So far I have looked at ways in which rapid manufacturing technologies might become available to consumers, and the reasons why product design for rapid manufacturing is easier than for mass manufacturing. In the final part of this extended post I want to address the only other remaining hurdle to consumers designing and manufacturing their own products: the tools they will use to design with.

Consumer co-design, sometimes called co-creation, is a topic that’s been written about at length by design researchers. At it’s purest it involves the end user, or typical representatives of end users, entering the design process and creating products or services as part of a design team. In practice though, co-design is often little more than an enhanced customer research exercise. End users might be asked about their needs and desires, encouraged to offer suggestions, and even invited to critique proposed solutions. But there is no doubt it is the designers who are expert, and who make the final decision.

As a designer myself, I confess I find it difficult to break free of this mindset - surely my training and experience mean I am able to understand what a market of consumers will want better than an individual consumer themself might? But the point is, what I think will end up being irrelevant if consumers are able to design their own products. Why should a consumer care that I think their product is crass or crude, if it’s exactly what they want, and they’ve made it? At the moment though, I have one trick up my sleeve - I can use CAD, to design a product and to communicate that design to the means of production, in a way that no non-designer can. All the time designers and design engineers can monopolise the expertise needed to create CAD data, consumer created products will not happen.

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If all goes to plan it should be about five weeks until the frame and forks are ready, which is why I set today as the deadline by which I had to decide what colour the frame will be painted. Because I’ve gone for a lugless construction there’s no possibility of accent colours, so this should have been a relatively easy decision. On the other hand it’s a bike that I hope will last me a long time, and since this is a bespoke item it’s one which I want to reflect my personality to some extent, certainly more than an off-the-shelf model.

Although it might seem a bit backwards, one of the things driving my decision was that I’d already ordered a set of Velocity Deep V rims in orange. I’d seen these rims on a Surly Steamroller in NYC Velo last year, and my first thoughts were to copy the colour scheme but with orange rims instead of red.

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In the previous post I outlined some of the current developments in rapid manufacturing, and what lessons could be learned from the consumer adoption of technologies in the past. Access to a technology is only part of the picture though; if these technologies are to be used by consumers it requires that non-experts are able to design products and supply data to rapid manufacturing machines in a form that the machines understand. So in this part I will look at why the design rules which apply to rapid manufacturing makes it easier to design products.

One of the common features of mass manufacturing processes is that the means of production require substantial initial investment, however once in place the cost of manufacturing a single part or product (relative to the initial investment) is negligible. It is therefore a basic principle of mass manufacturing that as the number of parts produced increases, the cost of production of each individual part decreases. This inevitably leads to uniformity, since even small design changes require significant reinvestment in tooling. To get a return on the investment in the tooling, the number of parts produced must typically be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. This makes manufacturing one-off or batch volume products virtually impossible without reverting to craft-like technologies.

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One of the basic assumptions behind my research is the belief that as rapid manufacturing technologies become cheaper and more available, consumers will design and make their own products. And most importantly, that this will happen whether designers, companies and brands sanction the activity or not. This is obviously a fairly sweeping statement, and so the next few posts will present my arguments as to why I believe this to be the case.

In 1977 Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), said in a speech to the World Future Society that he saw

“no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”

Olsen has since insisted that his prediction should be seen in the context of what was widely understood at the time by the term ‘computer’ - the mainframe and ‘mini’ computers with proprietary operating systems of the type which DEC were manufacturing. Nonetheless it’s a good illustration of the consequences of failing to recognise the consumer’s changing relationship to technology: Olsen was replaced as CEO in 1992 and DEC was bought by Compaq in 1998.

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‘Fab’ by Neil Gershenfeld, subtitled ‘The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication’ has been on my ‘must read’ list ever since I first started thinking about my PhD topic. It seemed to be promising to address a lot of the issues I’m interested in regarding what will happen when consumers gain control of the means of production. As such it was something of a disappointment, concentrating mainly on signs of what is happening now, rather than in-depth implications for the future. I think it’s fair to say that ‘Fab’ was written for the ‘average’ reader rather than anyone working in the area of rapid manufacturing or fabbing. But there is still a lot to commend the book, and no doubt that it’s required reading from one of the earliest pioneers in the field.

Gershenfeld begins by describing a class he runs at MIT entitled “How to make (almost) anything,” which introduces students to CNC machines and rapid prototyping technologies. The enthusiasm with which he describes some of the students’ creations: a backpack which lets the wearer scream into it, a bike which can be built from water-jet cut polycarbonate, or a PC input device for parrots, makes clear the passion he has for the subject. It’s also clear that Gershenfeld sees himself as something of a revolutionary, freeing machines from the ownership of corporations and putting them in the hands of consumers, at the same time opening up opportunities for creativity which do not interest profit driven industries. But this passion also causes him to make assumptions about consumers’ motivations which are questionable and far from proven.

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