Peter Troxler

Under the title ‘De revolutie in de maakindustrie’ I had the pleasure to open an afternoon packed with experts from that very revolution: Enrico Dini, italian architect and ‘the man who prints houses’, and Thomas Bossuyt who works as a sales engineer with LayerWise (the guys who printed that spring for positioning a telescope … and a first jaw implant).

Peter Troxler at ‘De revolutie in de maakindustrie’, RDM Campus, 21st February 2013. Photo: RDM Campus

I had the task to introduce that revolution in manufacturing which is indeed the 3rd Industrial Revolution, and the 3D-printer is its icon machine—as were the steam engine for the 1st and the conveyor belt for the 2nd industrial revolution.

My presentation was certainly a follow-up on earlier versions, such as the one I gave to an equally attentive audience at the MakLab in Glasgow the week before.

The discussion in Glasgow actually triggered me to add a few more illustrations of what the 3rd Industrial Revolution means.

I already used the the icon machine and the icon actor imagery—this time round I expanded the list to include social and urban developments, means of transport and aspects of the supply chain … probably more to come.

And here is the Glasgow presentation:

Today’s issue of ‘The Next Wave of Manufacturing’ is all about how hobbyist 3D printers are not living up to their promise … or is it?

Kiet Callies / Foter / CC BY-NC

It is not a surprise that currently available hobby 3D-printers are a bit ‘finicky’, as Jessica Leber describes the printing process. I could not agree more, having seen people finicking around with 3D printers — a lot. But then, let’s be honest: extrusion technology has been around for twenty years (the initial Fused Deposit Modelling patent is from 1992). DIY 3D printers became available only in 2007 … and five years on they are sometimes ‘acting finicky’, but there are over 15 different models available (Make magazine reviews only 15).

I don’t follow Jessica Leber’s assertion that the objects a (hobby) 3D printer can produce are ’fairly crude but quite small’ — 50 microns resolution is not crude, and 9 by 9 by 9 inch (22 by 22 by 22 cm) is not exactly small.

Jessica is right in pointing out that the materials still are a serious problem (not only in the hobbyist world). This is a general issue, not only a problem with thermoplastics, by the way.

The conclusion that ‘[t]he constraints of the at-home technology explain why the latest shift in consumer 3-D printing is toward centralized facilities not unlike photocopy shops’ is wrong in two ways. First, 3D printing shops like Shapeways, iMaterialize and local round-the-corner facilities (from 3D model in Zurich to Deezmaker in Pasadena, from 3D-U in Madrid to the figurine shop ‘omote 3D’ in Japan) have been around for as long as hobby 3D printers (Shapeways was founded in 2007—note the coïncidence to the first RepRap). Second, it is not exactly a surprise that new digital production technologies are popularized via ‘for rent’ or service facilities: copy shops, for rent digital audio studios and video cutting suites were the predecessors of home colour printers, Garageband, iMovie and the likes.

The big surprise in the article—or the big disappointment—is that Jessica Leber in no way questions where the digital models for printing would be coming from. THey are downloaded from the Internet, apparently. The article portrays home 3D printing as a consumption activity. I doubt it is. If Jessica Leber would have looked at Thingiverse (the one platform really devoted to a 3D printing community, not like Instructables that recently has been bought by a Autodesk, a (3D) modeling application developer) she would have noticed: 2112 things in household, 1616 things in art, 1476 things in hobby, 1097 things in toys, 644 things in fashion, 349 things in learning, …

I also would have expected that an article from MIT Technology Review would at least raise if not address the question how hobby 3D printing relates to ‘professional’ 3D printing—at least as a reference to what they published a few days ago (The Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers). Also that article only asked ‘can the maker movement really produce more than iPhone covers and jewelry’ and never asked ‘what can the real manufacturers learn from the makers’ or even ‘where could manufacturing go if it embraced making’ and ‘where could making go if it embraced manufacturing’.

Those are the relevant questions that lead to the future—not an MIT-instigated artificial war on the old-fashioned amateur vs. professional fronts. You’d better listen to Charles Leadebeater…

2012 has literally been the year of all sorts of New Industrial Revolution prophecies. Jeremy Rifkin has popularized his idea of the Third Industrial Revolution and the shift to lateral power at the ‘Mission Growth’ conference in Brussels. Chris Anderson has written about the maker movement and how this would would be the New Industrial Revolution. Peter Marsh has written about the fifth revolution in The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalization and the End of Mass Production. Even myself, I have become research professor on the revolution in manufacturing.

Hollem, Howard R / Foter / Public domain

MIT’s Technology Review has started a new series on the Next Wave of Manufacturing. I’ll be re-blogging this series here, trying to give it a European perspective.

The first two editions were on the topic of technology (3 Jan) and machines (4 Jan). The technology piece argues, that manufacturing needs to be close to development, because “[w]ithout understanding the details of production, you can’t really design the most competitive products”. Hear hear! one is tempted to say. Integrated product development and concurrent engineering come to mind, principles we’ve been taught as crucial to modern manufacturing back in the 1990s: designing manufacturing and product support processes together with the design of the product. They have been embraced by the space industry, and the automotive industry. The disappearing wage differences between China and Mexico and the risk natural disasters pose to global supply chains (the article cites the Japan earth quake and tsunami in 2011 as an example) only give more weight to this argument. So the question really is ‘[i]f labor is not the differentiating factor, you need to ask, “What can be?”‘. If the answer is manufacturing technology then there are two factors that limit an economy’s ability to actually make use of that technology: one is the cost of capital investment to buy the technology, and the other is the availability of technology-savvy personnel to operate and maintain it.

Consequently, economist Ricardo Hausmann argues, that the US would need to become a big producer of the machinery of the next wave of manufacturing and do something about the knowledge export: ‘the retention of the high-skilled people who come here to study and then don’t stay’. The really interesting information in this interview, however, is the link to the Atlas of Economic Complexity. In a nutshell, this atlas ‘measures’ the variety and interconnection of knowledge available in a country by studying imports and exports of products. Goods like ‘medical imaging devices or jet engines, embed large amounts of knowledge and are the results of very large networks of people and organizations’, they are produced by complex economies. Simpler goods like wood logs, coffee, cheese or tulips ‘embed much less knowledge, and the networks required to support these operations do not need to be as large’, the economies producing them are less complex. In the complexity ranking of the atlas, Japan, Germany and Switzerland have been the three most complex economies for decades; the US is currently (2008 data) number 13, the Netherlands number 23, Mexico is number 20, India is 51, Brazil is 52. Last on the list are Papua New Guinea, Congo, Angola, Sudan and Mauritania. I feel I’ll have to spend some time with this atlas…

Further topics of the series on the Next Wave of Manufacturing will cover:

• 3-D printing
• Energy requirements and resources
• Robots and mergers and acquisitions
• The political debate
• Q&A with Carl Bass (president and CEO of Autodesk)
• The military perspective
• Made in America
• New materials
• More of Made in America
• The impact of the Internet
• New disciplines and their manufacturing requirements