I want it all, I want it all and I want it now!

Here's one I made earlier and yes the shape is damn near impossible.

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small parts”-- Henry Ford

I admit it, beneath the suave, urbane façade I present to the world, I'm a bit of a geek. Probably a lot of other things as well, but certainly a geek about certain things. I love culinary technology, I love sci-fi, I think games are what computers are made for and I when I want a gadget I want it now.
It depresses me to wait for the postman when I want something, it depresses me more to actually have to go to a shop for a gadget mind but the postal wait combines gives me time for my lazy angst and post purchase tension to combine to reduce the adrenaline oomph one gets when the gadget arrives. I don’t want time to rationalise my purchase, I want the pure thrill of widget satisfaction. Right here, right now!

In short, when I hit “pay” I want the damn thing here before I get time to get guilty and defensive about dropping £200 on a pair of ludicrous cufflinks (see posts passim and I'm joking, I haven’t bought them). I short I want my new toy to fall out an "n" dimensional drawer on the side of my device and give me my new precious thing right here. As you can imagine from that intro, 3D printing rather intrigues me. But not just for the instant satisfaction angle, because no matter how hard I wish for it, the technology still isn’t “badda-bing!” speedy and you can’t fit a hover-board/titanium coffee maker/jet pack pogo stick inside an iPad. I'm fascinated by it by what it will do to our economy, our culture and what it promises in terms of personal freedom.

You see, one of the foundations of the industrial revolution was a realisation that if you built one hundred things it worked out cheaper per unit than if you built just one. Simple economies of scale drive this but you lose some of the personal nature of the widget if you chose one of the generic ones. It becomes a trade off, cheaper but generic versus expensive but tailored to your exact needs. From this point of view, manufacturing split into two divergent fields, factory based mass production and nano-scale personal production. Since then vast bulk of manufacturing innovation since has been directed at the former, where the money was, rather than the latter which clung to its time hallowed techniques as a badge of honour and an excuse to charge vastly more per unit. This stable situation has remained for over two hundred years, the dead hand of the market overriding investment at the nano-scale end and focusing us more and more on efficiency, supply chain, cost per unit and rationalisations as to why you can’t get exactly what you want for a reasonable price.

However the barriers to innovation in manufacturing are evolving fast, driven by the exponential improvements in the design side tooling and the rather obvious ability to decompose any design into micrometer layers and express it in solid form, the economies of scale are becoming less relevant and wild new economic models may become accessible. Enter the 3D printer and the design economy. The modern 3D printer has been knocking around in various niche markets for over a decade, in that time the technology has erased the centuries old profession of architectural model maker and revolutionised the building of conceptual prototypes but had little impact on the public perception. Over the last eighteen months however, though advances in the basic technology, the concept has the potential to move out of those specialist markets into a much wider pattern of uptake and usage. The technology rapidly got cheaper, better and faster and now a whole range of higher value use cases can be addressed. If innovation and uptake continue, the technology now has the potential to move into mainstream adoption in a similar way to laser printing in the late 1980s.

The potential of 3D printing (or additive manufacturing to use the industry term) is, quite simply, vast. Prior to 2010, the outputs of 3D printers were only used as examples or models due to a lack of various mechanical properties, low performance of the printers and a cost per cubic centimetre of around £9.00. This has now changed, with the adoption of newer resin bases and improved printer designs using bubble-jet analogies as well as thermal laser curing, the mechanical properties of the printed output have improved by an order of magnitude. This improvement alongside a reduction in cost to under 50 pence per cubic centimetre and a four-fold improvement in both speed and quality, as expressed by pixel and layer resolution, have opened the field up to new customers and attracted the interest of mainstream vendors like HP.

The potential of the concept has taken the tech from the designer/architect arena out into new fields like construction, aerospace, medical science and high tech engineering and all have deployed systems. 3D printers can now craft designs in a range of materials as divergent as chocolate, concrete, collagen gels and even metals (using the new selective metal sintering toolsets from ExOne and 3D systems or the fused deposition modelling tooling from Stratasys, you can build models in stainless steel and magnesium), as well as the usual grades of resin. The range of use cases have expanded massively from the model and prototype into production of the final version of one-off, complex or expensive items which traditional manufacturing techniques would have rendered uneconomic or impossible. It’s even possible to print a house, a shirt or even a cake using this technology, though obviously not all from the same printer.

The potential importance to manufacturing organisations is clear. They will face challenges to their established ways of working and their proven investment models will come under threat. But there are new opportunities. Imagine what this technology, combined with new 3D scanning technologies, could bring to fields as divergent as medical prosthetics, roadside assistance, bespoke jewellery and opticians, to name just a few.

The importance to us as technologists may be less obvious, any potentially disruptive technology is prone to over-hyping and 3D printing is no exception. The concept also is prone to over optimistic uptake and various factors always get forgotten in the excitement and rush to deploy. 3D printing is at heart an information process. Even at the most optimistic and hype driven future, concerns like security, IPR, DRM and old fashioned process design will still have to be addressed. There will be issues around counterfeiting and prohibited designs to be examined and the movement of economies of scale from the manufacture of widgets to the manufacture of 3D printers and their consumables will have to be managed. At the core, the data and designs which drive the printers will require the same capabilities and skills we’ve honed in ECM and data management over the years as it will drive demand for business change skills.

3D Printing is still a long way from providing manufacturing capability to every household, even low-end printers are still over £10k and the consumables are expensive for occasional use but the future looks bright. Beyond the growing and vibrant open source 3D printing community, the market is currently worth in excess of £2B a year and growing at 33% per annum. It might not be that far off when you get your spouse’s birthday present from a DRM one-time design purchased from Amazon and printed at Tesco.

“The technology is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every field it touches” -- The Economist, in a February 10, 2011 leader

This article is very heavily adapted from one I wrote on the topic for the Capgemini BIM Architects newsletter in December 2011 and no, not all of the titles of my blog posts will be nicked from Queen lyrics. Just some of them.