In their annual Hype Cycle report technology research firm Gartner has moved 3D printing up a notch from last year. It is now entering the phase of what they call the peak of inflated expectations.

Gartner defines this phase as:

Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.

Based on the news articles about 3D printing the last couple of months I tend to agree. The media are writing about 3D printing if it revolutionize manufacturing today, but this is simply not true. It will revolutionize manufacturing in the next decade or so. There are still many hurdles to overcome like machine and production reliability, speed, cost and diversity.

Please see the Hype Cycle diagram below to see how Gartner sees the technology landscape at this moment.

The Hype Cycle reports on up and coming technologies today and puts them in 5 phases based on their maturity and visibility. The diagram below shows the relationship between maturity and visibility for each of the 5 phases. For more information see the Hype Cycle page at Gartner.

Fortunately, a lot of technologies go through this Hype Cycle and will become mainstream. Technologies in the peak of inflated expectations phase are expected to become mainstream in 5–10 years. Of course, according to Gartner.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how 3D printing in space would make sense, and today NASA published a Request For Information (RFI) on in-space additive manufacturing (ISAM) subsystems. Even though, it is only a RFI it is great news that NASA is showing real interest in 3D printing technology.

The purpose of the RFI is described as:

[…] to obtain information to support the formulation of future technology development projects to develop in-space manufacturing capabilities that could exist as stand-alone, robotic tended systems, smaller systems that can be integrated with human tended vehicles, and surface manufacturing systems that can utilize in-situ resources. Advanced system concepts that include integration/fabrication of electrical devices are also sought. NASA is soliciting industry’s comments and areas for the government to consider relative to the ISAM project concept.

In the RFI, they talk about in-space manufacturing of parts and replacement parts. They specifically mention the idea to recycle (“re-purpose in NASA speak”) existing materials like cargo and food packaging.

I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction. It means that 3D printing is on the radar of NASA. As I said in my earlier post, I can only imagine what will happen in this industry, when big time research players like DARPA and NASA will start pouring money into this industry.

For more information see the NASA Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS).

In an earlier post, I wrote about The Design Dilemma, and how hard 3D design software is to learn and use. Fortunately, there is innovation happening in this area, and it is not coming from the existing industry players like Autodesk and Solidworks. These are small innovative companies, who each take an innovative approach to 3D design.

I divide them in two categories; software innovation and input innovation. I start with two companies who innovate on the software side. These are:

• 3DTin — online 3D design software using voxels or cubes. It uses WebGL to deliver impressive 3D performance for an online design software application. As an extra bonus, it lets you easily create 3D printable objects out of the box. I wrote about them in my post on 3D on the web and WebGL.
• Tinkercad — same as 3DTin but even more focused on 3D printing.

On the input side, innovation can be found in two areas. One is haptic interfaces. Haptic are freeform 3D input devices, which provide tactile feedback to the user when hitting something. The user can draw by holding a stick, which they can move in all directions. Here is a nice overview on available haptic devices on the market. A special mention for the Falcon from Novint. It only costs $200, which makes it very affordable.

The other area is 3D Motion Capture. This technology has been developed to track and record motions of people. The recorded motions can be used as input for game characters or figures in digital animation movies. But this technology can also be used to draw your 3D model as proven by Front Design, about who I wrote in my post 3D design your furniture in thin air. But there is also a simple proof of concept version available on Instructables using a computer, LED lamp and 2 webcams.

There is one company, who does not make 3D software, but did a great job on making easy to use 3D software, and that is surprisingly — or not — Lego. The Lego editor is a brilliant piece of software both from a functional perspective, as from a marketing perspective. Please take a look for yourself. Though they should make an online version.

I want to end this post with a great video showing Farah Bandookwala using a haptic interface to create her 3D designs:

One of the stumbling blocks to let anybody create in 3D, is the current state of 3D design software. They are hard to use and have a steep learning curves. That is where we are today. There are promising ideas and developments in this area. I am confident that this problem will be solved over time. In my next post I will write about these ideas.

Today, I want to show you a video of one of the more inspirational ideas out there. It is called Sketch Your Own Furniture by FRONT — a Swedish design studio made up of four designers Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren, and Katya Savstrom.

Yesterday, I wrote about Sketch Your Furniture by Front. A concept demo for an innovative 3D design user interface. One of the challenges for 3D printing and co-creation is, that 3D design software is hard to use. They have a steep learning curve and it is certainly not easy to create something.

It takes patience and determination to get these software packages under control, and make something meaningful. To be honest, people are not really interested in learning this kind of software. Even if they do, I do not think they will spend a few hours on designing a spare part of a gift. Even if we assume they would like to design themselves most people are not designers.

In short, you could summarize:

• people do not want to spend the effort to design
• people do not want to learn to design
• people cannot design

I call this the design dilemma of Co-Creation and 3D Printing.

So what are the solutions?

Fortunately there are solutions. I see the following developments in these area to overcome the design dilemma:

• Product Configurators — the user gets a fixed set of choices, and based on their answers a design is created. For example DriveWorks Pro.
• Templated Design — the user modifies a template design using a fixed set of modifiers (stamping, scaling, text, etc.). Examples are the Shapeways Light Poem or Kelecrea for Android.
• Co-design — a user works together with a designer to create their design. For example Grabcad offers this service.

These solutions bring together users and designers, and use software to ease and scale the design process — either through a marketplace or design creation automation.

In an earlier post, I wrote about a design meta language. It is one of the enablers to further improve software automation options. The design dilemma is a solvable solution, and this very important reason for the growth of 3D printing.

Like any new disrupting technology 3D printing — when it matures — has great impact on society. Mass production brought us affordable high quality goods, mass-media brought us high quality entertainment, and up-to-date information and the internet is changing the way we work and live.

As I am writing this post, I realize that this is my thinking today, which has evolved over the last couple of years, and will further evolve over time. I merely want to give structure and body to my thoughts and ideas today. I am sure, I am going to revisit this topic in a 6–12 months from now.

So how will affect 3D printing our daily lives?

To give this question context, let’s assume that 3D printing as a technology keeps on evolving — both in capabilities and cost. 3D printers become local, and you have either one in your home, or you can find one around the corner. I am going way forward in the future here.

The first and foremost effect, I think, is that consumers can become creators again. They are able to manipulate the final product or create one from scratch. There are several routes to take here: one route is that the customer is involved in the product creation process through coöperation with designers or companies. This is called co-creation or mass-customization. Another route is that they become makers themselves, and start creating without the help of others. Software evolves too and becomes more intuitive, and help the user to make useful and meaningful products.
The effect of this change in behavior is that the perception of a product is going to fundamentally change. The product becomes to be an extension of your personality, and defines who you are in a much more profound way than today. A product becomes more valuable and more personal.
The rise of personal fabrication services is already showing that the long tail of products becomes longer — much longer. It enables to create and make niche products available which would never existed before.
In essence, it will change how we consume and perceive products.

Another effect of 3D printing is that the manufacturing industry will change. Large companies, like Apple, totally depend on design, mass-production, mass-distribution and branding to make and sell their products. Take out their added value on production and distribution, and you are left with design and branding. A lot of companies need to adapt, and will experience massive changes in how they operate and are organized. With any disruptive technology, there will be winners, losers and newcomers. For sure, the landscape of products will change, and industries will have to change. People will lose their jobs, and new jobs are created.
Designers can directly deal with customers, and do not need the support of large corporations to produce and distribute their goods. Retail faces yet another challenge, after internet e-commerce companies have taken over part of their role already. One of their key offerings today is instant satisfaction, and 3D printing will take that away as well. What is left is personal service, advice and consultancy.

I expect that both effects of 3D printing or digital manufacturing will have a profound impact on our society. I can think of more, but these are more secondary effects.
The changes will come slow similar to how the internet is affecting our lives today. I think that we are only midway to see and experience the effects of the internet on our lives. 3D printing is still in its infancy. There is so much more to come.

Traditionally to produce your product you had to go via the mass production route. With 3D printing — and digital manufacturing at large — you have a second affordable option available. Of course it depends on the product itself, the components it consists of and the expected volumes which production method makes sense.

3D printing makes sense for one-off and small series production. That is the obvious answer. The more elaborate answer is that it depends on the actual volume of the product and its parts. Redeye (division of Stratasys) made some calculations and put them on the web. They came to series of between 100 and 250 parts. It depends on the material and complexity of the part but in essence when volumes go up mass production methods like injection molding start to make sense. I put in chart to make it more tangible.

The setup costs of mass production methods make it prohibitive for small series production. If you take injection molding the tooling cost start $10.000 and up. The setup costs for 3D printing are virtually zero. That makes the difference.

Other considerations are material, part complexity and source location. 3D printing has a limited set of materials and may or may not suit the requirements for your parts. The complexity of the part is also important. More complex parts require more tooling costs while with 3D printing the cost impact of part complexity is low. 3D printing even allows to make parts which you cannot make using mass production methods. But that is something for another blog post. The last consideration is source location. 3D printing is available around the corner in most Western countries and thus be sources locally effectively saving on shipping costs and lead time. Mass production typically takes place in East Asia because of lower costs.

In small part series 3D printing can be a viable option. I expect prices of 3D printing to go down significantly in the next 5–10 years effectively raising the bar for traditional production methods. Maybe 3D printing will even replace traditional manufacturing methods all together.

3D printing makes it possible to produce unique one-off designs for reasonable costs. This enables designers to implement design improvements based on customer-feedback. It is one of the aspects of co-creation where consumers and designers work together on a design.
Using iterative design a design can stay relevant for longer times — theoretically even forever. Technological capabilities are constantly improving and products can take advantage of that by using the new capabilities of the design. Also the expectations on what is fashionable and what is not changes over time. And last user experience can be used as input to improve function. Parts can break due to wear and tear.

Traditionally the concept of iterative design is employed within product design teams. You see it a lot in software development — especially in agile development environments. Developers or designers quickly deliver a prototype which is shared with the whole team and sometimes customers. They provide feedback which is used an input for the next iteration cycle. Also the open source software development mantra “release early, release often” is trying to achieve the same thing.

New technologies like the internet but also 3D printing make it possible to bring the product development cycle into the open and allows for faster feedback cycles. Especially on-demand production and zero stock policies make it possible to adapt a product design immediately.

There is a game often used to in team training session which is called the Marshmallow Challenge. Each team gets 1m / 3ft tape, 1m / 3ft string, 20 sticks of spaghetti and a marshmallow. The objective is to build the highest stable freestanding structure with the marshmallow on top. It is interesting that children are much better at this than adults. Children start building immediately and start over when they fail. Effectively they are using iterative design to come quickly to the best solution.

For several years now I am following Mark Ganter from the University of Washington. He works in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Together with Duane Storti he runs the Solheim Additive Manufacturing Laboratory.

In their laboratory they work on new material recipes for 3D printing. They publish their findings for everyone to see and use on a blog called Open3DP. A lot of 3D printing companies keep their material a trade secret — with exception when they use really common materials like ABS or Nylon. To me Open3DP is a fresh of breath air.

They have come up with some interesting new materials like:

• Wood
• Rice Flour
• Salt
• Plaster

Wood Glazed plaster

I love what Mark and his team are doing and I am always keen on hearing from Mark what he has been up to.

In my post Future of 3D Printing — part 3 I wrote about Digital Materials and Voxels. In this post I want to show you an excellent movie rendering of how both can be combined to make a machine. They call the machine the rapid assembler.