Last week was CES, the Consumer and Electronics Show held annually in Las Vegas. Amid the usual breathless fawning over TV’s that were a bit bigger (and everything else that was a bit smaller) than the same time last year, newspapers and tech blogs were falling over themselves to show the Cube, “the first 3D printer designed for your home”. Sorry, that should be the Cube™, because 3D Systems have evidently come up with such a great name, they want to make sure everyone else knows they’ve trademarked it.

The Cubify™ Cube™ © 3D Systems®

Journalists and bloggers who are more used to writing about the latest cellphone have at least some excuse for merely repeating the claims of the Cubify press release without really understanding what they’re writing. Journalists and bloggers who write about 3D printing have no excuses. But what amazed me, when reading about the launch of the Cube (and Cubify, the ecosystem which surrounds it), was how accepting and uncritical the reports were (Fabaloo was a notable exception, and at least asked some questions, even if the answers weren’t available). It’s like no-one ever heard of Shapeways, or Makerbot, or iMaterialise or Fab@Home, or any of the other machines and systems which have preceded the Cube. So, here’s a rather more critical report on 3D Systems jump into the consumer market.

The Cubify website and service is still in beta, so it’s difficult to judge some of the elements. Still, most of last week’s press concentrated on three areas: the printer, the prints it produces, and the community who will start using the service, so I’ll do the same.

The Printer

One of the things that really surprised me about the Cube launch was how no-one picked up on its ‘similarity’ to the Up! printer.

The Cube © 3D Systems

The totally unrelated Up! © Delta Micro Factory Corporation

No-one except Up! printer users that is, who were wondering at 3D Systems’ “blatant copying.” I appreciate irony, and the fact that a Chinese company is being ripped off by an American one does strike me as kind of funny. But what’s sad is that a machine which is supposedly the first 3D printer for your home is so boring, and so poorly considered. I don’t think anyone would claim the Up! printer is a thing of beauty – it’s brazenly utilitarian and clearly looks more suited to a garage or workshop than a home. But at least it’s honest. Whereas the Cube is basically an Up! printer, shrink wrapped in plastic with a few fillets applied, masquerading as a consumer product. It doesn’t try to reconsider what a 3D printer could look like, how it might relate to and be perceived by its users (unlike the Origo, for example); and it certainly doesn’t consider the environment it’s supposedly designed for. Is the Cube meant to go in the bedroom, the kitchen, the study, the bathroom? From it’s design, I’ve no idea.

© Origo

In other words, the Cube doesn’t push the boundaries in any sense. Except one, which is that the Cube is the only low cost 3D printer which uses cartridges instead of a spool of material. Admittedly it makes the product look less like a kit of parts, though the claim that this makes the material easy to load might be questionable – as far as I can tell the material still needs to be threaded to the print head nozzle. What it does offer, of course, is the possibility to restrict the use of third party material suppliers, in much the same way that manufacturers of consumer ink-jet printers do. This is standard practice in the world of expensive machines that 3D Systems comes from, and it may explain how they’re able to sell the Cube at $1299, a relatively low price compared to rival machines. At the moment Cubify is offering a single cartridge at $49.99; there’s no indication of how much material a cartridge holds, but it looks much thinner than a standard 1kg spool, which typically retails for about the same price. If that is Cubify’s business model, it will be interesting to see the extent to which it’s accepted, especially by the potential market who are yet to purchase a 3D printer.

It’s that potential market which also makes the final point about the design of the printer interesting. Without exception, I’d suggest, all machines  currently on the market that might be considered rivals to the Cube are what can be described as ‘hobbyist’. Some, such as the Rep Rap incarnations, are open source, others are not, but they all assume that the person using the machine will have the interest (and skill) to tweak and modify the machine’s performance, either through software or hardware (and typically both). Even the Up! printer, which most people claim is the closest anyone’s got to an ‘it just works’ device, has discussions on its message boards about calibration, nozzle temperature and hacking the speed of the onboard fan. Amongst the general population who actually know what 3D printing is, I’m sure there are some who would like to get involved, but are put off by the expertise needed to get a machine up and running. A true ‘plug-and-play’ 3D printer would likely attract a lot of customers, but the question is whether the machine will live up to that reality. If it doesn’t, I suspect that 3D Systems’ will have a lot of disgruntled users.

The Prints

Cube sample prints © 3D Systems

Cubify claims a Z-axis layer thickness of 125 microns (0.125mm), which if achievable is very good. Most printers in the same market space achieve somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3mm. But is it realistic? The press release image above is one that I’ve seen on a lot of different websites, and the printed objects don’t look bad, even if (or maybe because) they are out of focus. But here’s one that got much less publicity:

Cube sample print © 3D Systems

I think it was also a press release image, though I can’t find it on the Cubify site now. And to be honest that’s not surprising, because if that’s the quality that the Cube can achieve, it’s very disappointing. It’s certainly not up to the standard that can be achieved with other machines, and what’s more, because the Cube is a closed system, no-one will have the options to improve the print that they might have with a rival printer. Here’s another image, showing the Cube in action at CES, and it’s even less impressive.

Cube sample being printed at CES © The Verge. Click for larger image

I’m not sure why these prints are so bad, given the claim of a Z-axis resolution of around double what the Cube’s rivals can achieve. Maybe the XY-axis resolution is much poorer (it’s not given in the specification). Maybe the printers themselves should still be considered as beta releases, and when they’re launched we’ll see much better results. What’s clear is that the specs won’t count for much if the machines can’t deliver.

There were a number of samples on show at CES which were much better quality though. Here’s one, a shoe from Freedom of Creation:

Not a Cube sample © The Verge. Click for larger image

The reason it’s much better quality, of course, is that it wasn’t made on a Cube printer. Not being at CES, I have no idea how these products were being talked about. But I’ve seen them on a number of websites where there’s no indication that they were made by an entirely different machine and process. This image is from The Verge, which shows it alongside prints which did come from the Cube, under the headline “Cubify 3D printers and product sample images.” And here’s a CNET interview with Rajeev Kulkarni of 3D Systems, who does a very poor job of explaining the difference between the product samples he’s showing.

To be clear, I’m not trying to suggest that this was a deliberate ploy by 3D Systems. I’m certain it was much more to do with a poorly conceived and naively executed communications strategy. But this is one of the big hurdles that 3D Systems is going to have to overcome. The company is used to dealing business-to-business, with one-to-one interactions between sales staff and purchasers, many of whom have ongoing relationships. Generally the people buying the machines won’t be spending their own money, and may not even be the ones who actually use the machines. Dealing business-to-consumer is altogether different. Right now I don’t see much indication that 3D Systems fully grasp that.

The Community

I’ve been involved with a number of companies who’ve moved from a focus on technology to a focus on consumers; some of them have done it well, and some have done it shockingly badly. The very worst have seemingly no perspective about how they are perceived, and come across embarrassingly like your dad trying to talk like a teenager to impress your sister’s girlfriends. Does anyone other than 3D Systems think that LL Cool J is cool any more?

It’s hard enough when all you’re trying to do is make your product appeal to an audience you’ve never engaged with before. It’s even harder when you feel the need to build a ‘community’ around a name that no-one’s ever heard of. 3D Systems have jumped right in, with not entirely convincing results.

“Absolutely loved sharing my ideas with the Cubify™ community and making my dream of creating my own toy come true! Cubify™ rocks!”

says Max Freeman, who apparently uses TM symbols in every day speech. Over on the ‘Community’ page, a wall of mostly blank faces is punctuated by Deelip Menezes, who tells us

“I love my woman, my wine and my work, not necessarily in that order.”

Wow, you’re so, like, awesome Deelip. What you don’t tell us though, is that you’re actually a Cubify employee. Oh, and you’ve trademarked your name.

The Cubify Wall © 3D Systems. Click for larger image

My point here isn’t just to take the piss. It’s to show how easy it is to ridicule attempts to engineer ‘community’, especially when they’re bogus. And I’m not the only one to spot it, in fact my attention was drawn by this post on Core77, where the author, talking about the Cubify community wall wonders about being

“met with a pointless wall of headshots of different users, and many of them stock silhouettes to boot. Am I meant to click on people’s faces that I like in order to see what they’ve made?”

It just feels so false, so like a big company trying to get in on something that’s still relatively unknown, but without any real understanding of what that ‘something’ is.

The Core77 post also picks up on the Cubify Store, and it’s here that the ‘community’ idea really starts to be stretched thin. On Core77 the author compares the store to Thingiverse, where members upload designs and share them for free. That’s not to say that an open source approach is the only valid one, Shapeways and Ponoko have vibrant communities of users, some of whom sell their designs and some who make them freely available. But on Cubify, the only option is to sell your work, either that, or don’t share it at all. And it’s not only model files for 3D prints, there’s even a section where you can buy pictures of models of 3D prints. It all seems so desperate, so money-grabbing, and so predictable. I can even picture the meeting in some bland, reservable-on-Outlook meeting room where people got ‘energised’ as they ‘thought outside the box’ on ways to ‘monetize the offering’.

But maybe none of this matters, maybe the experience of using Cubify to upload and buy a model is so great that it blows all the already existing systems away. Surely that was a possibility? And so I signed up to try things out: here’s the page I was presented with when trying to upload a part:

Cubify model upload © 3D Systems. Click for larger image

There’s a few mandatory sections to fill: the name, the category of product, the units of measurement etc. Another compulsory section is the price, but since I didn’t want to offer my model for sale I put in $0.00. But this isn’t allowed, the minimum price I can sell my model which I don’t want to sell is $4.99. Even deselecting the ‘Sellable’ checkbox and choosing ‘Private’ as the model’s status doesn’t change this. There’s more compulsory sections: a short description, a long description (my long description of a product I don’t want anyone else to see or buy was shorter than the short description, but apparently that’s okay), and tags. Finally, I got to choose the model file I wanted to submit, and hit send. But there’s a problem – it’s also compulsory that I provide an image (of a model I don’t want anyone else to see or buy). No automated image generation, let alone an automated interactive model, like you’d see on Shapeways or Google 3D Warehouse. And so at that point I gave up. In any case, from the models on show in the gallery at the moment it seems the only material options are ‘strong white plastic’ and ‘glossy smooth plastic’. No, I don’t know whether that’s ABS or nylon or PMMA, it’s all the same isn’t it?

Conclusion

3D Systems aren’t Apple, that’s obvious. In truth, they’re not even LG. To the vast majority of people outside the additive manufacturing industry, 3D Systems are totally unknown. On the one hand that’s a bad thing, but on the other it’s an incredible opportunity. It means that 3D Systems had the chance to create a brand that could be absolutely anything they wanted, in tone, in appearance, in its offering and promise. Judging by the Cubify website, what they wanted was David Brent.

Cubify pre-launch teaser © 3D Systems. Click for larger image

The way to launch a product successfully isn’t difficult to understand, though obviously it can be difficult to achieve. There’s three stages: build-up, launch and sale, and three tasks: build the hype, over-deliver on the hype, sell. Apple are masters at this cycle by building excitement without revealing what the excitement is about, then showing something that surprises everyone, and then by making it available to buy the next day. If you look at some of the pre-launch PR that 3D Systems were putting about before CES you’ll see that’s what they were trying to do. But it failed, for easy to understand reasons. Everyone knew what 3D Systems were going to be showing at CES – they’d already shown pictures of the Cube and told people what it was. There was no spectacular wow that nobody was expecting. There wasn’t even an award, despite concerted efforts to get people to vote for a product they’d never used, as if winning somehow proved something. Although actually a 3D Printer did win an award – the Makerbot Replicator took ‘Best Emerging Tech’, though you wouldn’t know it from the Cubify blog, which seems to be claiming it won four awards including ‘Best of Show’. [Edit: the blog entry has changed to read "4 Awards and/or “Best of the Show”] And what if you actually want to buy a Cube printer? Cubify will be “taking orders soon”. I sense a deadline that was decided a long time ago, and a project that failed to deliver.

Makerbot Replicator two-colour printer, which did win an award at CES © Makerbot.
Click for larger image

If you’ve looked at the Cubify website you might have noticed one area that I haven’t touched on, which is the Cubify API. This is the part of the 3D Systems launch strategy which really confuses me, because in there are the ideas that might really be different, that might really change things. As far as I can tell, the concept is to offer a platform where developers can create apps which allow consumers to modify or create 3D models. A bit like the i.materialise Creation Corner, but on a much bigger and more open scale. Instead of just being able to upload models, there would be the option to upload modelling tools, and to earn revenue every time someone used one. For the consumer, rather than just choosing a model, you’d choose a model and then choose from a menu of apps giving you different ways to customise it. But where is the fanfare around this idea? Most of the API page isn’t even ready, there are no apps available in the store, and the only example isn’t on the API page, but the ‘Creative Partners’ page. It’s hardly surprising that almost no-one is talking about this aspect of Cubify.

And so, finally, what about all those TM signs? You might have noticed in this post that they annoy me, and I’ll admit it. If you go to the Cubify home page you’ll see 10 of them, including one claim, apparently, to have trademarked ’3D’ (though the USPTO have no record of it). I’ve no idea how many there are across the whole site. What annoys me is it’s so corporate, so desperate to grab IPR, whilst at the same time trying to appear cutting edge, as if ‘Cube’ is a word that the rest of us will all be wanting to copy. On the one hand trying to build a ‘community’ and on the other saying “don’t touch our property”. The result is it comes across as not having a clue. There’s no requirement to display a TM sign for the mark to be protected, so why are they there? I really pity the industrial designer who has to design the next model of printer. Because I know, without a doubt, somewhere in the brief there’ll be a line that says something like “our community love the Cube™”, and no hope of doing anything that isn’t.

‘Next Stages in Automated Craft: The Integration of Rapid Manufacturing Technologies into Craft and DIY Applications’ is the title of a paper I co-wrote with Ben Hughes following his invitation to me to teach on a module of the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins. It was presented at the IDSA’s 2010 conference titled DIY Design: Threat or Opportunity. You can download the full paper by following the link on the right to my Papers and Presentations. This post draws quite a lot from that paper, and follows on from my previous post looking at digital craftsmanship.

Defining ‘Craft’ is no easy task, a fact demonstrated by the Crafts Council’s [pdf] listing of not one but six different interpretations. In The Persistence of Craft Paul Greenhalgh warns that “craft has changed its meaning fundamentally at least three times in the last two centuries, and it means fundamentally different things from nation to nation even in the Western world.” Given the difficulty of arriving at an agreed upon definition, it is perhaps more fruitful to examine some of the underlying characteristics of ‘Craft’. In order to understand these characteristics, and to determine whether their differences to those of ‘Design’ remain relevant to today’s practitioners, it’s necessary to look at the historical basis of the divide between the two disciplines.

Pre-industrialisation, craft was simply the way in which goods were manufactured. Throughout Europe the Guilds operated a ‘closed shop’ system wherein master craftsmen would pass on knowledge to their journeymen and apprentices, carefully guarding trade secrets and protecting their members’ interests. The first wave of industrialisation, which saw the wane of much of the power of the guilds, involved attempts to use machines to make what had previously been crafted; thus craft and industry were two approaches to the same end. Josiah Wedgewood, one of the best known of the early industrialists and himself a master craftsman, pioneered the use of moulds rather than potters’ wheels and transfer printing rather than handpainting, as well as being involved in the development of bone china.The purpose of such innovations however, was to equal the best that craft could produce, such as the Chinese porcelain which Britain’s expanding middle class increasingly demanded as a sign of its good taste.

Wegdwood bone china teapot dated 1812 © Wedgwood Museum

It was not until the second stage of industrialisation – the standardisation coupled with increased automation characterised by the ‘American System’ of manufacture – that the relationship between craft-made and industrially produced goods was to fundamentally change. This was the point at which the quality of machine-made goods not only equalled, but began to surpass, that of craft-made products. As John Walker notes in Design History and the History of Design, this was the point at which design began to be seen as a distinct discipline:

“It was the gradual introduction of more intensive labour divisions, power-driven machinery, assembly lines, and growing automation which brought about the separation of craft and design and which prompted the well-known debates about the fate of art and craft in the age of mechanical production and reproduction.”

The well known debates which Walker writes about were first begun by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s views on craft products versus industrial products were informed by his social theories, on “an elevated view of labor, which he felt was fundamentally undermined by mechanization, the division of labor, and a capitalist system that increasingly alienated workers from the products of their efforts.” In A History of Modern Design, David Raizman writes that for Ruskin, the division of labour was a major cause of unhappiness amongst the working class, who were forced to undertake monotonous work without ever seeing the end product of their efforts. “In other words, Ruskin advocated no particular style or set of rules for designers to follow other than that the work be a unique creation reflecting the skill, pride and effort of the craftsman.”

This concept of craft – the unique product of the maker’s unadulterated skill, rather than the designer’s multiply-replicated, commercially made products – was one which prevailed through much of the history of ‘Craft’. Gradually craft came to be viewed not as a pre-industrial method of manufacture, but as a process of experimentation with form, material, technique, etc, the result of which was likely to be appreciated more for its aesthetic than for its function. As such, craft aligned itself more closely to art than to design, to the extent that James Noel White, speaking about the 1973 exhibition ‘The Craftsman’s Art’, claimed that “painting is becoming sculpture, is becoming ceramic, is becoming three-dimensional weaving, is becoming jewellery” (quoted by Penny Sparke in Design in Context).

It’s worth noting at this point that the concept of craft outlined above relates only to contemporary craft, sometimes referred to as ‘studio craft’. There’s another notion of craft of course: that practiced by amateurs and hobbyists, taught in evening classes and sold at fairs, and almost exclusively disregarded by contemporary craft practitioners, as well as designers. If contemporary craft involves investigation, this amateur craft is its direct opposite – an avoidance of experimentation in the desire to uphold tradition. Speaking at the Challenging Craft conference in Aberdeen in 2004,  Peter Hughes noted that

“the studio crafts were born out of modernity and created by the same forces that produced the industrial revolution. They are utterly unlike the traditional crafts, upon which they have so often drawn, in that they are practiced in the context of an information age that provides both imagery and technical knowledge to which traditional crafts people would not have had access.”

Chair of Textures © Droog

Yet despite these differences, amateur craft involves an attitude, a do-it-yourself mentality, which values learning, self reliance and the rejection of (some elements of) consumer culture. In some ways these attitudes are closer to those of rapid manufacturing and fabbing utopians than the elitism which the studio crafts sometimes exhibit. It’s also the case that in recent years the boundary between design and crafts has again blurred, with groups such as Droog, Front and the Campana Brothers being embraced by the Crafts movement. As designers have pushed at the boundaries of the meanings of design, experimenting with low volume production and ‘low tech’ materials, they have encroached on territory which previously was exclusively the domain of the crafts practitioner. Certainly this blurring of boundaries between craft and design hasn’t been met with uncritical approval by all of the crafts movement. Howard Risatti for example, believes that

“The craftsman always ends with a finished original, a one-of-a-kind object. Such individuality occurs even when the craftsman makes several objects of the same type, as in a dinner service or a set of chairs; each object simply enlarges the set to which it belongs. This, however, is not the goal of the designer.”

Vermelha chair © Campana Brothers, photo by Andrew Garng

But increasingly such protestations seem like voices in the wilderness. Maybe Craft is going through another of its periodic changes in meaning, and in the questioning of itself which this entails has tried to appropriate things which look similar. This certainly seems to be the case when looking at the Lab Craft exhibition which I wrote about in the last post. Because until very recently one key difference between Craft and Design has always persisted – the need for the involvement of the craftsperson in the manufacture of the object, rather than the design of the object for production by machine (what Greenhalgh describes as “the direct intervention of the maker in the material process”). Lab Craft declares that this is no longer the case. But if that’s true then the question of what Craft now is, of what the difference between Craft and Design is, shouts even louder. Lab Craft doesn’t even try to answer, it simply presents some objects which might previously have been called design, claims they are craft, and closes.

I’ve spoken to a few crafts people about this and none of them seem entirely comfortable with it. Of course, there’s no rule that says there must be a strict boundary between design and craft – maybe they exist as a continuum of the same line. But that’s a new interpretation in itself, and it’s not one that any of the six Crafts Council definitions recognise. Richard Sennett describes craftsmanship as “the desire to do something well, for it’s own sake.” And it’s evidence of that simple statement which is missing from the Lab Craft exhibition.

I think the problem, to put it bluntly, is that some of the objects being held up as examples of automated craft just aren’t very good. In fact, as examples of digital modelling, they’re crap. It’s not that I think, to be a craftsperson, you have to get your hands dirty in shaping the material you work with. I can conceive of a craftsperson whose tools are software rather than hardware based. But if a craftsperson is using CAD tools, shouldn’t they be using them with the same skill that a ‘traditional’ craftsperson handles a hammer and chisel? Shouldn’t they be able to manipulate surfaces with the same confidence that a potter throws clay, a second nature that comes with long hours of practice? Ask any industrial designer and they’ll tell you if you want to see exemplary CAD modelling you look at automotive stylists. I’m not as big a fan of car design as most industrial designers, but I can recognise the level of artistry, the desire to do something well that makes itself apparent in the surfacing of a roofline or the transition from a wing to a tail-light detail. And I know from struggling with my own CAD models the amount of skill and experience needed to achieve those details. I’ve yet to see anything even close from the realm of automated craft.

2012 Mercedes-Benz CLS Class © Mercedes-Benz

Currently showing as part of the London Design Festival, Lab Craft is a new exhibition put on by the UK Crafts Council, presenting the work of 26 designers and crafts practitioners who use “cutting edge digital technologies.”  As well as the obvious reasons for sparking my interest, this particularly caught my attention because of a paper I co-authored which was recently presented at the 2010 IDSA conference, entitled The Next Stages in Automated Craft. I will go into more detail about that paper in another post, but the Lab Craft exhibition illustrates some of the very same questions.

Babel Vessel #1 by Michael Eden

The fact that the Crafts Council have waited until 2010 before putting on a show which explores “digital adventures in contemporary craft” is itself revealing of a confusion towards technologies such as rapid manufacturing within the contemporary Crafts movement. Malcolm McCullough first raised the possibility 15 years ago when he asked in his book Abstracting Craft “What are the implications for art and craft as atoms become replaced by digital signals and the physicality of reproduction becomes a ‘virtual’ on screen experience?” Since then conferences such as Craft in the Digital Age and Challenging Craft (both held in 2004) have raised all the same questions which Lab Craft now aims to address. And for an indication that not everyone inside the Crafts Council approves of its acceptance of Lab Craft – only a few blocks away Origin, the UK Crafts Council’s “showcase of original contemporary craft”, was being marketed under the tagline “Made not Manufactured.”

Shine Candelabra by Geoffrey Mann, photo © Nick Moss

Definitions aside, it’s sometimes easy to forget that rapid manufacturing technologies, especially additive ones, are still unknown to most people, and Lab Craft provides an interesting introduction. It showcases the work of 26 designers and crafts practitioners working in fields such as ceramics, furniture, textiles and jewellery. Whilst there is relatively little information provided about each individual exhibit, the show includes two films showing how pieces were produced and including interviews with some of those included.

Information Ate My Table by Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, photo © Nick Moss

But whilst the show may work as an overview of the design possibilities of digital technologies for those who know little of the subject, it is difficult to engage with the show on any more than a superficial level without returning to the question of whether the objects exhibited can be regarded as craft. Of course this is the question which the show itself claims to raise, but unfortunately raising the question seems to be as far as the organisers are willing to go. One of the questions put forward in the show’s introduction is “As the human touch is considered a pivotal anchor in the definition of craft, is this made redundant amid the adoption of digital tools?” but there’s no real consideration of the question, simply an unequivocal “No.” Similarly there is no attempt to judge the relative value of the pieces exhibited,  all are presented as equally representative of ‘digital craft’. Practitioners such as Justin Marshall and Assa Ashuach, whose Automake and Ucodo initiativess are represented in the show, are at the forefront of experiments in computer generated and user generated products, but the question of whether these can constitute craft or design is ignored. And the issue of whether a digital practitioner must be skilled in digital tools in the same way that a traditional craftsperson must be receives no attention at all.

Digital Shibori by Melanie Bowles, photo © Nick Moss

All in all, I found Lab Craft extremely disappointing. It has some nice pieces, though the restrictions of the Crafts Council’s remit to show only work by UK practitioners means that not all the work included represents the best examples in each field. But it’s main failing is in making no attempt to answer the questions it purports to address. There is currently considerable debate amongst crafts practitioners about whether  digitally manufactured objects can also be craft objects, but this debate is nowhere in the exhibition. I will try to address the issues in the next post.

Unto This Last is a furniture studio and workshop, based on two sites in London. Its name comes from the title of a book by John Ruskin, published in 1862, in which he advocated a return to localised, craftsman/artisan workshops as an antidote to the conditions which industrialisation had imposed on much of Britain’s working class. As a fore-runner of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ruskin’s thoughts were influential, but the rising standard of living which mass manufacturing brought to the West meant that his pleas were ultimately seen as anachronistic. But according to Olivier Geoffrey, founder of Unto This Last, CNC machining and on-demand manufacturing open up possibilities for the craftsman in the community which may yet see Ruskin’s vision realised.

D Chair © Unto This Last

For the last month or so I have been teaching on the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins in London, on a project titled “manufacturing and consumption futures”. The project  is intended to encourage students to research the opportunities which new production methods allow for more personalised products, to propose and refine a system of their own, and ultimately to prototype the system itself. I hope to show some of the outcomes in a later post, but as part of the research for the project students were invited to Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop, to look around and to quiz Olivier about his philosophy.

Facet Sideboard © Unto This Last

Olivier began by explaining how, if you’re engaged in design, you’re inevitably bound up in the distribution systems of the products you’re designing. A designer working at Ikea, for example, doesn’t design flat pack furniture just for the sake of it, or even because it’s part of the Ikea brand experience. Flat pack systems allow customers to transport their purchases home from the store and then assemble the furniture themselves, which is crucial for keeping costs down. Whereas a designer working for Cassina knows that the assembly and transportation costs will be tied up in the price the furniture, and can therefore rely on skilled craftsmen using specialised tools to build a piece of furniture, rather than an untrained consumer with an allen key.

Honeycomb Shelves © Unto This Last

Unto This Last’s designs are similarly a reflection and a result of distribution systems and logistics. A customer who visits the store can see some examples of the products on sale, but with the exception of a few small gift items, no products are held in stock, instead they are manufactured to order. This reduces the costs of storage and inventory, whilst also allowing the company to carry more than 2000 items its catalogue. Orders are made in-store and delivered pre-assembled, and because the furniture is shipped direct from the store it means packaging is also greatly reduced. In this way, by using digital manufacturing processes and some of the techniques recognisable from other mass customisation initiatives, Unto This Last can offer custom-made furniture at close to mass-production prices.

Nurbs Coffee Table © Unto This Last

Unto This Last uses laminated birch ply for all its products. Clearly the material has properties, both visual and functional, which many designers in the past have found interesting, and it would probably be naive to suggest that the only reason for using the material is its fit within Unto This Last’s distribution chain. Nonetheless, it is remarkably suitable for helping Olivier realise his vision. To begin with plywood is very dimensionally stable, and has uniform properties in all directions (unlike natural timbers, where grain and knots affect the strength and shape of the material). It also doesn’t shrink. This means that parts can be machined on a CNC router with a high degree of accuracy (typically Unto This Last manufacture to tolerances of 0.1mm); such precision also simplifies the process of assembling the finished furniture piece – less finishing is required, and glue dries under the natural pressure of the fit, without the need for clamping. Using laminates also allows Unto This Last to effectively design its own materials – both workshops (in Brick Lane and Battersea) have presses for applying ‘standard’ veneers of oak, walnut, maple and a melamine coated surface, as well as allowing experimentation with bespoke surfaces such as fabric, leather and paper.

The CNC router used at Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop

The use of birch ply laminates undoubtedly plays a part in the consumer acceptance of this way of working – because the material is relatively uniform it means a customer can be confident that the piece of furniture delivered to them will be virtually identical to the one they saw on display. But the material also has a significant impact on the both the designs of Unto This Last’s furniture, and the process of design which leads to them. Parts are designed which anticipate the requirements of production, they incorporate tapers, chamfers, clearances etc which can be machined rather than relying on a furniture maker to create joints and fixtures by hand. Design elements which are proven to work on one product are reused in new products, and so a vocabulary, both technical and aesthetic, has built up. All of Unto This Last’s products are built in Solidworks, and by using equation driven parameters a design can easily be modified such that changing one dimension will cause all other critical dimensions to update. The company has also put a significant amount of effort into developing custom API’s to calculate the most efficient way of laying out parts before they are machined.

Pierre, a designer at Unto This Last, demonstrates a CAD model of a table

How the constituent parts of a fully assembled piece of furniture are machined turns out to be a significant issue for Unto This Last. Not only does it make sense to save costs by wasting as little of a laminated sheet as possible, businesses in London have to pay per kg of waste, which provides another incentive to make efficient use of each sheet. Typically the workshop will take two weeks worth of orders, computer software then creates a ‘cutting map’ for each sheet of laminate required. Where it’s not possible to use an area of the sheet for furniture that has been ordered, smaller gift items are incorporated into the cutting map to fill up the empty space. Again this demonstrates how Unto This Last are almost obsessive in the use of digital technologies to refine the manufacturing process; this is the key difference, Olivier explained, to more expensive furniture makers where a significant amount of cost is tied up in waste and poorly optimized logistics.

Tea-Light Candle Holders © Unto This Last

Certainly the concept of a craft workshop in the centre of a city, enabled by digital technologies, where customers can see and hear and smell custom furniture being made, seems to have struck a chord: 40% of customers come from the recommendations of past clients, and a further 40% are people who just happen to see the store and are interested enough to look in. But Unto This Last goes against the flow of most mass customisation enterprises, which tend to be impersonal and usually offer no contact with the designer, and where cost reductions are achieved by off-shoring to faceless factories rather than opening an atelier in the middle of London. Just how successful Unto This Last is at realising Ruskin’s vision remains to be seen, but we’d have more interesting cities, and more interested customers, if it showed the way for others to follow.

Thanks to Olivier and Pierre for their time, and Ben Hughes for arranging the visit.

Detail of Tapered Ply Table © Unto This Last

I recently received a mail from Alex Mamalyha, web community manager for i.materialise, announcing the launch of a new service from Materialise NV. i.materialise is a rapid manufacturing service aimed at designers, and the beta site gives a good idea of the way the service will work. Obviously there are many web-based rapid manufacturing services these days, and the announcement of a new one is a fairly regular occurrence which I usually just ignore. But given the extent to which Materialise have supported and encouraged designers’ use of RM technologies through their .MGX initiative, I thought this was one service that deserved further investigation.

The ‘manifesto’ of i.materialise claims the service makes “3D printing as easy as printing on paper”. Obviously such claims owe more to hyperbole than fact, but the i.materialise interface is presented in a relatively simple and obvious way. A workspace in the centre of the screen visualises the model once it is uploaded, and a number of drop-down menus to the right give the choice of materials, surface finishes etc.

To test the service, I used a model I made previously for Nina Pirhonen, a Finnish designer and creator of the PomPom character and series of books. The model was originally created in Solidworks, but in order to upload it to the i.materialise site it first needed to be converted to .stl format.

3D model of PomPom © Nina Pirhonen

It’s here that some of the limitations of the i.materialise service first begin to show. Whether it’s to simplify the operation, or because limits don’t in fact exist, there’s no information regarding maximum file sizes or number of triangles/polygons. This is fairly basic information that anyone, designer or not, with the skill to create a 3D CAD model will want to know, since it has a fundamental effect on the quality of the manufactured model, and most CAD packages allow the quality of the .stl file to be easily determined. In this instance I used a relatively coarse setting, giving a triangle count of 20,024, and a file size of 1,001,284 bytes. I also imported the file into Rhino in order to export as .3ds, .obj and .wrl formats.

Exported .stl model of PomPom © Nina Pirhonen

Uploading the file is easy – click the upload button and choose your file – and quick; a 1.5Mb .3ds file took about 20 seconds to upload, with a further 8 seconds for the i.materialise software to analyse the file. Exactly what the analysis involves isn’t clear, but I assume the model is being checked to ensure it’s a closed volume. No errors or warnings were given about the model, which suggests it isn’t being checked in terms of the feasibility of it actually being made – the ears, arms and feet/ground of this model would definitely throw up problems, particularly in some of the more fragile material options. Once the model is uploaded it appears in the workspace of the user interface, and can be viewed from different angles.

i.materialise interface © Materialise NV (click for larger image)

Another limitation of the interface is that there’s no option to change the build orientation of the model. Since most rapid manufacturing technologies have different resolutions in their horizontal plane and vertical axis, this can be an important choice, affecting which surfaces have the smoothest finish. For a service aimed at designers it’s definitely an option I would expect to see.

On the right hand side of the interface there are a choice of materials, including ABS, polycarbonate and polyamide, alumide, and multicolour composite. As different materials are chosen the price automatically updates, along with the surface finishing options. Most materials can be painted and some can be mechanically smoothed (similar to tumble polishing). There’s also an extensive ‘library’ of information about materials and manufacturing techniques.

Multicolour Composite material properties © Materialise NV (click for larger image)

Given the nature of the model I was testing the service with, I was particularly interested in the multicolour composite option. Materialise use a Z Corp Spectrum Z510 for this process, which prints at 600 x 540 dpi. The problem was that, as far as I could tell there is no way to specify the colour of the surfaces. Usually Z Corp Spectrum printers use VRML files, but when I uploaded in this format (the system accepts and recognises .wrl files, even though they are not listed as a usable file type) no colour information was retained. The same was true when I tried an .obj file. Looking around the site and through the FAQ’s didn’t give any clues as to what file formats I should be using or whether this option is functional, but obviously this is something that needs to be fixed before the service comes out of beta testing.

All in all, I’m not really sure what to make of the i.materialise site and service. It’s stated explicitly that the service is aimed at designers, though it’s not made clear whether that means just design professionals or includes consumer-designers. Either way, for those with the experience and skill to create their own 3D models it seems a bit simplistic. There’s none of the control you get setting up a model for printing yourself, particularly deciding what orientation the parts should be printed. To be fair it’s possible to contact i.materialise direct, but then the service becomes little different to using a local RP/RM shop (although admittedly, the range of materials and processes is much greater than most shops are able to offer). And of course it should be kept in mind that the site is still in beta testing, the whole point of which is to iron out the glitches. In this respect at least, i.materialise have done a good job – the UI is easy to understand and the whole process of uploading a file, choosing a material and ordering is easy to follow.

Finally, one tantalising option, which isn’t possible to review but which is suggested in the FAQ’s, is the future possibility of ordering some of the .MGX designs. Quite how this will work is unclear – will it simply be possible to choose from a catalogue and hit ‘print’, or will it be possible to modify the design? But this is obviously one area where the i.materialise service can offer something unique, over and above similar web-based services or a local RM shop.

Update: Since posting this article I have swapped a few emails with Alex Mamalyha; my questions and his answers are reproduced below:

1. Is there a maximum file size, and is there a limit to the number of triangles or polygons in a model?
2. How are colours specified when choosing the multi-colour composite option (using the Z-Corp Spectrum printer)?
3. Will you attempt to make any model, or will you advise if an uploaded model is unsuitable?
4. What is your returns policy?

Finally, I noticed that it’s possible to upload a VRML (.wrl) file and the system will recognise it, but this isn’t listed in the ‘supported formats’ list.

1. There is no limitation on the file size or number of triangles in the model.
2. Colors should be stored within the uploaded file, so if you choose Z-Corp we will print it in color (I realize it is a bit confusing since the preview generated images are in single color, but we will improve that bit shortly).
3. We did some testing with Blender users. If the uploaded file is not suitable for printing we will fix it ourselves, unless it requires severe design changes (after all we don’t want to print cube when the person is ordering sphere) in which case we will contact the designer and explain what has to be changed. We will not attempt to print something that is not printable. Additionally, we are developing plug-ins for major CAD programs that will provide designers with the info on problems with the file before they even upload it.
4. Once we print and ship the model, it cannot be return for obvious reasons (usually it’s one of a kind design)

About VRML support. We are still in a pretty early BETA and some info may not be consistent in all parts of the website, but we will do our best to provide support for a number of different file types.

Are there plans to add functionality which would allow the designer to choose the orientation of the part in the build chamber? Or maybe make it clearer which is the Z-axis so the part can be oriented in the modelling application?

We are working on functionality, so that preview window on the website will allow designers to rotate the model, rather than have screenshot generated (as it does now). It does not matter how the file is located during the upload process, we have support engineers, who check all incoming files and position them, we don’t expect people to know how the model should be oriented for printing purposes.

I recently got back from a trip to New York, having been there during ICFF and all the design week activities surrounding it. I was somewhat surprised at how little rapid manufactured furniture there was within the main show (unless you count laser cutting, which was impossible to avoid and demonstrated little that wasn’t being done five years ago), but outside .MGX was again showing it’s new collection at Moss, this year entitled E-volution. I should say straight off that the curation of this exhibition isn’t particularly clear: some of the pieces on display are from previous collections, and not everything in the new collection is on show. Nonetheless, it occurred to me whilst walking round that the designers and pieces involved fall into three distinct categories of the exploration of design for rapid manufacture.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

It’s worth making clear at this point that when I say ‘design’ I mean the kind of design that .MGX promote and specialise in. The kind of design that’s sometimes called “Design with a capital D”; the kind of design which non-designers usually associate with the word and which some designers dislike because they feel it misrepresents what design ‘really’ is. This is design whose reason for existence is spectacle, whose aim is to make people take notice through initial observation rather than through extended use. Normally I would say there’s too much of this kind of design, and much of it is rubbish. But Materialise has a clear objective, which is to push the boundaries of rapid manufacturing and showcase what the technologies are capable of. If the result is more designers and manufacturers understanding what RM technologies can achieve, then that’s a good thing.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

The first category is best termed Design as an Exploration of Production. This category is the largest in terms of the number of .MGX products it contains, and is made up of products whose central interest is an exploration of what rapid manufacturing technologies can produce, which conventional technologies cannot. It is typified by complex detailing on both the interior and exterior of the product, geometries which would be impossible to achieve were any form of tooling required.

Fugu vase by Hani Rashid © .MGX

Many .MGX lights fall into this category. Being able to design and manufacture an internal space of great complexity allows the designer to play with the way in which light escapes from a volume, as well as the shadows it creates.

Tulip lamp by Peter Jansen © .MGX

A further branch of the Design as an Exploration of Production category continues the idea of manufacturing what would conventionally be ‘impossible’ forms, but reduces the complexity to much purer geometries. Bathsheba Grossman has worked with Jiri Evenhuis to up date an earlier version of the Torus lamp, in which two simple donut forms interconect. Another example from Freedom of Creation (of which Evenhuis is a partner,) though not produced through .MGX and thus not on show, the Rollercoaster bowl.

Rollercoaster bowl by Janne Kyttänen © Freedom of Creation

The second category is what I call Design as an Exploration of Craft. The main use of rapid manufacturing in this category is as an enabler of actually getting an object produced, an object which would otherwise be too expensive, or require too high a level of expertise, to be manufactured. It doesn’t necessarily mean that only one object is ever produced, more that, even if the production volume never rises above one, the design is still a success. In many ways, it’s possible to see more evidence of this kind of design in past .MGX products than in the newest collection – it seems the ability to create one-off pieces is no longer the wonder it once was. The Damned lampshade by Luc Merx is from 2007, but was on show at Moss, and exemplifies this category.

The Damned Lampshade by Luc Merx © .MGX

The lampshade clearly refers to classical images of the fall of the damned, such as those of Gustav Doré in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s about as far removed from what’s usually considered to be ‘good design’ as it’s possible to get, and it’s difficult to imagine it would ever have been made if rapid manufacturing did not exist. Merx refers to the complexity of 18th Century carved ivory furniture as an influence, a craft which is highly skilled and nowadays virtually obsolete (not to mention, largely illegal). The .MGX website describes how selective laser sintering technology allows this intricacy of form, but this lampshade is not an exploration of that intricacy. Rather it takes the capability for granted, and uses it to explore a very personal vision of the designer. In a similar way, though more whimsically perhaps, Dan Yeffet’s Forbidden Fruit bowl is a take on original sin, as well as a pre-emptor of Shapeways Creator service.

Forbidden Fruit bowl by Dan Yeffet © .MGX

The final category I have termed Design as an Exploration of Design. Here the end product may display traits from either of the first two categories, however the most important thing is the way the designer uses the capabilities of rapid manufacturing to explore new ways of designing. I have written previously about Assa Ashuach’s AI stool, on show at Moss, and the way it was designed using a kind of ‘reverse’ finite element analysis to determine where the stool should be rigid and where it should flex in order to create the minimum possible volume of material. In one sense it can be argued that the designer didn’t design the AI stool, Assuach designed the process, and the process designed the stool.

AI stool © Assa Ashuach

A similar notion, i.e. a design process in which the designer does not control the final outcome of the design, is apparent in the Root chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald. Based on traditional Asian furniture in which tree roots are shaped to create individually unique pieces of furniture, each Root chair is digitally ‘grown’ within variable parameters. There is little information in the show about exactly how this is done, but this investigation of an ‘evolving’ family of forms is something also being explored by Lars Spuybroek’s MyLight (included in the show at Moss), as well as Lionel Theodore Dean of Future Factories.

Root chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald © .MGX

As well as the Torus lamp with Jiri Evenhuis, Bathsheba Grossman is also showing the Gyroid lamp. Grossman is well known as an early exponent of rapid manufacturing technologies which she uses to make mathematical sculptures. Her background as both a mathematician and artist lead to the creation of sculptural forms driven by equation and geometry in which the personality of the designer determines the meta-design but is strangely removed from the symmetrical, repeating details. According to .MGX

In nature, the gyroid is found when two immiscible fluids are forced to occupy the same space. These fluids interpenetrate but do not dissolve together. The same is true for the Gyroid.MGX which divides the 3D space it occupies into two regions. These regions are identical, interlocking, and yet remain completely distinct from each other.

Gyroid lamp by Bathsheba Grossman © .MGX

These three design explorations encapsulate the types of creativity rapid manufacturing is facilitating amongst some designers today. They don’t just relate to the work produced by Materialse .MGX, they are also able to accommodate, for example, Front’s Sketch Furniture and Future Factories Ghost chair. In time new areas can open up, but if you can think of examples today which don’t fit, I’d be interestd to hear.

Shapeways, the consumer-oriented digital manufacturing service, has received a lot of positive press since it was recently spun out of Philips Lifestyle Incubator. Originally in closed beta testing limited to 500 participants (though this seems to have been relaxed – I had no problems registering), Shapeways allows users to upload designs and receive a quote for the model’s manufacture in a number of different materials. Accepted file formats include .stl, .dae and .x3d, and the maximum file size is 64Mb which seems pretty huge – I very rarely create a full assembly in .stl which is even half that size. However the maximum number of polygons is 250,000 (due apparently to the processing time and the need to display models on computers without high-end graphics cards), and the problem of a model not being accepted occurs quite frequently in the Shapeways forums. But given that Shapeways is still in beta it seems to be working well, and the enthusiasm with which it has been received by some users is encouraging for those of us who argue that there’s a demand from consumers for the ability to design and manufacture their own products.

Nonetheless, one of the requirements for using Shapeways is a knowledge of CAD in order to output a 3D model in one of the formats mentioned above. As I have argued previously, knowledge of CAD is the gateway to manufacture (assuming we are not talking about craft production), and without that knowledge it doesn’t matter how easy it is to upload and pay for a model to be produced, it’s not going to be embraced by consumers without the time or interest to learn a 3D modelling program. This is one of the strengths of Ponoko, whose laser-cutting manufacturing method allows users to supply files in .eps format from 2D drawing programs which far more people are familiar with. But it seems Shapeways are attempting to address this issue with the launch of their Creator service.

Light Poem lamp © Shapeways

Essentially, the Creator service allows users to customise the shape of a pre-designed object. Currently only one product is available, what Shapeways calls the Light Poem lamp, which is based on Philips’ Imageo LED lamps; this in itself is an interesting approach, since it could be thought of as an early instance of a manufacturer encouraging the consumer modification of its products. Creator runs as a Javascript application, and on opening the Light Poem model the user is presented with a 3D model of the lamp, with a default text of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. The lamp is customised by changing the text, and by choosing from a number of fonts.

Default Creator Light Poem configuration © Shapeways
Click image to view full size

The first thing I noticed when running Creator was how crude and unpolished it looks. This may be due to the beta status of the project, but the rectangular boxes and non-anti aliased text give it a distinctly un-Web 2.0 feeling. The model can only be rotated using the arrow navigation symbols, rather than left click and drag with a mouse, and although a mouse wheel will zoom in and out, the model ‘freezes’ if you get too close, which then requires the view to be reset. Worst of all in my opinion, clicking ‘Help’ takes you to a web page which contains no articles relating to Creator.

The first stage in customising the lamp is to create your own text, which is typed in the box at the top right of the screen. Although the model updates quickly to show how your text translates to the 3D object, I immediately became frustrated by the limitations placed on the text that can be used. To begin with, only upper case and numerals are allowed – lower case and punctuation won’t work. ‘Foreign’ letters and those which use accents are similarly prohibited, and whilst the text editor will accept spaces, it won’t allow carriage returns. I can understand the probable reasons for this: one of the manufacturing problems is trying to ensure the structural integrity of the product, and lower case letters with their ascenders and descenders would make this difficult. Punctuation would cause similar difficulties – a full stop or comma has a lot of surrounding space which might weaken the structure – though it is harder to understand why accented letters are not allowed, particularly as this pretty much limits the appeal to only those who want to write in English. In short, without punctuation and the ability to start a new line, what is written never feels like poetry, more like a slogan.

Creator warns if the model is likely to be structurally problematic © Shapeways

The choice of fonts is relatively limited, there are five, but the inclusion of Gill Sans means you can start to subvert things a bit. Without serifs, ’1′ appears as a block when written, thus the model below:

Light Poem from a pattern of ’1′s in the default font
Click image to view full size

changes dramatically when the font is changed to Gill Sans:

Light Poem from a pattern of ’1′s in Gill Sans
Click image to view full size

Having decided on the text, the next stage is to decide the ‘Wrapping Style’ – is the text horizontal or spiralled? This is a fairly simple choice, but again it demonstrates how the Creator service has been poorly implemented. In some instances, swapping from spiral to horizontal, or vice versa, will create problems where a structurally sound object in one configuration becomes unsound in another (as gaps appear, or letters hang in mid-air). To fix this means going back a step, when it would have been perfectly simple to include the wrapping style choice in the first step, along with the choice of font. This is particularly annoying if you continue to the third stage – choosing the material – and then decide you want to change a word or the font, because stage one will have been frozen; the only option is to exit the application and restart it. And this is even more frustrating when you realise that actually there is no choice of material, all that’s on offer is ‘white, strong and flexible’.

Text can be oriented in a spiral or a set of rings
Click image to view full size

If this sounds like harsh criticism that is unfortunate, because I would very much like to see this initiative succeed – if nothing else it will make some of the central arguments of my thesis easier to sustain! And if these are issues which beta testing is intended to highlight, then it could be they will be attended to quickly. But I find it difficult to understand why the Creator service looks and performs poorly, when the Shapeways site in general has none of these problems. The Creator is intended for those with no 3D modelling skills, and who likely have no experience of rapid manufacturing; it seems to me these are exactly the people who will be put off by a frustrating user experience. A bit more time spent polishing the user interface might have highlighted and resolved these concerns earlier.

One of the issues I am continually running into in the course of my research is that of brand image, and how manufacturers might try to protect or control their brand in a future where consumers can manipulate and control a product’s form. And it’s easy to demonstrate what brands might be up against using Creator. First of all, what does a manufacturer define as an acceptable product?

Light Poem profanity
Click image to view full size

Nike gained a fair amount of unwanted publicity when MIT student Jonah Peretti tried to order a pair of NikeID trainers with “Sweat Shop” stitched on the heel, a lesson they apparently learned as it is now impossible to specify “Sweat” (“Shop” is okay), along with profanities and, apparently, words from gang culture. The schoolboy in me was happy to discover that Creator has no such filters, and will allow you to design a lamp with as much swearing or offensiveness as you like. Whether Shapeways would actually make a product to such a specification is another question. In a reply to a forum question about X-rated designs, Joris Peels who is Shapeways community manager suggests such models would be okay, provided they were not publicly shared, but I could imagine this attitude might change if a media campaign were started of the type that the internet seems to attract. Then imagine a future where it is possible to custom design sex toys or replica hand guns, and it seems inevitable that Shapeways or other services will have to employ a significant degree of censorship.

The second question, of course, concerns copyright. Shapeways terms and conditions make no reference to copyright infringement, though apparently a legal framework around the service is being drafted. I have little doubt that copyright infringement will be prohibited, but this is obviously easier to spot in some instances than others, and I wonder who would bear responsibility in cases where copyright was infringed? Or more bluntly, who would be sued – the customer who has paid for the object, or Shapeways who have profited from selling it? Perhaps Prince, who seems to have an aversion to anyone using his work, would take offence to a Light Poem lamp which used the lyrics to “Let’s Go Crazy”. In which case, judging by past behaviour (YouTube, Ebay), he would go after the ‘host’ rather than the customer.

Light Poem from the lyrics to “Let’s Go Crazy” © Prince, reproduced under the provision of “Fair Use”
Click image to view full size

For other examples of user customisation of a product’s form, visit Zapfab and FluidForms.

The previous two years conferences have focussed primarily on the engineering aspects of rapid manufacturing. Although there were again some very technical presentations this year, it also
seemed to be a definite aim of the conference to look at how these technologies are breaking out of R&D labs and getting into the hands of those exploring the design possibilities, and the societal implications, of RM. Frank Piller gave a great presentation on mass customisation and the way in which rapid manufacturing’s ability to create ‘one-off’ products is a natural extension of this. Evan Malone of Fab@Home, and Kathy Lewis of Desktop Factory both gave inspiring presentations on the way in which consumers are taking RM technologies into their own hands. But most interesting for me were the presentations of Assa Ashuach and Lionel Theodore Dean, two designers whose processes are integral to their experiments in pushing the limits of what rapid manufacturing can achieve.

Talking to Assa the night before, he was a bit concerned about how his presentation would go down with an audience primarily made up of engineers and material scientists. He needn’t have worried, most people were fascinated by the way that the technologies and materials they were responsible for developing were being used in ways they had never envisaged. Assa started by showing The AI Light, a pendant lamp which uses sensors to understand its environment, and which reacts by flexing and twisting in response to what it senses.

AI Light © Assa Ashuach

The AI Light is made in nylon using EOS’s laser sintering process. Inside each wing are two actuators, one to control bending and one to control twisting; these allow the light to perform fluid, organic transformations, rather than harsh, robotic movements. The ‘AI’ refers to the way in which the light learns from its surroundings, and allows what Assa calls “training rather than controlling”

“When you first invite it into your home, you have to let it get accustomed to its new environment. Once it is relaxed, the training can then begin. It has five senses that track changes in its environment and slowly it develops a set of behaviours that indicate a new character to each light. The user is also able to interact with the light by playing with it through sounds, light and movements. This smart structure may behave in unpredictable ways if moved to an unfamiliar space.”

AI Light © Assa Ashuach

Assa worked on the AI Light with Complex Matters, a company run by Dr Siavash Mahdavi which specialises in the design of custom materials, often using rapid manufacturing technologies. These custom materials are cellular microstructures, engineered to display different properties in different parts of a product as the application demands; for instance a material might be rigid and stiff in one direction, but soft and flexible in another. It is this kind of structure that allows the AI Light to flex.

Assa first collaborated with Complex Matters on the design of the Osteon chair, which was also shown in his presentation. Assa described the process of design in this project as “finite element analysis in reverse”: first a set of ‘ideal criteria’ were formulated, then the material structure was designed to meet those criteria.

FEA image of the Osteon chair © Assa Ashuach and Complex Matters

Internal structure detail © Assa Ashuach

The Osteon chair was again manufactured by EOS in laser sintered nylon, and can be described as a cosmetic skin stretched over an intelligent internal structure. The result is a continuous flowing curve whose form is unmistakably derived from the tools and capabilities of CAD surfacing software. But the form alone does not tell everything about this chair – one of the most interesting features is that by designing the material specifically to meet the needs of the product, the material needed to manufacture the chair was reduced by 2/3′s. This is significant in any industry where a high strength : weight ratio is required, aerospace for example, but also has implications for the design of environmentally sustainable products.

Osteon chair computer rendering © Assa Ashuach

Osteon chair © Assa Ashuach

The technique of ‘finite element analysis in reverse’ was also utilised in another furniture project, again designed in collaboration with Complex Systems. A custom designed material was developed with the aim of using the minimum volume of material possible to support a load of 120kg at a height of 40cm. Manufactured by Materialize .MGX, the AI Stool is designed to be soft in the areas which which the sitter contacts directly, but rigid in the areas which support the sitter’s weight.

Computer image of AI Stool internal structure © Assa Ashuach and Complex Matters

AI Stool © Assa Ashuach

Lionel Theodore Dean is the driving force behind Future Factories, and was one of the first designers to understand and begin to explore the ability of rapid manufacturing to produce individual, unique products. As with Assa, the processes Lionel has developed to design these products are as interesting as the products themselves. But rather than custom designing materials and forms to meet a specific need or requirement, Future Factories’ processes introduce an element of chance, often relying on software to evolve a shape in ways that the designer cannot fully control.

Future Factories describes these processes as ‘computational design’. Lionel describes this concept in the catalogue for Digital Design Futures, an exhibition recently held with Justin Marshall of Automake at the Hub exhibition space.

Rather than creating a single discrete design solution, a meta-design is created that defines the function and character over a potentially infinite range of outcomes. The aim is to create coherent recognizable designs but with obvious differences between iterations… There is a balance to be found between freedom and control. A random element is necessary to create something unique; too random and the identity is lost.

An example how this kind of process can be implemented is the idea behind the Tuber pendant lamp. The concept was for a website which ran an animation in which the form of the lamp was continually changing, morphing from one shape to another as dictated by software which ‘evolved’ the design. At any point the customer could ‘freeze’ the animation and order the resulting product, which would then be rapid manufactured in a plaster-based composite material.

Tuber lamp design iterations © Future Factories

An interesting question was raised at the end of the presentation, regarding how much control the user should be given over the design of the Tuber lamp: had the possibility of allowing the consumer to interact with the morphing of the design been considered, rather than leave it to software? The answer was yes, it had been discussed a number of times, for example by introducing slider bars which would control different elements of the design. But for Lionel, this wasn’t about consumer-generated design: the Tuber is a ‘designer’ lamp, it comes from the creative skills of one designer, it’s just that each lamp is different.

Lionel began to see limitations in this process however, in that it relies on the manipulation of pre-existing geometry in a CAD model. As such it was only capable of ‘adjustment’, rather than fundamental change. This was addressed in a later project, ‘Holy Ghost’, which combined the notion of morphing with another process, that of ‘building block’ additions.

Holy Ghost iterations © Future Factories

Like most designers I suspect, I had seen images of the Holy Ghost chair previously. Based on Phillipe Starck’s Louis Ghost chair for Kartell, it had received a lot of press since first being shown. What I had never read about though, was the process by which the chair is designed. The back of the chair consists of a number of elements Lionel calls ‘buttons’, and the first step is to decide how many buttons will be used; a computer script then randomly places these buttons within a three dimensional ‘envelope’ which determines the shape of the back. In the second step the script ‘expands’ the buttons in a uniform manner until they touch. Finally the individual buttons expand in a non-uniform manner to take up the available space, this is what results in differently sized buttons. A series of springs link each button allowing the whole of the back to flex, and the part is manufactured in SLS nylon.

Holy Ghost © Future Factories

Future Factories’ latest project is Icon, a limited series of 100 individual titanium pendants. Lionel had experimented with jewellery pieces in the past. Initially these had been made by rapid prototyping in wax and then investment casting (the Perfactory process) but later this was changed to metal laser sintering, a more direct process.

Jewellery in conjunction with the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre © Future Factories

This change of manufacturing process in turn required a change in design, primarily to avoid support structures which required much more hand finishing. Initially the new pendants continued to be hand polished, on the outside surface only, but later an automated process was adopted, polishing both internal and external surfaces. Since titanium cannot be soldered, the Icon pendants would be virtually impossible to produce by conventional manufacturing methods. But the Icon series also demonstrates, Lionel believes, the possibility of individualised designs which nonetheless retain an identifiable ‘meta design’. If this meta design were understood in terms of design language, it could be a powerful indication of the way in which traditional manufacturers might retain their brand image in a future where a huge increase in variation is possible.

Part of the Icon series of pendants © Future Factories

First of all, Spore has released it’s Creature Creator in advance of the full release of the game in early September, available as a trial version or for purchase. I’ve talked about Spore previously for the way it will introduce consumers to 3D design tools, as well as indicating a direction CAD software might take to simplify and guide the user through the creation of a product. But what’s also interesting is that the creatures being created by users now will be used in the game when it’s launched. In other words, the players of the game are creating the content of the game, and what’s more some of them (those who buy the full version of the Creature Creator) are paying for the privilege. It’s another example of the degree to which consumers are willing to engage with a brand’s product creation process if the experience is compelling. There’s a good discussion about the Creature Creator at Product Design Forums, plus a YouTube movie which shows how to design your own creature.

Second is an opinion piece entitled ‘Home Manufacturing in the Future‘ by Terry Wohlers, author of the annual Wohler’s Report into the state of the rapid prototyping / rapid manufacturing industry. Wohler’s view is that the future won’t see consumers printing products (or parts of products) at home because a) it’s cheaper to go buy a new product, b) the printer won’t be capable of using the right materials and c) the 3D data will be too complex to create or download. Instead, Wohlers believes, home manfacturing will see the rise of ‘mini factories’, in which start up businesses are able to build low-risk manufacturing plants in their basements or garages.

The example Wohlers uses is perhaps prejudicial to his argument: a toaster, which isn’t likely to be an item consumers see as highly desirable in terms of customisation, and which requires high performance plastics to withstand the heat. But primarily my problem with this viewpoint is that while it may actually be right, it’s for the wrong reasons. Home fabrication will fail to take off if the quality of product it’s possible to produce doesn’t match that of other manufacturing methods. That may be quality in a production sense, but also quality from a design, engineering or branding perspective. And even if that’s the case, it doesn’t exclude the possibility of consumers designing or customising based on existing products, and using these local factories purely as service providers to supply their bespoke parts.

Still on the theme of rapid manufacturing, July 9th and 10th sees the third International Rapid Manufacturing conference at Loughborough University. Speakers include Frank Piller on the theme of ‘Making Mass Customisation Work’; Dr Ian Campbell, who is my PhD supervisor, and whose presentation is entitled ‘Design for Rapid Manufacturing in an SME Environment’; and Lionel Dean of Future Factories, who’ll be discussing ‘the business issues surrounding the use of RM in design led consumer products.’

If you’re an industrial designer the chances are you’ll know of the Core77 website. A couple of weeks ago someone asked a question on the Core77 forum regarding ‘Personal fabrication and how it will impact ID‘, which sparked an interesting discussion. By which I mean the reaction of some of those posting was interesting: although the comments became a little less hostile as the discussion progressed, the overall tone was almost entirely negative. Here’s a few examples of the opinions expressed:

“A small percentage of consumers may want to choose colors on their sneakers, or push and pull a few points on a nurb surface for a cell phone, but you comment comes off as pretty ignorant as to what design actually is.”

“The rapid protoyping machine in many ways is no different than the hot glue gun, it allows crafters to excercise their wimsy and their perspective, some of wich is good, most horrid.”

“Myspace is a perfect example of what happens when you put design into the hands of everyone. A huge percentage of the pages on myspace are unusable/unreadable. Personal fabrication will be no different… on balance… a big, ugly mess.”

“you might be able to “design” a 1/2 decent product (brick, rock, ashtray) but can you spec, prototype, debug, and the rest of the whole list…nope didtn think so unless its in the ashtray world.”

It’s hardly surprising that practising designers believe themselves able to design better products that untrained consumers. But what I wasn’t necessarily expecting was the barely concealed contempt with which designers regarded those consumers’ attempts at creativity. These are, after all, the same consumers who are buying the results of those designers’ work; what does it say of a designer’s skill if products are selling to creatively illiterate users?

The other thing I found interesting was the refusal of some (though not all) to acknowledge that these technologies might change the way designers worked. I’ve always believed that it’s essential for designers to analyse and understand trends that will affect future society, but a number of posters seemed unwilling even to contemplate change in their own profession. Is the comment below a well considered opinion or just the hope that this is how things will be?

“Designers are not going anywhere and given the complexity of modern objects from footwear to gadgets, i don’t expect RP or other technology having any effect on democratizing design to a point where “everyone is a designer”.

Finally, on a somewhat lighter note, M&M’s have just launched an updated version of their custom candy service. It’s now possible to upload images, which a ‘graphic specialist’ will tweak in order to create an image which will print well on the small sweets. There’s not too many examples yet, but the My M&M’s service continues to be the best example I know of how customisation can add value to low cost items.

It’s virtually impossible to be interested in fabbing or mass customisation and not know about the cool stuff Ponoko are doing, both in enabling consumers to manufacture self designed products and in providing a marketplace for those products to be sold. And the news that they are establishing a global head office and manufacturing facility in San Francisco hopefully shows that Ponoko is already doing well enough to start expanding. I know I’m a bit late in posting about this announcement, but what I found especially interesting was the emphasis placed on the environmental benefits of this new set-up.

Ponoko has appointed Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, to its board of advisors, and writes in its press release that

“Being able to make products on-demand, close to where people live, reduces waste and cuts down on the carbon emissions associated with transporting products to consumers. Our facilities in San Francisco mean that we’re starting to see this become a reality in the United States, and the appointment of Graham to our board of advisors is a huge endorsement of Ponoko’s vision for a more sustainable approach to the way goods are created, made and delivered.”

In the original plan for my PhD I proposed to look at some of the environmental implications of rapid manufacturing. Unfortunately it’s one of the parts which has been shaved off as I focussed the research and got to grips with exactly what I’d taken on; indeed I’ve no doubt that there’s a whole PhD waiting for someone who’s interested in this area. But it’s still an issue I’m interested in, and up until now the positive possibilities of local manufacturing facilities isn’t something that had occurred to me.

The first, somewhat obvious reaction to the notion of consumer-oriented manufacturing is that it has to be a bad thing environmentally. If the means of production are brought closer to the end user, both physically and in terms of when manufacture occurs in relation to sale, production becomes easier and cheaper and so it’s necessarily valued less. As more things are produced, correspondingly more things will be discarded.

There are a number of reasons to question whether this will necessarily be the case though. The first, which seems to be talked about increasingly, is the possibility of using recyclable materials in the rapid manufacturing process. 3D printers such as those from Z Corp already recycle unused material within the machine, but in theory the part itself could be made from materials which can later be recycled, in the same way that conventional plastics or metals are recycled today. However this seems to me to be something of a false argument: whilst recycling discarded waste is a good thing, it’s undoubtedly better not to produce the waste in the first place. As such, arguing that recyclable materials will lead to more environmentally sustainable practices just avoids the issue of whether rapid manufacturing will lead to shorter life cycles for products.

A better argument to my mind, is that whilst some parts of a product might be discarded more often, other parts will be discarded less. In the consumer electronics field where my work is concentrating, consumers will replace products for three reasons – to gain access to new technology, for fashion, or because the product is broken. Where a consumer is replacing a product because they want the newest technology, rapid manufacturing may not have an answer, but in the other two circumstances it may in fact lead to a reduction in waste.

Reuters recently reported on a phenomenon it called ‘Urban Mining’ – recovering precious metals from the circuit boards of electronic waste, which has become increasingly lucrative as the price of gold, silver and copper has risen. According to the Yokohama Metal Co Ltd, a recycling firm quoted by Reuters:

A tonne of ore from a gold mine produces just 5 grams (0.18 ounce) of gold on average, whereas a tonne of discarded mobile phones can yield 150 grams (5.3 ounce) or more.

Scrap metal from discarded electronics products © Thomson Reuters

It’s an almost universal complaint that these days phones have too much functionality, a complaint that’s backed up by a report I remember seeing which showed that 80% of a typical phone’s features are used once or less by its owner. And yet still we’re seduced by the look of the latest model. Imagine if instead of replacing the entire phone you could change the entire look and feel by adding new covers, or other parts. The old ones might be thrown away, but the guts of the product, the technology which contains the lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury which are poisoning poorer regions of the world, would instead be retained.

A similar argument applies when it comes to products which are broken. Although it’s obviously annoying when a product breaks, the vast majority of certain kinds of consumer electronics (mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops, DVD players) are discarded long before they wear out. The exceptions tend to be those products where for whatever reason fashion plays less of a role in purchase decisions (refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens etc), and so it somehow becomes okay to hang onto them for longer. But even here, it’s rarely that the whole product is broken; the problem is that as a product gets older, the chance that the manufacturer continues to support it by making spare parts decreases. It can even be that repairing the product is more expensive (and almost certainly more hassle) than buying a new one – in the UK, Dyson vacuum cleaners are one of the few household products people take for repair. Undoubtedly this is partly due to the initial high cost of the machine relative to other cleaners, but it’s also encouraged by a five year warranty, together with Dyson’s commitment to continue manufacturing spare parts for all machines back to the first model made in 1993. In future, rapid manufacturing might further encourage products to be repaired rather than discarded, if for example Dyson only needed to make the 3D files for spare parts available for download, rather than keep inventory of old stock. Consumers might print spare parts themselves, or visit repair shops where parts could be printed and fitted the same day.

Dyson DC02 vacuum cleaner from 1995 © Dyson

There’s one final reason why rapid manufacturing may not lead to an increase in waste. In her PhD thesis, Ruth Mugge looked at reasons why people become attached to products, and why some products more than others. She argues that one way consumers develop an emotional attachment is through an involvement in the product’s design, or through customising the product during ownership. A product in which a consumer has invested time, thought and creativity becomes more valuable to that person, and consequently they are less likely to discard or replace it.

This brings us back to Ponoko again. Because in enabling people to design and manufacture their own products, it’s difficult to imagine those products are then discarded with as little consideration as something bought off the shelf. Even those who visit Ponoko just to buy designs that someone else has created are able to engage with the product’s story, and the designer behind it, in a way that is impossible in a normal purchasing experience. I’m still a long way from being convinced that rapid manufacturing will be good for the environment, but I’m starting to see why it might at least be better than the conventional methods of manufacture we have now.