You can download your music, maps, television programmes, films, books and newspapers. But if you need to buy a toy online for your nephew’s birthday, the best you can do is order it and wait for the postman to schlep it up the drive and stuff it through your letterbox. It’s not that different to the model my Nan used when ordering clothes from the Marshall Ward catalogue in the 1980s. Ok, so the catalogue is on a screen now and includes comments from other shoppers. But all the rest of the process is pretty much the same.
At the V&A a few weeks ago, I saw some devices that could change all that: 3D printers. They work by layering materials to create three dimensional objects. The demonstrations are typically small plastic models, but designers are becoming bolder. According to The Register, an 83-year-old woman has been fitted with an artificial jaw created using a 3D printer, which shows a high level of confidence in the precision and quality of the finished product. Although not many people are familiar with the concept of 3D printing, it has been described as “an industrial revolution in the digital age”, and Makerbot Industries is now taking preorders for a $1700 home printer.
In the future, we might find we can download toys, jewellery, ornaments, crockery and cutlery as easily as music, with a 3D printer in our home being used to deliver the goods. This presents some interesting challenges and opportunities for the economy as a whole. The first challenge is that manufacturers will face the same intellectual property battles that musicians and film makers have. When designs can be easily replicated, they will be, and it will become harder for the creators of those designs to protect their investment and build a viable business around it. The retail and manufacturing sectors would also suffer if products could be sold directly to customers at home without their intervention.
There are opportunities too, though: new outlets will emerge for marketing designs you can print in 3D at home; independent designers could access the same online distribution platform as major companies; lower product development costs might make it viable for companies to release a much broader range of products than today’s market can support; and some designs could be open-sourced, so that they can be freely shared.
Which 3D designs would you most like to be able to download and print at home?
image courtesy of Creative Tools licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).
Intel’s leading anthropologist Genevieve Bell (possibly one of the most interesting people I’ve ever spoken to), cites 3D printing as an example of an emerging consumer trend – etsyification. It basically means that people are getting into digital creativity, in response to years of passively consuming content (think TVs, radios, smartphones and iPads). Etsy is a hugely popular US e-commerce site where people are buying and selling handmade or vintage items.
Thanks for your comment. People have always been creative, but I think the internet gives people new opportunities to share their creativity, as we see with all the ebooks and music albums online. 3D printers will add an interesting new outlet for designers, and the opportunity to see designs become products might well inspire more people to give it a go.