In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts
Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors
detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.
The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts
The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process
a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself
There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology
By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.
Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today
What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person
The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs
the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless
It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it
At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything
conducting, resistive, insulating.
The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.
Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.
We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans
You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.
Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials
because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
great quote (replace challenges with changes for effect)
Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do
And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble.
irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring
At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard
We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude.
Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university
Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."
Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."
Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools
The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally
You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.
Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before
You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.
What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?
It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing
2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs
To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.
But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before
There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out
this may solve greece's problem, walk away from debt, you can't buy other people's (country's) stuff anymore, so make it all yourself
The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use
Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab
it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever
Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs
To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism
I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility
The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally
My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people
The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale
My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower
If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry
Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do
The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science
If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality
I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.
When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.
the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside
you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know
For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.
This is more a case of blockchain applications on the supply chain and information management, in the construction sector. More supply chain than p2p, it would be a stretch to call it p2p manufacturing...
The paper has some interesting points though, that I am extracting in the document, under the "Tech level" section.
I WOULD DELETE THE "P2P Manufacturing" TAG.
Another note: access to full paper not provided.
"DropBot is an open-source Digital Microfluidic (DMF) automation system developed in the Wheeler Lab. It features a modular and extensible design, an intuitive user interface, and is capable of driving up to 320 independent channels."
A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.
not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,
“instead of researching the market, be the market”
businesses should be out there observing.
larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.
direct contact with customers.
move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us
not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves
lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach
a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing
work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.
either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!
energy efficient
long term
Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical
see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.
any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive
This is instinctive to businesses
Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance
much of business
have taken this to extremes
A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.
moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.
be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.
apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated
looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general
We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.
Where nature can perform particular functions
we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them
Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.
a shift towards renewable resources
The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.
The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.
looking at our work from a range of perspectives
wider context
keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.
being strategic is important too
ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.
This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.
allowing people to imagine different possibilities.
scenario planning
Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.
Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation
The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.
This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties
the notion that big is best needs to be challenged
new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.
more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience
have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.
not having all your eggs in one basket.
In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure
this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.
it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so
‘edge’
the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.
overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.
recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.
giving status to the marginal
It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.
Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.
Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.
be flexible, lean and adaptable
A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.
"Service dominant logic suggest that value is always co-created in context of use and experience. Co-creation is not an option (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008).
"Moving things along meant a focus on 2 key aspects. philosophy and methods.
"An SD logic approach is not one that you can run a survey of attitude, behaviours or intentions. The person is embedded in his actions and practices of value creation. The focus on context means the unit of analysis is in the sociology of real life behaviours. A sociological approach makes methods a problem because we've inherited a world where we have created tools from analysing water in a bucket, not by looking at its behaviour in a river.
"GD logic is compelling not only because it is entrenched for over 500 years, but also because you could measure its constructs. GDP, sales, revenues, CPI - they are all constructs of a GD logic society. What SD logic needed was better methods and new constructs.
"To that end, and rather ironically, I found an ally in digital technology. Here was a world of sensors and actuators with an enthusiastic community looking for novel ways of deploying them into homes and buildings i.e. the internet-of-things.
"I also found, as an ally, the thinking around new economic and business models. Here was another strand of literature largely marginalised by mainstream business literature because it was (the way I interpreted it) taking a systemic view of value proposition, value creation and value capture (ie, change one, change all) and the way the organisation had to be agile and transformed for it - which sat very nicely with SD logic.
"Customised products are firm centric. Personalised products are customer initiated and empowering. Personalised products also tend to move the product into becoming platforms to afford co-creation, which advanced the notion of symmetry in value co-creation further. Finally, with the advent of platforms, the economics of 2 or multi-sided markets completed my set of theoretica
Science shows that brainstorms can activate a neurological fear of rejection and that groups are not necessarily more creative than individuals.
To innovate, we need environments that support imaginative thinking, where we can go through many crazy, tangential, and even bad ideas to come up with good ones.
healthy amount of heated discussion, even arguing.
not feel so judged
become defensive and shut down
deliberative discourse
“Argue. Discuss. Argue. Discuss.”
It refers to participative and collaborative (but not critique-free) communication.
Multiple positions and views are expressed with a shared understanding that everyone is focused on a common goal. There is no hierarchy. It’s not debate because there are no opposing sides trying to “win.” Rather, it’s about working together to solve a problem and create new ideas.
Here are five key rules of engagement that we’ve found to yield fruitful sessions and ultimately lead to meaningful ideas.
creating a space where everyone can truly contribute.
“Yes, AND”
“no, BECAUSE.”
if you’re going to say no, you better be able to say why.
We conduct ethnographic research to inform our intuition, so we can understand people’s needs, problems, and values.
accountable to something other than our own opinions, and it means we can push back on colleagues’ ideas without getting personal.
We curate teams to create diversity
bring different ways of looking at the world and solving problems to the table.
Argument is productive for us because everyone knows that we’re working toward a shared goal.
The statement of purpose establishes the rules: It reminds us that we are working together to move the ball down the field. As much as we may argue and disagree, anything that happens in the room counts toward our shared goal. This enables us to argue and discuss without hurting one another.
Deliberative discourse is a form of play, and for play to yield great ideas, we have to take it seriously.
University of Warwick researchers have developed a new material that is conductive, piezoresistant, and printable in the latest generation of consumer 3-D printers.
"Centrifuges are commonly required devices in medical diagnostics facilities as well as scientific laboratories. Although there are commercial and open source centrifuges, the costs of the former and the required electricity to operate the latter limit accessibility in resource-constrained settings. There is a need for low-cost, human-powered, verified, and reliable lab-scale centrifuges. This study provides the designs for a low-cost 100% 3-D printed centrifuge, which can be fabricated on any low-cost RepRap-class (self-replicating rapid prototyper) fused filament fabrication (FFF)- or fused particle fabrication (FPF)-based 3-D printer. In addition, validation procedures are provided using a web camera and free and open source software. This paper provides the complete open source plans, including instructions for the fabrication and operation of a hand-powered centrifuge. This study successfully tested and validated the instrument, which can be operated anywhere in the world with no electricity inputs, obtaining a radial velocity of over 1750 rpm and over 50 N of relative centrifugal force. Using commercial filament, the instrument costs about U.S. $25, which is less than half of all commercially available systems. However, the costs can be dropped further using recycled plastics on open source systems for over 99% savings. The results are discussed in the context of resource-constrained medical and scientific facilities."