smartphone to upload a random 3D-printing YouTube video to do the explaining for me. He watched it, intrigued, and then again laughed it off as some kind of trick video.

It wasn’t until the next time he visited my home that he truly understood what this technology meant. I showed him my little printer, which has a 15-centimetre square platform built around it, and told him I could print him anything he wanted that would fit in that space, right now. My father’s a tradesman, a man of the tools who spent his life with hammers in his hands and also working on a farm. Ever the marketer, I told him we could print a tool with moving parts. He decided to print a shifter spanner, a type of wrench with a little screw that changes the size of the spanner head. During the same process I took my daughter through, he kept on saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This is unbelievable!’, adding that he never thought he’d see technology that radical in his lifetime, which is quite something given that he was only observing a hobbyist’s level of tinkering on that day. He watched the entire build process. For more than one hour he obsessed with watching the magic of the digital world build him something real: something he could touch and hold. Superlatives are not available to describe how amazed he was once it was done. It totally flipped his mind.

He said, ‘Can I keep it, Steve?’ without realising that I could easily print another one. When I saw him a few weeks later and asked about his 3D printed spanner he told me that he keeps it in the glove box of his car to show everyone he meets and tries to explain how it was made. He went on to say that more than half the time his friends refuse to believe it was printed. If any 3D printer manufacturers ever need another brand evangelist he’d make a terrific candidate!

It’s an interesting comparison to the reaction of my daughter. It’s really a great reminder of the best definition we have for technology, which is, ‘something that was invented after you were born’.

The stark difference in perspective between these generations is everything. The really significant element is that by the time my daughter is 14 years of age, she and every person she knows will have a 3D printer. We’ll all be 3D printing in our homes every day in 10 years’ time. And if you think that isn’t possible, let me remind you that every social media channel you use today didn’t exist just 10 or so years ago, and we all know how much that changed our economic landscape.

I believe 3D printing is going to have a bigger impact on society than the internet did. Yes, it’s part of the same ecosystem, but it raises even more seemingly unanswerable questions, such as:

• How can we stop people printing dangerous items such as guns? We can’t. But all technology can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Remember that little piece of technology known as a knife? It’s as old as homo sapiens and still has lethal potential, yet it lives in our kitchens. The real danger is people.
• How can we protect a manufacturing firm from the threat of 3D printing? We can’t. It can only be embraced as a way of making the old method redundant or less profitable for a company. Manufacturers need to be beneficiaries of the advances, not victims. Technology will come anyway because it’s recalcitrant.
• How can we make money when people can make their own version of anything? I’m not sure. But I am sure the answer will come to those who experiment in the ecosystem. I’m also sure the more human something is, the more money we will make as technology replaces itself again and again. There are already clear lessons from the music industry. The platform is greater than the product. We have to create places for people to create upon, unless, of course, the product is human, such as the 1980’s pop stars who have started singing for their supper again (as they tour the globe) because their royalty streams have dried up. Human performances can’t be replaced — yet.

Importantly, we need to think of 3D printing beyond widgets, tools and mechanical devices. We need to understand that a multi-material, one-process-to-print-everything is rapidly approaching.

It’s quite a human process to lament the missed and seemingly obvious opportunities in hindsight. I sometimes think to myself that I should have continued coding on my 16KB RAM-only TRS-80 home computer in the 1980s and that I should have implemented some of my internet startup ideas in 1995, when I first got on the web (I finally did it 10 years later). The era for 3D printing is now. It’s early days and there’s enough time for any company or entrepreneur to get involved. It’s the burgeoning period of possibility. 3D printing is going to impact every business. Observing its development is not enough; it requires participation.

The path for manufacturing is clearly leading to major disruption. The advantage manufacturing has is the lessons it can learn from what’s already happened to the media and where it’s heading.