About a year and a half ago, we started talking to clients about the coming age of "desktop manufacturing," a phenomenon driven the convergence of new printing technologies (or actually, the application of existing printing technologies to the manufacturing of things rather than images and text), new materials, the advent of printable electronics, and a greater appreciation of design. (MIT's Neil Gershenfeld calls it personal fabrication, but the basic idea is the same.)
Two pieces that I saw recently struck me as data-points backing up the idea. The first is a Technology Review article about a eMachineShop.com:
It's the Internet Revolution meets the Industrial Revolution: a new program that lets people design 3-D objects like car parts and door knobs in metal or plastic then order them online.Programs for computer-aided design, or CAD, have been around for decades, but eMachineShop.com appears to be the first service that checks whether a design can be made, tells the customer how much it will cost. If the customer wants the item the design goes to a "real world" machine shop for manufacturing.
Second, Slate's Clive Thompson writesabout "[h]ow industrial design became a weekend hobby:"
Do-it-yourself design will get really interesting when inventors are able to sketch something out and then hold the thing in their hands within a matter of minutes. Today, rapid-prototyping technology—that is, 3-D printers that can instantly crank out a physical copy of anything you design on a computer—is available only to elite design firms. It'll get cheaper within years. Meanwhile, "original design manufacturing" companies overseas are becoming expert at quickly and cheaply cranking out MP3 players and laptops to specs set by brand-name firms like Virgin or Sony. Put those trends together, and it's easy to envision an offshore service that will take my personal design for a music player and crank out 10 copies. Presto: the Clive brand MP3 player! Think of it as vanity electronics—casemodding on a superfast, global scale.
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