A 3D Printer in Every Home

One of the most prevalent images in the mass conciousness about 3D printing is the image of a small MakerBot/Solidoodle appliance on a counter top in every home in America.  It's not hard to see why this image spreads so readily.  But I suspect the analogy people are intuitively using to forecast this image, namely the historical trajectory of the inkjet printer, fails us at some point in the process.

What I matters to this image of 3D printers as household objects is really a couple of linked things: advances in materials for additive manufacturing and the overall ease-of-use.

I don't think many people really dispute the need for a broader array of materials as feedstock to make 3D printing realize its very-hyped potential to fabricate most any object that can be designed.  Advances are clearly being made in this arena, but a think much more needs to developed to make these appliances truly versatile enough for the average household to become a must-have for each family.

On the ease-of-use side, we can in fact use the analogy of the inkjet printer to consider what needs to develop in order for 3D printers to be used by every household.  The modern, ubiquitous inkjet printer requires virtually no manual maintenance on the part of users, they are cheap to acquire, their feedstocks are widely available, and putting them to work requires very little technical know how on the part of users: just being able to write a Word document or double-click on a picture positions the user to making quick and easy use of their printer.

Essentially, 3D printers, as part of an ecosystem of allied services and products, will need to become equally easy for the average non-techy, non-maker enthusiast to use before this particular slice of technology can become ubiquitous at the level of the household.

How to Forecast the Futures of 3D Printing

3D printing (additive manufacturing) is pretty hype right now, anointed so not just by Gartner (see the top of the hype cycle below), but also by the proliferation of exuberant articles in mainstream publications over the last 18 months or so.  How are all these journalists and evangelists arriving at their images of the 3D printed future?  Truthfully, in most cases I’m not exactly sure, but I suspect that in a fair number of them folks have given over to expanding on intuitive extrapolations of what they’re seeing in front of them.

Gartner Hype Cycle Special Report 2013

Digital fabrication certainly looks poised to become a major component in our future economic systems, and additive manufacturing will clearly play a major role in any digital fabrication scheme.  Given the inherent appeal of 3D printing systems, how they decentralize (not democratize, as so many writers like to mistakenly say) the tools for fabrication and how they enable such freedom of creation, it is both easy and fairly logical to assume that 3D printing has some role in our future.

But how can one usefully think about the future evolution of 3D printing?  How can we generate useful images of 3D printing’s future? (by “useful” I mean both logical and insightful though not necessarily probable).

Well, let’s do a little exercise in forecasting.  In fact, let’s consider two different approaches to qualitatively forecasting the futures of 3D printing.  We will call the first method displacement analysis and the second coevolutionary forecasting.  The former method is based partly on assumptions about the expected uses of a new technology and focuses our thinking on the changes that have to happen for those uses to come about, and how our expectations themselves might have to change.  The latter method leaves the future more open-ended and focuses our attention on how a given technology will evolve in connection with related and/or necessary enabling technologies and systems.

The Displacement Analysis

In displacement analysis, we would first think about additive manufacturing in terms of the capabilities it presents and the applications for which people currently do and hope to use it.  Then we map these capabilities and applications against a picture of the systems and processes in place in society today.  What’s displaced?  What has to be reworked?  Where are the systemic connections that have to be made to make the technology work as hoped?  And socially and institutionally, what stakeholders are threatened, and which are empowered?  Where’s the push-back (and what forms would it take) and where’s the natural incentive for investment?

As a result, we redraw the picture of the industry or societal systems of which our new technology will be a part and we identify the types of changes that have to occur for that new picture to become a reality.  And in the process we are forced to think about how our expectations might be altered when confronted with the many forces and relationships in systems that influence both stability and change.  Having been forced to think so systemically, we can end up with a picture of the future different than the one with which we started out.

The Coevolutionary Forecast

Our second approach also asks us to see our new technology as part of an ecosystem, but rather than working backward from the systemic impacts of a new technology it progresses forward from today by asking how a new technology would coevolve with other developments.  In contrast with displacement analysis that is anchored by our assumptions or expectations for a technology’s future use, this method asks us to start by identifying related parts of the ecosystem and then to think about how these different but related technologies, institutions, and values would logically coevolve as developments and changes in each part feed back to the other parts.

Coevolutionary forecasting is therefore predisposed to producing timelines of change (what I have always thought of as coevolutionary change tracks).  In the process of doing this kind of forecasting we are often “following our nose” as it were, following sequences of interactions that can take us to fairly unexpected places.  And that really is the key value of this kind of forecasting: it provides a structure for finding unexpected or counter-intuitive pathways into the future.

And so, what then would be our two different forecasts for the future of 3D printing?  Well, that will just have to wait for second part of this piece…

Slides for the Verge general practice framework

Earlier this year I posted about the Verge general practice framework for futures studies, which is used by more and more futurists around the world to frame explorations into the future.

A couple of weeks ago I gave a lecture at Oxford University on Verge and with the help of Dr. Wendy Schultz and Andrew Curry put on a workshop for attendees to practice using Verge in group work.  The slides from that presentation are included below.

An Introduction to "Verge" from Richard Lum

As I said to the audience members at the lecture, I am continually amazed at the versatility of the framework and marvel at the range of uses to which field practitioners put it.

And I can't help but feel like I could tweak this framework just a little more...

Interesting Education Posts for 10/21/2013

One of our focus areas is the futures of learning, and one thing you learn (and learn pretty quickly) as you dive into this vast area, is the sheer breadth of issues that individuals and groups from across the country are trying to grapple.  And that is part of what makes the subject area both so challenging as well as interesting: it frankly is not easy or simple to "predict" the futures of either education or learning.  As much as some forecasters or pundits find it easy to see the future in something like MOOCs or workforce trends, the tensions, struggles, and realities of change in education and learning make "the future" a set of images that constantly shift.

One fun post regarding the future of college education came from John Tierney at The Atlantic: "What Would an Ideal College Look Like?  A Lot Like This."  For everyone engaged in the ongoing debate over the futures of universities and college education, this is a fun one that seems to showcase a college that incorporates many of the elements that reformers and the disaffected call for.

A second piece to check out would be the panel discussion around Amanda Ripley's book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, on C-SPAN's Book TV.  Ripley's book follows three American students abroad in the school systems of three countries: Finland, Poland, and South Korea.  Interesting discussion, and another angle on the issue of comparing/contrasting American high school education vs. "successful" systems abroad.

No Summit for 2013

Back in 2007 we started an annual event for Hawai'i's strategic thinkers called the Hawai'i Futures Summit.  We ran it in 2007 and 2008, skipped 2009 and 2010 during the worst of the economic downturn, and resumed it for 2011 and 2012.  Each year we bring down to Honolulu members of our global network to help facilitate two days of big picture thinking on the future of Hawai'i.

We had been planning on doing it this year, after having such a wonderful event last year, but we (fortunately) got entirely too busy as we progressed through the summer and I ultimately decided to cancel it.  With project going right now in education, for two different governments, and with our new content areas coming online, we simply didn't have the bandwidth to put on a good event.

For those of you have attended past Summits, we are talking about next year's event, so shoot over any ideas or requests.