8

Conclusion

It should be clear that the combination of robotic precision, computer graphics’ design freedom, algorithmic vetting, and expanded human experience is leading to many new possibilities for people to make things. Old shapes can be made with less lead time and/or closer to the point of use, new shapes become possible, and new materials (whether metals, plastics, proteins, or concrete formulations) can be used after being impossible or overlooked. Much of the news is good.

The luxury eyewear market includes several vendors selling 3D-printed frames; one such company is Monoqool, headquartered near Copenhagen, that sells super-light (10 gram) frames with screwless hinges.1 In pharmaceuticals, Aprecia received FDA approval for its 3D-printed pill called Spritam, which is able to dissolve extremely fast when patients take it for epilepsy and related conditions. It is the first commercially available drug to be manufactured via 3D printing,2 but the prospect of printed medicine raises the prospect of both personalized pills and easy counterfeiting. A restaurant in London called Food Ink is 3D printing all menu items and features 3D-printed cutlery and furniture.3 American Standard is selling high-end bathroom fixtures that are produced using additive manufacturing. The DVX line includes a subset devoted to designs that could not be manufactured using traditional techniques; prices are in the $17,000 range in 2018.4

The variety of these examples illustrates several key concepts. First, innovation is occurring in many domains, some (such as epilepsy medication) with great potential to improve human welfare. The low price of desktop printers that readily can be both obtained and modified lowers the barrier to many forms of experimentation and connects a wider variety of people with tools that can realize their visions. Decentralizing the productive infrastructure helps move manufacturing closer to particular markets. All of this should accelerate innovation.

Second, there is room for improvement when it comes to customer markets. A price of $17,000 is stunning for a bathroom faucet, and Adidas runs a risk in pricing the Futurecraft shoe at $300. Build speed is also slower than desired in everything from aircraft part fabrication to the food at experimental restaurants. Learning to print more than one drug compound will take years.

Finally, these early attempts at broad markets still don’t address the true strengths of additive manufacturing. High-fashion eyeglasses or faucets are clever but don’t solve a real problem (the way 3D-printed hearing aids do). What is the path from fast-dissolving pills to custom formulations? Will 3D-printed food at a trendy restaurant reduce food waste, help address malnutrition, or otherwise feed the hungry?

There is much to learn, and much that is overhyped. Optimal alloys and polymers have yet to be designed specifically for additive methods. Design skill and design toolboxes (software, hardware, and fabrication expertise) are still in scarce supply: many successful additive manufacturing stories were not “born digital,” but were carried over from a prior design/manufacturing regime. The “printing” metaphor obscures many realities of digital fabrication: the roles of support structures, post-processing, and complementary technologies such as CNC tooling do not figure into most of 3D-printing stereotypes. Changeover costs (between metals in particular) on the same machine can run into thousands of dollars, whether for an additional sifter, a fresh bed of powder, new filters, different gas in the chamber, or just a thorough cleaning of the entire build chain. Inventory levels can certainly drop, but metal or engineered plastic powder can cost 10× or 100× its solid equivalent. Mixed material printing may be fun with different color filaments on a toy-doll head, but it remains rare in production applications.

At the edges of research, printing human tissue and printing human organs are very different things; only the former is even remotely possible in 2018. For millions of urban migrants to live in 3D-printed housing, many things will need to happen: banks will lend money to support a building technology only if it is aesthetically and mechanically durable for decades. Structural engineers will need to understand how, why, and when these new kinds of structures will fail, emit harmful gases, or support parasitic populations, whether insects, birds, or mammals. Not least significantly, people will want to live in and personalize these mass-produced dwellings: how will these houses become homes?

These examples illustrate a larger issue: 3D printing only rarely can operate in isolation. Whether intentional or not, it will take years of systems thinking to approach all the ramifications, many of which are intertwined. Here is a brief sampling:

• • Where will designers learn how to make products and shapes that exploit the strengths of additive technologies rather than replicate what is known about subtractive or formative (mold-based) methods, often at higher cost and possibly with material disadvantages?
• • How will machine-makers design machines without knowing the state of available build materials, whether in tissue, polymers, nutritive proteins, or metal alloys?
• • How will metal-powder companies, medical supply houses, refineries, recyclers, and the rest of the materials supply chain optimize for build platforms that are still being tweaked and in some cases have not yet been invented?
• • How will testing agencies and certification authorities ranging from the FAA to the FDA to the International Building Code authority to EPA decide to regulate what goes into and comes out of these machines, whether waste, gases, or parts intended for some particular use?
• • Much like color copies of paper currency, are there some shapes that should not be printed? Or are there conditions (such as crime scene recreation) under which 3D printing is accepted and others where it is repugnant or illegal? If some governing body decides that some objects should never be printed, how is that mandate enforced?
• • Who is intellectually and professionally equipped to integrate additive manufacturing into conventional manufacturing work flows? Where will this integration happen first, fastest, and most successfully?
• • For consumer-grade printers to gain a wider audience, design and validation tools will need to get better and more accessible. As smartphones gain traction, meanwhile, the place of the home PC is evolving. Where will these trends converge?
• • Who ultimately stands behind the structural strength of a 3D-printed piece? The machine manufacturer? An engineer who signs off on a design? A testing firm, maybe similar to Underwriters Laboratories? A validation authority such as a building inspector or NIST?
• • How will adoption of 3D printing in various countries interact with the ebbs and flows of economic globalization? Despite 3D printing having early roots in the United States, current leadership appears to be dispersed, with Dutch, Japanese, and German firms (the latter building on a powerful machine-tool industry) in the vanguard. HP’s 3D-printer business is headquartered in Spain. How will Chinese firms affect the overall market?
• • What will be the unintended consequences?
• • What business models will emerge? Can machine-makers continue to compete with their customers by operating profitable print-to-order subsidiaries? Will the costs of printers, inputs, or both stabilize, drop, or possibly increase further?
• • Whether for assembling buildings away from earth, synthesizing food on the journey, or fabricating tools to fix things on the spacecraft, 3D printing figures prominently in the proposed expansion of humanity’s extraterrestrial presence. Will any of these scenarios ever come to pass?

However these questions are resolved, one thing remains clear: making things is a consummately human pursuit. This sea change in our ability to create has the potential to affect many, many aspects of our existence, from life expectancy to diet to how we learn. In the end, such a transformation in how we make will ultimately make us different.