I recently spoke at Worldcon about the future of design/engineering and manufacturing, along with Curtis Chen, Dr Deborah Munro and Dr Mark English. Needless to say, I felt very intimidated by the other intellects in the room!

Afterwards some people had follow up questions and also the recording went missing, so I figured I’d put all the answers and my notes in one place in case anyone is curious in the future.

3D Printing and how it will change things:

I have a more day-to-day relationship with 3D printers and manufacturing in general, as opposed to someone who’s developing new technology. My experience is more in practical applications than in experimental projects, so everything I’m about to say comes from that perspective and please know it’s just my opinion, there’s plenty of other conjecture out there.

The excitement of 3D printing is that the cost of making five similar parts is the same as making five identical parts.

This is against our traditional mass-manufacturing model, in which you make ten thousand of the same part to keep costs down. Being able to affordably produce unique parts has already opened up a huge swathe of opportunities for designers.

Also, the developments of 3D printing software came to influence other CNC manufacturing. So now 5-axis lathes and even very old 3-axis mills can be programmed much faster than before, making it cheaper to produce individual pieces or small runs for items that aren’t 3D printed.

Finally CAD (design and drawing) programs themselves are becoming increasingly scriptable, so everything is becoming more integrated.

This means that you’re looking at a potential future where instead of going to Ikea, you use an app to visualise furniture in your house (Pokemon Go style) and then you pick from a huge range of online designs. You pick the timber and enter the dimensions. These are fed into scriptable CAD, which feeds it to the CAM (computer aided machining), which programs the machines. Then the workers just have to feed in materials, finish the parts and pack your order like any other.

This is already possible. Whether it takes off will depend on marketing. Your iphone is sexy because Apple spent billions on marketing to make it sexy. The possibilities of customisation are there, but it will depend on business whether it becomes cool to have furniture that makes actually sense for your home or whether the whole world will continue to have the same IKEA dining table.

In summary: The next 30-40 years will see a bit of development, but it’ll mostly be guided along the same market forces. In the end, 3D printings greatest contribution may be software developments which have also influenced other CNC techniques, making smaller runs and customisation more viable.

3D Printed Food:

I wouldn’t want to be the first to taste it.

Why would you want to do this anyway? 3D printing is not inherently better than any other method of making something, in fact it’s generally worse.  A 3d printer might put nice icing on a cake or layer up a pyramid of caramel, but I don’t it making complicated food anytime soon, and I certainly don’t see it becoming an efficient cooking method for many many years.

That said, there’s an amazing story which explored the concept of making fake steak: A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

Multi-component printers:

If you zoom out, a factory is a multicomponent printer. Products are cut at one station, they are pressed at another station, they run through a die-cut at the next, then they go through finishing, etc. I’ve never been amazed by the concept of one machine which could do everything. It’s far more practical to simply put a series of machines in a conveyor system which some simple robotic arms and then use that to make what you want. After all each machine is a collection of parts, so the difference is pretty academic between “this is one machine” vs “this is a collection of machines.”

At the moment we substitute in human labour because it’s cheaper than robotic arms, and there’s always some cleaning out of off-cuts and topping up of oil etc which is easy to do manually than to automate.

In terms of size and traveling, maybe this factory stays packed up until its needed.

In terms of presentation, you can put a box over this automated factory and call it a Universal Fabricator, whalla, to the user’s point of view you have one machine that does everything.

As technology improves, the amount of individual machines you may need in your factory would decrease, along with its overall size and weight, but never to nothing, and the overall concept would remain the same.

New designs, making what we couldn’t before:

Biology grows things in a way which 3D printers come close to imitating. I’d say in the next 30-40 years, you’ll see people stealing from nature and using 3D printers to manufacture things we currently can’t.

An obvious example is the porous but very strong structure within bones. 3D printing a structure member like that is possible, but you don’t see it much. The reason is because our most accurate 3D printing methods (SLA and SLS) use a medium which is left stuck inside the bone. In SLA’s case this is the unhardened fluid, in SLS it is the unlasered powder. You’d have to put holes in the bones to remove this excess material and then that ruins their strength.

You can use FDM printers to make bones, but then you’re stuck with thermoplastics.

A precise CNC welder might be the most exciting way to go, creating metal bones. At the moment CNC welders are very messy but that could change, or maybe these bones are massive structure members used to hold up a building, so the messiness of the welds gets absorbed by their scale. We’ll have to see what we manage to get away with.

Sending fabricators into space / self-replicating probes:

It doesn’t have to be a magical machine. A colony is a fabricator. It will eventually be able to self-replicate – as long as it doesn’t die first.

You just need to give them (humans or drones) enough resources to survive up until the point their self-sufficient, then they can start mining and manufacturing whatever tools they need. They’ll be a certain minimum required to mine and smelt and make the first bits. Beyond that, the more advance tools you can bring, the faster they will get back to the tech level of the planet/station they left from.

This is true historically too. A colony landed, struggled, became self-sufficient, and then gradually got to the stage where it could also build ships or found new towns.

Future of Factories:

Essentially I see automation becoming increasingly more affordable, and human error and labour becoming increasing more costly, to the point where factories employ less and less human staff. This is simply a continuation of what’s been happening since the industrial revolution.

Beyond that, it’ll be much easier to make custom and bootleg items. You’ve heard of fake handbags. You can expect some fake iphones appearing soon.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you get fake pharmaceuticals too. America as portrayed in the Peripheral by William Gibson is the most believable near future world I think I’ve read in a while.

Thanks

That’s all my notes. Any questions please flick me a message. I hope to be able to present in more cons in the future.