Category Archives: Online Creation

3D Printing Spawns a New Breed Of Startups

December 20, 2011 –

David Minich started in 2011 his company Make Eyewear to solve his problem that he could not find any glasses he liked. Now his company delivers designer glasses and personalized glasses – or Freestyle glasses as he calls them – as well. You can order their glasses online. What is interesting is that he uses 3D printing via Shapeways to produce the frames and assembles them before shipping them to customers. There is a great background article on Make Eyewear at Fast Co.Design.

What I like about the story is that it shows two things. First it shows that 3D printing makes startup companies who produce physical goods possible. And second that 3D printing can be used as a manufacturing technology.

Where the internet and open source software have significantly reduced the cost for startups to create online services 3D printing is doing the same for manufacturing. Startups look for product-market fit and need to quickly iterate through product designs based on customer feedback and behavior. The internet and web sites support this type of company development. But the same applies to 3D printing. An entrepreneur can quickly develop and manufacture a design without a lot of upfront investment. He can continuously update the design throughout product-market fit stage of the company.

In existing manufacturing there are two major drawbacks and that is the upfront investment – to create tooling and molds etc. – and lead time – assuming you produce overseas. Both are not helping entrepreneurs to get as fast possible to product-market fit.

Make Eyewear is showing that you can use 3D printing as a manufacturing technology and you can go quickly from design to implementation. I expect that Internet startups will be joined in the near future by (physical) products related startups as the fast rising stars in the business scene.

Permalink | Comment (0)

3D Design 3D printing Online Creation

Short Animation on Future of Manufacturing

August 30, 2011 –

The following short animation called FULL PRINTED was made for the exhibition “Laboratory of Manufacturing” at the Museum Design Hub in Barcelona last year. It is great short about how 3D printing, manufacturing, crowd sourcing of design, co-creation and iterative design can work.

There is only one thing which bugs me every time I see this video and that is the USB key to store the design and bring it to the FabLab to print it. Storing data on a USB stick? Is anybody still using that?

Permalink | Comment (0)

3D Design Online Creation

The Design Dilemma

August 13, 2011 –

Yesterday, I wrote about Sketch Your Furniture by Front. A concept demo for an innovative 3D design user interface. One of the challenges for 3D printing and co-creation is, that 3D design software is hard to use. They have a steep learning curve and it is certainly not easy to create something.

It takes patience and determination to get these software packages under control, and make something meaningful. To be honest, people are not really interested in learning this kind of software. Even if they do, I do not think they will spend a few hours on designing a spare part of a gift. Even if we assume they would like to design themselves most people are not designers.

In short, you could summarize:

people do not want to spend the effort to design
people do not want to learn to design
people cannot design

I call this the design dilemma of Co-Creation and 3D Printing.

So what are the solutions?

Fortunately there are solutions. I see the following developments in these area to overcome the design dilemma:

Product Configurators – the user gets a fixed set of choices, and based on their answers a design is created. For example DriveWorks Pro.
Templated Design – the user modifies a template design using a fixed set of modifiers (stamping, scaling, text, etc.). Examples are the Shapeways Light Poem or Kelecrea for Android.
Co-design – a user works together with a designer to create their design. For example Grabcad offers this service.

These solutions bring together users and designers, and use software to ease and scale the design process – either through a marketplace or design creation automation.

In an earlier post, I wrote about a design meta language. It is one of the enablers to further improve software automation options. The design dilemma is a solvable solution, and this very important reason for the growth of 3D printing.

Permalink | Comment (1)

3D printing Online Creation

Effects of 3D printing on society

August 11, 2011 –

LIKE any new disrupting technology 3D printing – when it matures – has great impact on society. Mass production brought us affordable high quality goods, mass-media brought us high quality entertainment, and up-to-date information and the internet is changing the way we work and live.

As I am writing this post, I realize that this is my thinking today, which has evolved over the last couple of years, and will further evolve over time. I merely want to give structure and body to my thoughts and ideas today. I am sure, I am going to revisit this topic in a 6-12 months from now.

So how will affect 3D printing our daily lives?

To give this question context, let’s assume that 3D printing as a technology keeps on evolving – both in capabilities and cost. 3D printers become local, and you have either one in your home, or you can find one around the corner. I am going way forward in the future here.

The first and foremost effect, I think, is that consumers can become creators again. They are able to manipulate the final product or create one from scratch. There are several routes to take here: one route is that the customer is involved in the product creation process through coöperation with designers or companies. This is called co-creation or mass-customization. Another route is that they become makers themselves, and start creating without the help of others. Software evolves too and becomes more intuitive, and help the user to make useful and meaningful products.
The effect of this change in behavior is that the perception of a product is going to fundamentally change. The product becomes to be an extension of your personality, and defines who you are in a much more profound way than today. A product becomes more valuable and more personal.
The rise of personal fabrication services is already showing that the long tail of products becomes longer – much longer. It enables to create and make niche products available which would never existed before.
In essence, it will change how we consume and perceive products.

Another effect of 3D printing is that the manufacturing industry will change. Large companies, like Apple, totally depend on design, mass-production, mass-distribution and branding to make and sell their products. Take out their added value on production and distribution, and you are left with design and branding. A lot of companies need to adapt, and will experience massive changes in how they operate and are organized. With any disruptive technology, there will be winners, losers and newcomers. For sure, the landscape of products will change, and industries will have to change. People will lose their jobs, and new jobs are created.
Designers can directly deal with customers, and do not need the support of large corporations to produce and distribute their goods. Retail faces yet another challenge, after internet e-commerce companies have taken over part of their role already. One of their key offerings today is instant satisfaction, and 3D printing will take that away as well. What is left is personal service, advice and consultancy.

I expect that both effects of 3D printing or digital manufacturing will have a profound impact on our society. I can think of more, but these are more secondary effects.
The changes will come slow similar to how the internet is affecting our lives today. I think that we are only midway to see and experience the effects of the internet on our lives. 3D printing is still in its infancy. There is so much more to come.

Permalink | Comments (5)

Online Creation

Iterative Design, 3D printing, co-creation and marshmallows

August 9, 2011 –

3D printing makes it possible to produce unique one-off designs for reasonable costs. This enables designers to implement design improvements based on customer-feedback. It is one of the aspects of co-creation where consumers and designers work together on a design.

Using iterative design a design can stay relevant for longer times – theoretically even forever. Technological capabilities are constantly improving and products can take advantage of that by using the new capabilities of the design. Also the expectations on what is fashionable and what is not changes over time. And last user experience can be used as input to improve function. Parts can break due to wear and tear.

Traditionally the concept of iterative design is employed within product design teams. You see it a lot in software development – especially in agile development environments. Developers or designers quickly deliver a prototype which is shared with the whole team and sometimes customers. They provide feedback which is used an input for the next iteration cycle. Also the open source software development mantra “release early, release often” is trying to achieve the same thing.

New technologies like the internet but also 3D printing make it possible to bring the product development cycle into the open and allows for faster feedback cycles. Especially on-demand production and zero stock policies make it possible to adapt a product design immediately.

There is a game often used to in team training session which is called the Marshmallow Challenge. Each team gets 1m / 3ft tape, 1m / 3ft string, 20 sticks of spaghetti and a marshmallow. The objective is to build the highest stable freestanding structure with the marshmallow on top. It is interesting that children are much better at this than adults. Children start building immediately and start over when they fail. Effectively they are using iterative design to come quickly to the best solution.

Permalink | Comment (1)

3D printing Online Creation

Design Meta Language

August 1, 2011 –

One of the problems in 3D design is that 3D models do not – or to a limited extend – capture any design intent. The technical requirements for manufacturing a part or product are hard to extract from a design let alone the functional requirements.

This is already a very basic problem in the 3D printing industry with regard to material specifications. There are multiple material printers on the market but they are nearly impossible to use because 3D software does not capture how things are made.

But the requirements go beyond materials alone. Parts need to have particular properties to function as intended. The production process is in itself less important and should be determined by the available resources. These properties need to be captured in the design.

There is also something like design intent which is also not captured. If a designer gets a design from another designer the design intent is not captured in the 3D model. This makes it hard for another designer to make adaptions to that design. He needs to reverse-engineer the design intent to be able to do that. Imagine an adaption of design based on a particular functional requirement. For instance you have an USB stick and you want to change the design to micro-USB. Fundamentally the impact of that decision is low but without knowledge on the actual design it hard to make that adaption.

The current file formats are very poor at capturing design decisions. There is a need for a Design Meta Language on top of the existing file formats which allows designers to store intent, function and properties of parts and components.

So why is that important you ask yourself? Well for one to make it possible to let non-designers customize designs without the need to have a designer available. There are situations where that is not feasible like a war zone or in space or when it just too expensive like in most consumer applications. Consumers can improve designs and share them with others. They can improve or adapt it further and so on. It is called iterative design.

Permalink | Comment (1)

Online Creation

Design exploration and co-creation by consumers

July 27, 2011 –

In my post about blank canvas syndrome I wrote about that co-creation is a solution. In this post I would like to write about how co-creation – or co-design – can help and which approaches work best. It is based on some excellent research done by Loughborough University.

There are two approaches to let consumers do co-creation:

Consumers design their own and have a designer help them
Consumers choose a template and a designer modifies this template to their liking

When taking approach 1 consumers only deliver 1 design to the designer. They do not use multiple iterations or explore the design using multiple desings. Their final design is delivered to the designer. The designer need to abstract all design intent from this one drawing.
Interesting enough they regard the first drawing delivered by the designer as a draft and feel the need for iterating on the design to come to a final design which they like. They clearly recognize at that moment that multiple iterations are necessary.
Consumers expect that when the designer starts working with them that the designer “fills in the blanks” in their design – both from a functionality as an aesthetics perspective.

Most people prefer approach 2 from a process perspective by far while at the same time they are more satisfied with the results of approach 1. Consumers definitely suffer from the blank canvas syndrome and experience discomfort when they have to design their own ideas. At the same time the result of this approach leads to much higher satisfaction with the end result.
This means that any consumer taking approach 1 is very motivated to get the end result but the actual market demand is much lower. Research shows that only 10% of all consumers like this approach. The other 90% is much more comfortable with the template approach.
Approach 2 gives a less unique feeling over the end result. Consumers think that others will come to the same design changes they asked for.

For more information please read these two excellent articles:
http://no-retro.com/home/2009/10/30/from-configuration-to-design-part-1/
http://no-retro.com/home/2009/11/01/from-configuration-to-design-capturing-the-intent-of-user-designers-part-2/

Permalink | Comment (0)