3D printing vs. digital fabrication

"What Does The Future of 3D Printing Look Like?" is an article from Techpublic this morning and it is a good example of the distinction we need to make between 3D printers and the broader suite of technologies that make up digital fabrication.  For example even a quick glance through your typical makerspace reveals that the 3D printer is but one of a range of tools and expertise brought to bear on the creative challenge of making truly amazing things.

Thinking about economic futures...

After yesterday's round-up of articles related to economic futures, I spent the early part of my morning thinking more on what the landscape of economic changes looks like today.

For those of who attended the 2012 Hawai'i Futures Summit, you will be familiar with my framing of the Infinite Economy.  For those of you who aren't, you can check out yesterday's post or the 2012 slide deck on slideshare.  The Infinite Economy looks at the full breadth of changes occurring in the world that, collectively, will shape economic life.  In this way the Infinite Economy looks much farther afield than just one or two developments, say 3D printing or renewable energy.  And in it there's a graphic that conceptually tries to see all the elements of this "landscape" (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: the Infinite Economy

In reflecting on this image this morning, I started to list some of the big trends and emerging issues that are found within the Infinite Economy and which people are discussing today.  The list began with:

• Automation
• Digital fabrication
• DIY movement
• Maker movement
• Social financing
• Alternative currency
• M2M/internet of things/ubicomp

A comprehensive list would of course be huge, but after just getting this far I started thinking in a new direction.  Switching to a layered view, I started to list some of the major trends, but also started to add some of the change dynamics that are relevant to anticipating economic futures (Figure 2).

Figure 2: initial iteration of a layered view

In starting to draft this visual I soon realized (and was reminded of) a number of things:

1. This image will need a lot more time and effort to capture enough of the different dynamics of which I think people need to be aware
2. I need to switch to my preferred 11x17 page size :)
3. Thinking about economic futures today truly requires a global perspective.  An exploration that simply focuses on, say, the American scene, will overlook critical shifts and interdependencies shaping economic life
4. And this requires a much more systemic perspective than I think we've traditionally employed when thinking about the "economy"
5. Partly because there seem to be changes occurring on so many levels and across some many domains/boundaries, employing only an "economics" viewpoint will not provide real insight
6. Considering economic futures today requires a practice of zooming in and out to see the different kinds of change dynamics underway (future iterations of Figure 2 will illustrate this point)

Economic futures round up for Thanksgiving

Because everyone has nothing better to do today than hang around on the web reading articles, I've included below a few good articles that bear on economic futures (not to be confused with the stock market term).

1. "A Skeptic's Guide to 3D Printing": as I was saying on Twitter a couple of days ago when this article got posted, this is the best starting point for exploring the futures of 3D printing I have seen yet. And as I've said in previous posts, in its full suite digital fabrication clearly will play in interesting role in rewiring some of our economic life, but the current hype around 3D printing is animated a bit more by people's excitement and imagination than by critical examinations of the development and diffusion of a new technology, which is something this article does well.
2. "Google Enters 3D Printing Arena": Follow the digital fab vein, this short article as an announcement about a development agreement between Google (dba Motorola Mobility LLC :) ) and 3D Systems to build a high speed digital fabrication and fulfillment system to support Motorola's mobile device customization project, Project Ara.  As a colleague has often said, take a quick peek at anything Google gets into.
3. "The Reluctant Visionary": This is a review-of-sorts of Eric Drexler's new book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, which returns us to an examination of what Drexler now calls "atomically precise manufacturing."  Nanotechnology has had its own massive hype in decades past, but in various forms the science and engineering continue to advance and, as always, the promise of what manipulation at the atomic level could mean for human economy is nothing short of revolutionary.
4. "How Google's "Deep Learning" Is Outsmarting Its Human Employees": The last article is from Fast Company and takes us back to Google and into the realms of neural networks and machine learning to look at how Google's system for deep learning is evolving capacities to distinguish objects in the world around it that it's programmers never provided.  Augmentation of human capabilities with machines and the replacement of human effort with machine effort, both fundamental aspects of technological change since the beginning, will of course portend even greater changes in economic life.

And for our early work from last year on framing many of these larger economic shifts:

The Infinite Economy from Richard Lum

A better forecast for 3D printing

Today I was pleasantly surprised to come across what is by far the best example of proper forecasting regarding the future of 3D printing that I have seen yet.  It's an article titled, "A Skeptic's Guide to 3D Printing," from of all places, Booz & Company.

In particular, I like the authors' employment of well-documented patterns of change to develop their sense of the future potential and time horizon for 3D printing: experience curves, economies of scale, and total landed cost.  Would that more folks would employ some of these models when contemplating the future of emergent issues and technology.

Having said this, I also offer that this is an excellent example of how good forecasting, particularly that which aims beyond a three year horizon, should begin.  Beyond what these authors have presented there are a number of additional models that could and should be brought to bear in considering the multiple possible trajectories that 3D printing could follow.

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…