Thursday, May 03. 2012
Via MIT Technology Review (blogs)
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What's to stop kids from pirating LEGO sets as readily as they pirate music?
Christopher Mims 04/02/2012
Let's assume for a minute that 3D printing becomes as good as its proponents say it will, and soon. We're talking high strength plastics, high resolution models, all at prices that the average consumer can afford.
LeoCAD, A library of over 4,000 LEGO bricks, already exists. It's distributed under a creative commons attribution license, so you can pretty much do what you want with it, as long as you give credit. Makers are already constructing custom LEGO pieces on their 3D printers. The existing model for creating LEGOs, in Denmark, is surprisingly labor-intensive.
Meanwhile, "out of print" LEGO sets are eye-openingly expensive. (Pretty much every Star Wars set from the movies that weren't awful is going for at least $300.)
It seems obvious that at the point where all these trend lines meet, there's a powerful incentive for tinkerers and teenagers to start downloading plans from the internet and simply making their own sets.
In this scenario, if physical objects made from single materials follow the same trajectory as other media that were physical until they became just bits, there will at first be resistance from toymakers, in the form of lawsuits. Collectors will be sued as a deterrent to other rogues, and websites for sharing designs shut down.
Meanwhile, an underground of Makers will continue to experiment. Amateurs will collaborate to create LEGO sets and other toys that no cadre of designers in Denmark could match. Some will go pro. Gradually, the industry will adapt.
I realize that some proponents of 3D printing envision this process eating pretty much all the manufacturing on the planet. There are good reasons that won't happen. But for certain industries that are uniquely susceptible to being disrupted by better versions of today's 3D printing technology, who knows? Perhaps the YouTube of the future deals in atoms, not bits.
Friday, March 23. 2012
Via Treehugger
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By Lloyd Alter
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The Free Universal Construction Kit is a wonderful idea, "a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys." It is not a set of physical objects, but instructions for a 3D printer. My first thought upon seeing it on every website from Kottke to Geekologie is that the patent lawyers will be on the case in seconds; In Canada, we have watched the endless battle between LEGO and Montreal's Mega Blok that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (LEGO lost).
It turns out that the designers of the Free Universal Construction Kit (I cannot use the acronym on this family website) were preoccupied with the issue as well. In fact, it seems to be one of the prime motivations of the design, " to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests."
In producing the Free Universal Construction Kit, we hope to demonstrate a model of reverse engineering as a civic activity: a creative process in which anyone can develop the necessary pieces to bridge the limitations presented by mass-produced commercial artifacts.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The designers describe the Free Universal Construction Kit is a sort VLC open source video player for hardware; a tool that disrupts the system, that lets anyone play with their toys any way they want instead of the way the toy manufacturers plan it.
Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.
The Free Universal Construction Kit from Adapterz on Vimeo.
The most important aspect of the Free Universal Construction Kit is what it portends for the future.
The Free Universal Construction Kit is simply one “toy” illustration of a coming grassroots revolution, in which everyday people can—with desktop tools—overcome arbitrary restrictions in mass-manufactured physical culture. The burgeoning possibility of freely shared downloadable adapters has significant implications for industries where the attempt to create “technological lock-in” is a common business practice.
No wonder that the first people they thank in their credits, after their families, are their lawyers. More at Free Art and Technology.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
Personal comment:
A very interesting approach for opensource projects: to bridge the gap and position themselves between branded (and/or proprietary) products.
Thursday, February 23. 2012
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While the subject of online piracy is certainly nothing new, the recent protests against SOPA and the federal raid on Megaupload have thrust the issue into mainstream media. More than ever, people are discussing the controversial topic while content creators scramble to find a way to try to either shut down or punish sites and individuals that take part in the practice. Despite these efforts, online piracy continues to be a thorn in Big Media’s side. With the digital media arena all but conquered by piracy, the infamous site The Pirate Bay (TPB) has begun looking to the next frontier to be explored and exploited. According to a post on its blog, TPB has declared that physical objects named “physibles” are the next area to be traded and shared across global digital smuggling routes.
TPB defines a physible as “data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” Namely, items that can be created using 3D scanning and printing technologies, both of which have become much cheaper for you to actually own in your home. At CES this year, MakerBot Industries introduced its latest model which is capable of printing objects in two colors and costs under $2,000. With the price of such devices continuing to drop, 3D printing is going to be part of everyday life in the near future. Where piracy is going to come in is the exchange of the files (3D models) necessary to create these objects.
A 3D printer is essentially a “CAD-CAM” process. You use a computer-aided design (CAD) program to design a physical object that you want made, and then feed it into a computer-aided machining (CAM) device for creation. The biggest difference is that traditional CAM setups, the process is about milling an existing piece of metal, drilling holes and using water jets to carve the piece into the desired configuration. In 3D printing you use extrusion to actually create what is illustrated in the CAD file. Those CAD files are the physibles that TPB is talking about, since they are digital they are going to be as easily transferred as an MP3 or movie is right now.
It isn’t too far outside the realm of possibility that once 3D printing becomes a part of everyday life, companies will begin to sell the CAD files and the rights to be able to print proprietary items. If the technology continues to advance at the same rate, in 10 or 20 years you might be printing a new pair of Nikes for your child’s basketball game right in your home (kind of like the 3D printed sneakers pictured above). Instead of going to the mall and paying $120 for a physical pair of shoes in a retail outlet, you will pay Nike directly on the internet and receive the file necessary to direct your printer to create the sneakers. Of course, companies will do their level best to create DRM on these objects so that you can’t freely just print pair after pair of shoes, but like all digital media it will be broken be enterprising individuals.
TPB has already created a physibles category on its site, allowing you to download plans to be able to print out such things as the famous Pirate Bay Ship and a 1970 Chevy hot rod. For now it’s going to be filled with user-created content, but in the future you can count on it being stocked with plans for DRM-protected objects.
Monday, February 13. 2012
Via MIT Technology Review (blog)
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Before you dismiss it as a fad, consider the evolution of 2-D printing.
By Tim Maly
The Miehle P.P. & Mfg. Co. 1905 printing press. Credit: Public Domain / Wikipedia.
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I'd like to sneak up on the question of 3-D printing by way of boring old 2-D printing.
Typography used to be heavy industry. The companies that make typefaces are still called foundries because there was a time when letters were made of metal. When you got enough of them together to reliably set a whole book or whatever, you had a serious amount of hardware on your hands. Fonts were forged. Picking a new one was a large capital investment. Today, fonts are a thing that you pick from a drop-down menu and printers are things in your home that can render just about any typeface you can imagine.
We went from massive metal fonts and centralized presses to the current desktop regime by degrees. In the early days of desktop printing, we had the dot-matrix. The deal was simple: "We give you one crappy font and you need specialized paper but you can do this at home". It wasn’t useful for much, but it was useful for some things, and used frequently enough that it was worth developing improvements.
Today, it's reasonable for most people to have a pile of paper and a printer that cost them next to nothing and for businesses to have stockrooms laden with the raw material of documents. Print shops have had to stay a step ahead, selling convenience, their ability to print nicer things on bigger formats, or the economics of scale.
I want you to bear this in mind, when you consider Chris Mims' argument that the idea that 3-D printing will be a mature technology "on any reasonable time scale" is absurd.
Chris is right that 3-D printing as it stands isn't a replacement for the contemporary industrial supply chain. It's clearly a transitional technology. The materials suck. The resolution is terrible. The objects are fragile. You can't recycle the stuff.
Maybe early home 3-D printers use only plastic and can only make objects that fall within certain performance restrictions. Maybe it starts out as, like, jewelry, the latest model toys, and parts for Jay Leno's car. But there's no way that lasts. People are already working on the problem. They are working especially hard on the materials problem.
At the same time, it's not hard to imagine a convergence from the other direction. Some materials and formats will fall out of favor because they are hard to make rapidly. Think of how most documents are 8.5×11 (or A4) these days. It's just not worth the hassle of wrangling dozens of paper formats.
It's also important not to confuse 3-D printing & desktop-class fabrication. These aren't the same thing. There is more to desktop manufacturing than 3-D printers. A well-appointed contemporary maker workshop has working CNC mills, lathes, and laser cutters. A well-appointed design studio has the tools to make and finish prototypes that look very nice indeed. Aside from the 3-D printer, none of these tools are terribly science-fictional; they're well-established technologies that happen to be getting cheaper from year to year.
Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working. There comes a point where making new things isn't a capital investment but simply a marginal one. Fab shops are already popping up, just like print shops did.
Copyright Technology Review 2012.
Wednesday, January 04. 2012
Via BLDGBLOG
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de noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
Flight Assembled Architecture/Architectures volantes from FRAC Centre on Vimeo.
A short video has been released documenting the brick swarm project mentioned here last month, in which Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler deploy semi-autonomous flying robots to assemble a structure of foam bricks. However, it's as if the architects underestimate the interest of their own work, fast-forwarding through the bulk of the assembly process as if no one would want to watch such a thing (or perhaps their robots were less graceful than originally hoped). Either way, check out the results, embedded above.
(Thanks to phenrydelphia for the tip!)
Personal comment:
Following our post of last november, here comes the video of the brick swarm construction. Brick being surprisingly THE material of construction for digital fabrication (or not: pixel like), at least for Gramazio & Kohler.
Friday, November 25. 2011
de Rose Etherington
Flying robots will assemble a six metre-high tower at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France, next month.
Created by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea, the mobile machines will lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks to build a 3.5 metre wide structure.
The installation will be on show from 2 December 2011 to 19 February 2012.
More about it HERE.
Wednesday, November 23. 2011
Whilst we are pretty much all aware of the implications of 3-D printing as a process of making any arbitrary object at the push of a button, it is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.
Designers at IDEO have teamed up with scientists at the Lim Lab at the University of California, San Francisco to envision a “provocation” (that’s designer-ese for thought experiment) in which they explore the possibilities of exploiting known properties of microorganisms to literally “grow” the products we use every day.
What is particularly interesting about these future scenarios is where we once thought about computer systems that evolve through immense network of both physical and conceptual parameters, where one influence the other as in the case of Nervous System’s process of “growing objects”, the process of printing may eventually evolve into processes of actual physical growing. These two systems, of digital creation and of the biological one may eventually merge, creating an ecology of both digital and physical networks that communicate and feed of one another.
“One day if we understand how to program [living organisms,] we can encode things beyond software–we could encode materiality” says Carey. “That’s already happening in nature, but we have no idea how to do that ourselves.”
Time to move away from mimicry?
Read more on Fast Company >Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods
More on this topic at syntheticaesthetics.org
Monday, October 17. 2011
Some robots are being trained to do digital design work now. The design-savvy robots in question are part of Southern California Institute of Architecture's (SCI-Arc) Robot House and they're around for the repetitive and extremely detailed movements that human artists find tedious or impossible. So your life of quiet painterly desperation and locavore vegan cocktails is safe for the time being.
Here's some info about the Robot House, from SCI-Arc's website.
Personal comment:
After having come to ETHZ some years ago (and in many other places since), robots also come to SCI-Arc!
Wednesday, September 28. 2011
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by Eye contributor
When I wrote about BlablabLAB’s ‘Be Your Own Souvenir’ project as part of ‘Tangible Digital’ (Eye 80), I thought I’d missed my chance to be immortalised in a 3D plastic miniature, writes John Ridpath. But eight months on from their first event in Barcelona, the Spanish collective brought their laptops, 3D printers and scanners to London, to take part in the Alpha-ville digital festival.
Above: Video of the original ‘Be Your Own Souvenir’ project, which took place in Barcelona’s La Rambla in January 2011.
Below: ‘Tangible Digital’, opening spread. Eye 80.
To take part in ‘Be Your Own Souvenir’, participants are asked to stand on a small podium and strike a pose for a few minutes while a three-dimensional model of their body is scanned by three Kinects (hacked Xbox 360 interfaces with 3D depth sensors). The data is then passed to a 3D printer, and rendered in low-res plastic from the feet up – all within fifteen minutes.
As I wrote in Eye 80, ‘There is definitely a certain charm to the crude, bright yellow, low-res aesthetic of the figurines – but the real magic is in the immediacy by which the physical turns to digital, then back to physical.’
For their latest installation, BlablabLAB had set up shop in Red Market Square, behind what used to be the Foundry pub in Old Street (see ‘Foundry occupation’). Figurines were now available in orange and blue. After posing (with a companion), I watched the double figurine emerge (above) with curiosity. Next to the printer was a miniature graveyard of statuettes gone wrong – some missing heads and limbs, reaching their bizarre end in a tangle of string-like plastic. Thankfully, we avoided such a fate and walked away with a bright blue, one-off souvenir (below).
Below: Some of the 3D printer’s casualties.
22 > 25 September 2011
Alpha-ville 2011
Various venues
London
www.alpha-ville.co.uk
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop. For a taste of the new issue, see Eye before you buy on Issuu. Eye 80 is out now.
Personal comment:
We are now in the "post-digital" era according to the festival's theme. Well... it seems then that we are in the post post modern & post digital period. Three posts for one modern and a digital. Which means?
Possibly a new time? With new conceptual tools (and no more a post post post one)? For the ones interested in new conceptual tools, there is this book, Radicant, by french curator Nicolas Bourriaud that gives link to other interesting authors, some recently deceased (Edouard Glissant).
Thursday, July 28. 2011
Via MIT Technology Review
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Powerful design tools and techniques such as 3-D printing enable manufacturers to be more nimble, says Autodesk's manufacturing boss.
By Tom Simonite
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3-D printing: A 3-D printer squirted out each of the 200 plastic parts in this 10-foot-long turbo-prop engine, demonstrating a technology that could soon be used for more than just prototyping.
Credit: Autodesk |
Autodesk, a multinational software company based in San Rafael, California, makes 3-D design software used by everyone from automotive manufacturing giants to Hollywood studios. Now it is betting that those digital tools will have an increasingly powerful role in what happens on factory floors, enabling manufacturers to embrace more flexible strategies that deliver more customized products.
Buzz Kross, who heads the company's manufacturing industry group, says the manufacturers he works with see an opportunity in new technology at a time when they sense that the boom in outsourcing to China has run its course. "There have always been companies that differentiate based on their ability to manufacture most efficiently, and others based on design and invention—it's the difference between GM and Tesla," says Kross. "Now a lot of manufacturers are leaning more to the design model."
Kross says that rising costs in China's maturing economy and high-profile problems with out-sourced components, like those that plagued Boeing's 787, are making the model of high-volume, low-cost outsourced production less economically attractive. The result is that a wider range of companies are considering adopting a more flexible, premium approach to manufacturing that has previously been limited to a relatively small niche. Kross is trying to help that trend along with software such as Inventor, which provides a way to digitally prototype and test mechanical designs, and Streamline, which enables engineers, designers, and managers to collaborate on a design. Both are intended to speed the journey from digital drawing board to factory floor.
"You don't need to center everything on making millions of the same thing at the absolute cheapest price anymore," says Kross. He cites the growing popularity of a model known as ETO (engineer to order), in which businesses buying from manufacturers order by referring to a list of general rules, not a catalogue and price list. For each order, a manufacturer makes and assembles a product very specific to the customer's needs. That approach also cuts costs, because raw materials and parts don't have to be held in stock; rather, they can be purchased to match the latest order. And the customized products can command a higher price than a conventionally made one, Kross says: "These companies capture a larger share of the customer's wallet this way."
That style of manufacturing makes the design process—and design software—much more central. Kross says that 3-D printing technology will blur the line between design and manufacturing still further.
"Everybody's already embracing it for prototyping," says Kross. "You can already print moving components and subassemblies that don't need any assembly. That's incredibly useful, whether you make pumps or power trains or chairs." Nike, an Autodesk customer, prototypes shoes by using a printer to squirt out materials that have more or less compressibility, depending on how bouncy and flexible each part of the sole is meant to be.
The next step is for 3-D printing to become a manufacturing method rather than solely a prototyping tool, says Kross. Small companies are already trying this, but it won't be long before large manufacturers follow suit. "Think about when you buy a Dell computer and they let you choose all the different components," Kroll says. "3-D printing for manufacturing will allow you to have that, but with nearly infinite options."
This process may cost manufacturers more than production at a more conventional or offshore factory. But as with the ETO approach, more customized products fetch higher prices, says Kroll. Jewelry, furniture, and consumer electronics are all areas that could benefit from the new techniques, he says. "People don't like it when they have the same thing as everything else and will pay more to get exactly what they choose."
Copyright Technology Review 2011.
Personal comment:
We are just ending the beta version of a project where we used Inventor to pre-assemble, then laser cut and fold all the parts of the object. Like many of us now. Well, then this is still not an easy process... and our object remain relatively small. But when the softwares and machines will become efficient enough from sketching to building (possibly Revit with its BIM model --to which should be added some strong scripting and design options--), through prototyping, these will truely become powerful design tools opening up to a new design paradigm.
And its interesting to underline the fact that this way of producing could also be taken into account for a sustainable design approach.
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