In October 2009 LEGO Systems A/S of Billund, Denmark, updated its website with a new feature: LEGO Design byME. A refreshing of its prior mass customization capabilities, known as LEGOFactory, the new Design byME allows kids (and not a few adults) to design literally anything they want—a vehicle, an animal, an architectural wonder, an event, whatever it might be, in facsimile, replica, or newly created, imaginative form—and then after purchase have LEGO package up the exact bricks it takes to make that design and send it to them. Each set comes complete in a box whose image the customer can also design themselves and with a Building Guide that details how to build the design, brick by brick, on the family room floor—or, in our parlance, instantiate the virtual design in real space and actual time.
At the core of the offering is the LEGO Digital Designer, which can be downloaded from the site for free. As the designer, you select from almost 2,000 different elements (not just bricks, but minifigures, wheels, bases, tools, trees, and on and on they go), across over fifty colors (not all elements come in all colors, of course), and then decide exactly where to place each one, in the orientation and configuration you want, with such tools as cloning, hinging, hiding, coloring, and grouping that enable you to get what lies imaginatively in your head out figuratively onto the computer monitor. So you can plan, draft, tinker, and finally perfect your brick-based creation before ever lifting a physical element. Moreover, you can save templates and groupings to refer back to again and again, and even store completed designs to your private gallery on LEGO.com or display them in the Public Gallery. In this way you can show off your designs, which others in the greater LEGO community can find, download, modify, purchase, and build. (Family-friendly LEGO of course examines every design to ensure customers do not infringe trademarks or offend sensibilities.)
Hanne Odegaard, the director overseeing the offering, told us “the most important value we add with Design byME is empowering our consumers to tell their personal stories”—in other words, designing memorabilia for their own LEGO experiences. When we asked what consumers tended to create with the offering, after listing off quite a number of different kinds of models, she concluded, “The possibilities are endless.” Absolutely! In fact, if you do not believe there is any such thing as infinite possibility, we dare you to try out LEGO Design byME and find the limit.1
This duality of design and build sits at the heart of LEGO Design byME, one readily seen in how the LEGO Group promotes the offering on its website as the combination of two things: “Dreamt byME” and “Built byME.” Therein lies the essence of Physical Virtuality: virtual design resulting in physical creation. As seen in Figure 8.1, this realm takes an experience happening in a virtual place and then instantiates, or realizes, it in the real world. First you dream it, and then you build it.
This is the specialty of computer-aided-design (CAD) software.2 A pioneer in the field, Autodesk, based in San Rafael, California, sells AutoCAD and other software tools to designers all over the world for industrial, architecture, engineering and construction, and even media and entertainment applications. To commemorate not only its software but the successes of its customers, the company created the Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco. Open to the public one day a week while often used as an executive briefing center experience for potential clients, manager Jason Medal-Katz took both of us on a tour of the gallery, noting that the exhibits show how the company’s software “helps designers turn ideas into reality” amid “unlimited possibilities.”
He further said how once Autodesk announced it would create the gallery, its customers came out of the woodwork to have their designs be the ones on display. (Actually, not their designs, which remain virtual, but the physical manifestations of those designs in the real world of the gallery!) Ford donated a Shelby Cobra GT500, South Africa’s ADEPT Airmotive, a high-performance airplane engine; Herman Miller a Mirra chair; and, interestingly, the LEGO Group a dinosaur, cut out on one side so visitors can see its construction, from one of its LEGOLAND theme parks. The Danish company actually uses Autodesk software to ensure that its own mega models not only can be built but can stand up on their own without support—something its own Digital Designer does on a smaller scale for LEGO Design byME users.
Figure 8.1 Physical Virtuality
Medal-Katz also pointed out a statement printed on the wall that not only epitomizes Autodesk’s capabilities but also exemplifies the very spirit of Physical Virtuality:
Design has never played a more important role in turning change into opportunity. Everyday, Autodesk customers are recreating the world around us and how we experience it—from new and innovative processes to things never before seen. This gallery showcases some of that daring work and illustrates the ways an idea can become real.
Ideas, conceived in imagination but impossible without digital technology, can, like Velveteen rabbits, become real.
Perhaps the quintessential technology that even further defines Physical Virtuality is 3D printing. Think of inkjet printers, which shoot out multicolored streams of ink onto two-dimensional paper. Slightly simplified, 3D printing adds the third dimension of height, where instead of ink, the printer deposits onto a base plastics or resins with dimensionality to them; the material grows layer by layer and eventually hardens into a physical object. Pioneered by such companies as 3D Systems of Rock Hill, South Carolina, Object Geometries of Rehovot, Israel, Stratasys of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and Z Corporation, based in Burlington, Massachusetts—the name refers to the third dimension in the standard mathematical notation for spatial axes: X, Y, and Z— industrial businesses use 3D printing for rapid prototyping, not only imagining but seeing and feeling what a proposed product or part would be like. They can test it, redesign it, and then produce another prototype, much more quickly than with any other method, for as much iteration as it takes to get it exactly right. As David Reis, CEO of Object Geometries, puts it: “Now engineers can think of an idea, print it, hold it in their hand, share it with other people, change it and go back and print another one. Suddenly design becomes much more innovative and creative.”3 Architects use 3D printing not only for design but to demonstrate designs to clients. Other businesses, such as those in jewelry, health care, and art, use it to produce a final product. And combined with 3D scanning, still others use it to replicate existing objects, such as fossils, archaeological artifacts, or bones.
Physical Virtuality, as exemplified by its name, lies at a crossroads between the real and the virtual, because that which in the end people experience in Reality first must be envisioned in Virtuality, with the connecting tissue of being modeled in Physical Virtuality. As Charles Overy, founder of LGM, a building modeler based in Minturn, Colorado, puts it, “We are moving from handcraft to digital craft.” 4 Perhaps the first person to put this ideal in motion with 3D printers was Janne Kyttanen, who in 2000 founded Freedom of Creation in Amsterdam to commercialize his own personal designs, freeing him to create art and artifacts he could never produce before.
FigurePrints, based in Vancouver, Washington, does things a bit differently, making real what already exists in Virtuality—specifically, World of Warcraft (WoW) avatars. It was founded in 2007 by Ed Fries, who as head of Microsoft Games Studio cofounded the Xbox project and is himself one of over 10 million WoW players. Players go to the company’s website, choose their particular character type from among the scores within the game, and customize its armor, weapons, base, and even the particular pose and expression. Once the player is satisfied, the design goes through pre-processing using Autodesk 3D Studio Max before being printed by a Z Corp printer (with technology licensed from MIT, Z Corp has the only printers in the industry that can deposit in color). The value for World of Warcraft players was so high that over 100,000 of them almost immediately signed up for FigurePrints, which had to use a lottery to determine who would get their figures first. Why? Well, as explained by Desktop Engineering reporter Susan Smith, “With thousands of hours invested in this game, players seek the items to add to their collections but until now this experience has always been virtual.”5 And with the FigurePrint watching over and inspiring a player’s performance, the experience becomes real.
Of course, this general concept of making the virtual real applies to more than what can be printed with resins and plastics. Contour Crafting, invented by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of USC, involves a truck-sized 3D printer to build houses made out of plaster, concrete, and clay. Portland advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, in concert with StandardRobot and Deeplocal (self-described as “a post-digital shop that helps brands create remarkable experiences that bridge the online and physical worlds”6), both of Pittsburgh, built a “Chalkbot” for a Nike campaign. It prints phrases contributed via SMS message on the ground in pixilated chalk for occasions such as at the Tour de France in support of Livestrong. According to Jeff Benjamin, chief creative officer at Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colorado, it’s an example that the “digital is breaking out of the computer screen and into the real world.”7
Scents can now be harvested, analyzed, and deconstructed by perfumers who then build their perfumes molecule by molecule.8 Meanwhile, the science of molecular gastronomy9 allows chefs to create food experiences all but unimaginable a few years ago. For example, Homaro Cantu, owner and chef of Moto in Chicago and a pioneer in the field, modified an inkjet printer to shoot out food-based inks onto edible paper, enabling wondrous new multisensory dishes. I (Joe) once took a client to Chicago for an Experience Expedition that included dining at Moto. The evening’s courses were listed on a menu that, once we had perused it, we were encouraged to eat. One of the courses was a Cuban sandwich that looked exactly like a Cuban cigar, with the edible “COHIBA, Habana Cuba” label printed using the same technique.
Researchers at Cornell University are working on a 3D food printer for the home,10 but the most amazing example of Physical Virtuality goes far beyond all this: regenerative medicine company Organovo of San Diego collaborated with the engineering firm Invetech of Melbourne to create a “3D bio-printer” called NovoGen. It can deposit living cells, cultured from bone marrow and fat cells extracted from the individual patient, layer-by-layer with a scaffold to shape the cells properly and let them grow together.11 Organovo CEO Jack Murphy says, “Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio-printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D. Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth. Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have … the ability to make three-dimensional tissues on demand.”12
It’s also worth mentioning the ability of dentists to make three-dimensional tooth reconstructions on demand, because the method, known as CEREC (for CERamic REContstruction), uses subtractive technology rather than the additive technology of 3D printing. In this process, pioneered by Sirona Dental (a Siemens spinoff based in Bensheim, Germany), dentists capture an image of the actual tooth needing repair and that image is used to create a virtual model of the reconstruction. The digitized rendering is then sent to an in-office milling machine where a porcelain block is cut down, atom by atom, to a crown that perfectly matches the original tooth.
All of these examples illustrate the apex of Physical Virtuality: treating atoms as bits, where matter becomes programmable via virtual design and its physical instantiation.
This ability to customize an offering on demand for an individual customer and produce it on an efficient, noncraft basis is known as Mass Customization: efficiently serving customers uniquely. This term was coined by Stan Davis once again in his book Future Perfect.13
When Davis first wrote about it in 1987, Mass Customization was considered an oxymoron. And when I (Joe) wrote my book on the subject in 1993, it was, as the subtitle stated, “The New Frontier in Business Competition.”14 Today it is fast becoming an imperative. Although Lutron Electronics Corporation of Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, has been mass customizing lighting controls for over 40 years, and other businesses, such as LensCrafters and FedEx, could not exist without it, there has been an explosion in the past decade of mass customizers. Many of these are well-known companies who have added this capability to their offerings. These include such big players as Adidas, Nike, and McGrawHill. But the capability for mass customization has given rise to many new companies birthed in the capability as well, such as Zazzle, CafePress, Chocri, Spreadshirt, and Blank Label in goods; Peapod, LegalZoom, and Netflix in services; and Pandora in experiences.15 Carmen Magri, CEO of chocolatier Chocri, calls such businesses “design-your-own companies.”16 MilkOrSugar, a “custom shopping portal” from Amsterdam-based Ilumy, lists 312 customized products (all physical goods) from companies it has vetted across twelve categories.17
The core principle they all share to one degree or another is modularity: breaking apart the offering (whether a good, service, experience, or even potentially a transformation18) into a set of interchangeable elements that can be reconfigured, dynamically linked together to create different offerings for different people. Mass Customization is not about being everything to everybody—a surefire way to increase costs along with complexity. No, it is about doing only and exactly what each individual customer wants. Modularity (modules + linkage system) enables external combinations to far outpace internal complexity, thereby lowering costs to the point that they are on par with Mass Production (sometimes higher, sometimes about the same, and sometimes even lower, particularly when demand is highly variable, the underlying technology changes quickly, or finished goods inventory costs are high).
When you think of modularity, think once again of LEGO building bricks. What can you build with LEGO elements? Anything! Anything you want, because of the huge number of modules of different sizes, different shapes, and different colors, plus the simple and elegant linkage system for snapping them together.
Of course, the frequent mistake mass customizers make is that they overwhelm people with too much choice, exposing them to all of the possibilities in such a way that their eyes glaze over and they throw up their hands and give up. Always remember that customers do not want choice, they just want exactly what they want. Your job is to present the possibilities to them in a way that they can figure out what they want—even if they do not know what that is or cannot articulate it. This is the task of design tools.
Put simply, design tools match customer needs with company capabilities. More than configurators—common in complex, industrial sales situations—that merely let customers choose among options by description or product code, design tools must be visual, showing customers and letting them experience the differences between options, the possibilities across modules, the appropriateness and efficacy of the chosen offering.
Consider NedSense enterprises n.v. of Amsterdam. This software provider has served the fashion and textiles industry for over thirty years, providing behind-the-scenes CAD/CAM tools to help designers create their offerings. As it saw more and more of its customers shift toward mass customizing those offerings to distributors, retailers, and consumers, it took the opportunity to lead them in the shift. So it created LOFT, a room and fabric design tool the company calls an “experience engine,” to help its customers reach their customers in order to show off, as CEO Pieter Arts told us, “the endless possibilities for people to visualize and share their ideas.”
The LOFT experience begins with a digital photograph of a room, either one supplied by the company or one of a consumer’s room in her own house. With a few clicks and a lot of processing, the experience engine figures out where the corners of the room are so it can convert the 2D image into a 3D virtual place. The consumer roughly outlines each piece of furniture, which the engine uses to precisely determine their locations within the 3D room. After just a minute or two, the consumer is ready to dream. She can move the furniture around, replace it with other pieces, add a rug, change the curtains, try out new fabrics, all with an easy click. The most amazing part of LOFT’s patented technology is its ability to erase an existing fabric on a real piece of furniture (or rug, or curtain, or dress, or anything else that can be made from fabric) and replace it perfectly, so that everything—its curving, its warp and woof, its highlights, its shadows—looks real.
While NedSense initially made LOFT particular to its area of expertise—fabric and textiles—many companies have built general-purpose software that can provide the basis for design tools across any number of industries: design-tool provider cyLEDGE Media GmbH of Vienna maintains a Configurator Database that lists over 600 different Web-based configurators, many of them incorporating full visuals.19 Many companies use Adobe Flash and more recently Adobe Scene7 to provide visual flair to the online design experience,20 but to quicken the pace of interaction and enhance the visual experience, Treehouse Logic of Menlo Park places the entire design tool in the browser—including the rules engine, data, and visuals, which integrate with its customers backend e-commerce platforms and Enterprise Resource Planning systems. Consumers can therefore play around with designs very rapidly, without the system having to make the user wait while it goes back to a server for additional information or visuals. Rickshaw Bagworks of San Francisco employs Treehouse Logic for its messenger-bag customizer, proclaiming it enables “Endless possibilities styled by you.”21
Interestingly, a few companies are creating design tools, often called “virtual mirrors,” that encompass the adjacent realm of the Multiverse, Augmented Virtuality. Paris-based FittingBox, for example, enables eyewear manufacturers such as Luxottica, Ray-Ban, and Krys to let consumers see what they would look like in a pair of glasses before they are produced or shipped—with the consumers’ own head serving as the physical trigger for the webcam-based virtual try-on experience. Hanulneotech Co., Ltd., of Daegu, South Korea, provides a number of similar tools, including those for virtual hair styling, masks, and, strangely, gold crowns. Its tagline is “Virtual becomes Real,”22 which is apt even though the Virtual is Augmented by matter. (And, yes, both of these companies mistakenly use the term “Augmented Reality” to describe their offerings.)
Ridemakerz has built its entire business model around a virtual world as design tool. Its RZ Virtual Experience lets kids (mostly boys) design, race, and play with virtual cars on racetracks, the open road, in pit crews, and even a wrecking zone. Each kid can then buy the vehicle he designed, which Ridemakerz (formed with significant investment from Build-a-Bear Workshop) mass customizes and ships out for real-world play. As CEO Larry Andreini says, “It’s the experience of being able to go online and use an immersive environment and gameplay to try things on or put different wheels on to test performance and play with it and then press the button and turn it into the real toy. We can do that globally without investing to have 300 stores. The viral effect of the virtual world and Internet is the force.”23
In many situations, such visual design tools are not enough. If it is for an intangible, memorable, or effectual offering—service, experience, transformation—customers may need to experience the possibilities with auditory, tactile, and perhaps other sensory feedback, with the fourth dimension of time (think of 4D as X, Y, Z, and t) added to pre-experience experiences. Even if the offering is a tangible good, these additional facets can be of great benefit. It would be one thing to merely view a custom-designed vehicle, and another experience entirely to fly around it from any angle, zoom inside it, and smell the leather of the seats as you pass through the window to feel the texture of the steering wheel.
Design tools for inherently personal experiences or intrinsically individual transformations remain few because few companies mass customize such offerings; they are largely craft produced today. One experience example: roller coaster simulators such as at DisneyQuest outside of Walt Disney World and at LEGOLANDs around the world. In 2010 Disney added the Sum of all Thrills ride to the INNOVENTIONS pavilion in Epcot. Sponsored by Raytheon, it lets guests design their own ride on a multitouch table using mathematical rules and engineering tools—it’s not a simple Option A or Option B configurator. When they’ve chosen their particular custom ride among the 1.4 million permutations, they can visually see what the experience will be like on the screen and then go experience it for themselves on the RoboSim 4-D Simulator made by KUKA Robotics Corporation of Augsburg, Germany.
Interestingly, Walt Disney Imagineering produced its own 4D project software for building the complex, story-laden rides for which it is known. First used to create Expedition Everest at Animal Kingdom and since spun out to another company for commercialization, the software takes the concept of a static design tool to embrace changes over time:
By marrying an architect’s 3-D, computer-aided design images with planning software that tracks construction schedules in real time, Disney can create a virtual “movie” of the Expedition Everest project. This 4-D software—the fourth dimension being time—breaks down a 3-D image of a project into millions of pieces of data and then reassembles it step-by-step, in the sequence in which the structure will be built, to visualize how it will all come together.24
While mass customizers now customarily use design tools for goods, we need more such tools to envision higher-order offerings. As Stanford Professor Martin Fischer, an expert in 4D visualization who aided in the software development of Disney’s tool, said, “The nice thing is that it makes sure that what’s inside your head looks the same as what’s inside my head.”25—which then yields an experience inside of the guest’s head.
Ideally, you want to make the design of the offering, no matter the genre, an experience unto itself, as many people value designing and making their own offerings almost as much as having and using them. That’s one reason there has been such a push in the past decade or more of a do-it-yourself (DIY) movement in technology. For although we will see additional 4D design tools once more experiences and transformations move out of Craft Production and into Mass Customization, today craft producing one’s own technology-infused goods is an experience for many people.
Many websites cater to the DIY crowd, including Etsy, a marketplace for handcrafted goods; CustomMade, a clearinghouse for woodworking and furniture artisans; Scrapblog, a community for scrapbookers; Instructables, a sharing site for documenting what people like to do and how to do it; and, at the epicenter of this “maker movement,” Makezine, the online manifestation of Make magazine from O’Reilly Media of Sebastopol, California. The website, the quarterly magazine, and its annual Maker Faire event all promote hobbyists who use off-the-shelf and personally crafted technology to make real their own imaginings. Make, whose slogan is “Technology on your time,” is written by makers for makers, although many lack the resources or equipment to realize fully their ideas.
Many companies have stepped up to provide such resources. Ponoko of Wellington, New Zealand, calls itself “the world’s easiest making system.” From its website: “Ponoko is an online marketplace for everyone to click to make real things. It’s where creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers meet to make (almost) anything.”26 It works with digital fabrication sources (including not only 3D printers but laser cutters, etc.) around the world in order to produce close to customers, reduce shipping costs, and lessen the environmental impact. Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Shapeways was spun out of the Lifestyle Incubator of Royal Philips Electronics to help designers realize their own creations; its website asks, “Have you ever wanted to turn your 3D designs into reality? Enter Shapeways, we create physical models of your digital designs!”27 Much more than that, it helps connect those designers with consumers who might like the same creations, generally customized to their own specifications, before being 3D printed on the company’s Z Corporation ZPrinter 650.
Of course, a 3D printer alone does not a maker make. So enter TechShop, which employs the motto “Build Your Dreams Here.” The chain of DIY facilities, with its first workshop lying at the heart of Silicon Valley in Menlo Park, provides members with access to the sorts of tools and equipment that they do not tend to have lying around the house—3D printers, milling machines and lathes, laser and plasma cutters, drill presses and band saws, and just about anything else that Wired columnist Clive Thompson categorizes as “atom-hacking tools.”28 Members also can also take workshops and classes from “Dream Coaches” and join with a community of fellow hobbyists to acquire the skills necessary to build what they had only dreamt, whether just for themselves, as a craft hobby to sell to others, or as the precursor to the dream of a big business that just needs to get off the ground.
CEO Mark Hatch told us to think of TechShop as a health club, except it uses tools and workshop equipment instead of exercise gear. “We help people make the things they dream up, but don’t have the tools, space, or skills to accomplish on their own. And we make sure that every visit to TechShop is its own unique and engaging experience.”
As digital technology continues to slide down the slope of Moore’s Law and becomes more affordable, TechShops could spring up all over the place, putting such technology within the reach of nearly everyone. As Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, said in a blog post contemplating that day, “How far off is a future in which the creative economy overflows the thin boundary that separates ‘information’ from ‘stuff’?”29
That boundary diminishes every day, and even now seems pretty permeable. Where will all this take us? As in so many other arenas, science fiction shows the way: we’re heading to the day when in our own homes we have available functionality like that of the replicator from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This device physically creates anything a crewmember might ever need—based on virtual specifications lying inside the ship’s computer, ready to be called up and customized on command—from a spare part to keep the old spaceship running to, say, a cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot.30 Amazingly, it is here in the realm of Physical Virtuality where actual realization may be closest to fictional representation, for fabrication laboratories, or fab labs, are a here-and-now technology.
The biggest proponent, and foremost researcher, of fab labs is Neil Gershenfeld, the head of MIT’s wonderfully named Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), who says he is squarely “aiming at making the Star Trek replicator.”31 Although originally limited to prototypes of real products, thanks largely to the research and application of Gershenfeld and his colleagues and students, it is now being used to create real products, even electronic devices with their own digital circuitry.
Gershenfeld’s describes the CBA, which every year holds the open class “How To Make (Almost) Anything,” as “a group of people like me who never understood the boundary between physical science and computer science.”32 Following that to its logical conclusion, he writes in Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication:
The universe is literally as well as metaphorically a computer. Atoms, molecules, bacteria, and billiard balls can all store and transform information…. At the intersection of physical science and computer science, programs can process atoms as well as bits, digitizing fabrication in the same way that communications and computation were earlier digitized. Ultimately, this means that a programmable personal fabricator will be able to make anything, including itself, by assembling atoms.33
No wonder science fiction writer and technology commentator Bruce Sterling, in Wired magazine, calls this capability “The Dream Factory,”34 an apt epithet for the possibilities that lie within Physical Virtuality!
Gershenfeld’s Center for Bits and Atoms is not the only place working on this vision, either. Desktop Factory, a subsidiary of 3D Systems, aims to bring down the cost of 3D printers enough—like laser printers before them, which similarly started as scarce, expensive, shared resources—so every designer who wants one can afford one. eMachineShop—whose founder, Jim Lewis, says he also was inspired by Star Trek’s replicator (in yet a second Wired piece entitled “The Dream Factory”)35—lets you access all its tools for cutting, shaping, and bending metal and plastic over the Web. CloudFab, of Pittsburgh, aims to let people access excess digital fabrication resources wherever they reside “in the cloud” that is the Internet. And not to be outdone by the commercial sector, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, operates an advanced research project called Programmable Matter whose purpose “is to demonstrate a new functional form of matter” that “can reversibly assemble into complex 3D objects upon external command.”36
Gershenfeld finds all of this truly revolutionary:
The past few centuries have given us the personalization of expression, consumption, and computation. Now consider what would happen if the physical world outside computers was as malleable as the digital world inside computers. If ordinary people could personalize not just the content of computation but also its physical form. If mass customization lost the “mass” piece and became personal customization, with technology better reflecting the needs and wishes of its users because it’s been developed by and for its users. If globalization gets replaced by localization.
The results would be a revolution that contains, rather than replaces, all of the prior revolutions. Industrial production would merge with personal expression, which would merge with digital design, to bring common sense and sensibility to the creation and application of advanced technologies….
That will happen.37
How does he know? Because it already has happened, not just at MIT but in sixteen fab labs around the world networked together through the Fab Academy.38 Fab labs may cost around $50,000 apiece today, but as Gershenfeld predicted in an interview in his office, that will come down soon to $5,000. He foresees the capability of that omni-inspiring Star Trek replicator in as little as fifteen or twenty years. And if—excuse us, when—that happens, it truly will be beyond Mass Customization as described above. It will indeed be highly personal customization,39 or as Gershenfeld puts it elsewhere, “It’s stuff”—viewing that term in all the physical, material, atomic meaning of the word—“for a market of one.” 40 Being able to continually and efficiently innovate offerings of one for markets of one—what could be called Continuous Invention—is the next step in the evolution of business competition, which began with Craft Production, shifted to Mass Production after the Industrial Revolution, then to Continuous Improvement with the rise of Total Quality Management and Lean Production, and then on to Mass Customization in the past few decades.41
Continuous Invention. That’s where we are headed with Physical Virtuality, whose essence lies in the imaginings of virtual design instantiated in the physical stuff of atoms. Or as Gershenfeld so beautifully sums it up, “Personal fabrication will bring the programmability of the digital worlds we’ve invented to the physical world we inhabit.” 42
To make that happen in your company, for your individual customers, follow these principles:
∞ Create a way for your customers to design virtually what they want to create physically. Help them dream it, and then help them build it.
∞ Think in particular about how you could use the quintessential technology of 3D printing to help them realize their dreams.
∞ Go beyond that to consider all varieties of atom-hacking tools that might apply in your business.
∞ For new business opportunities, seek out what already exists only in Virtuality that you could help make physical. This includes not only things in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft but anything from the world of entertainment; companies have already made real such virtual brands as the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. from Forrest Gump, Duff Beer and Kwik-E-Mart from The Simpsons, and Stay Puft Marshmallows from Ghostbusters.43
∞ You can also use all these tools yourself to make prototypes for engineering purposes or as models for marketing purposes.
∞ Invent what has yet to be dreamt. If the replicator can inspire not only fab labs but also Cantu’s rather narrow purpose of edible paper (although he aspires to use it “to deliver food to the masses that are starving”44), what could it inspire you to create, in your industry, for your customers? If we can even print human organs in three dimensions, for goodness sake, what other inventions would further humanity and edify us as individuals?
∞ But remember that Physical Reality is a realm, not a technology. Technologies, again, are mere tools we invent to fulfill human purposes. So as with every realm, always employ technology on behalf of your customers, in a way that creates value for customers by helping them fulfill their purposes.
∞ Mass customize your offerings to give your customers exactly what they want at a price they are willing to pay.
∞ To do that, modularize your offerings, breaking them down into constituent elements, or modules, and develop a simple, elegant linkage system for snapping them together.
∞ Think and work especially hard to mass customize experiences and transformations, for companies do precious little with these offerings today. And no matter what your industry, you can create value in these higher-order offerings beyond what you can get for mere goods and services.
∞ Create a design tool to match customer need with company capability—and thereby avoid the mistake of overwhelming your customers with too much choice.
∞ Although much already is going on in both special-and general-purpose design tools, conceive of new sorts of design tools that go beyond today’s state of the art. Think especially about applying the other realms of the Multiverse, as some already apply Augmented Virtuality for such tools. For experiences and transformations, do not forget the dimension of time, as the former are revealed over a duration of time and the latter must be sustained through time.
∞ Make the using of your design tool itself an experience.
∞ Embrace the do-it-yourself, or maker, movement. What can you help customers do themselves? What places, networks, or websites could you create that helps them create?
∞ Help make the fab-lab future a reality. What might your company do to realize this vision, whether by embracing Continuous Invention as your own business model or by helping your customers make it their business (or personal) model?
∞ And then when all is said and done, you might even think to celebrate your customers’ virtual designs made real, à la the Autodesk Gallery at One Market.
Saul Griffith, who got his PhD under Gershenfeld and works on the DARPA project mentioned earlier (and, oh by the way, created the Instructables website), founded Otherlab in San Francisco to bring to market, among other bountiful ideas, offerings based on computational manufacturing and programmable matter. When surveying everything going on in the greater arena of technology invention, he told Inc. magazine, “The business landscape looks like infinite possibility.”45
There is indeed infinite possibility lying within Physical Virtuality (as there is within each and every realm of the Multiverse). Opportunities go well beyond physical goods, to also making real intangible services, memorable experiences, and effectual transformations. Search broadly for possibilities to engage customers in a virtual place you make for them, such as a design tool made to complement and stimulate their imagination, in order that they may construct what moments before existed only in their minds. But if you are a manufacturer of goods that does not yet mass customize its offerings or work with its customers virtually, this is the one realm you can no longer ignore. And for everyone else, it is a realm in which to dream big; for in realizing your dreams, you may just find a way to help your customers realize theirs.
