co>innovative

As I’ve written about before, some extremely cool stuff has come out of the home fabbing hobbyist camp of late.

This machine, for example, can replicate itself (given the right materials). Of course it’s primative, but you get the idea. A machine that costs $2,000 to make could potentially begin to make its way into the developing world (evidence of the utility of something like this can be found over at Afrigadget.) Hook up one of Negroponte’s laptops, download a design from Ponoko, throw in some raw materials, and you have a locally produced product.

Lipson and Malone’s machine is different in that it can use a number of materials, from plastics to metals with a low melting point, unlike the current rapid prototyping machines that tend to use just quick drying plastics.

“This makes them useful for making parts or components, but not for making complete systems. We’re aiming to make integrated systems, including circuitry and sensors … It’s not technology that will replace existing manufacturing process, but is more likely to augment it, by doing things that current techniques can’t do,” Lipson told CNN.

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Another wicked old post from another blog that I wanted to mention regarding Amazon’s potential to facilitate user manufacturing. Frank Pillar discusses user manufacturing which he defines as:

User manufacturing… is a business model where users (customers) are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies.

As things stand now, concieving, designing, sourcing, manufacturing, promoting, and distributing a product of any kind remains a challenge. Things have progressed rapidly over the last few years and will continue to at a rapid pace. Within a few years, with companies such as Ponoko, eMachineShop (and many other built to order manufacturing shops), Threadless, and, potentiall, Amazon refining their processes and services, the most difficult portions of physical product production will become much easier.

You can rent space on Amazon’s computers to run a business, or rent out its transaction capabilities to sell things and collect money, or rent pieces of its warehouses and distribution system to store and ship items — or all of the above. So, with almost no start-up costs, anyone anywhere could become a retailer. It’s not just contracting with Amazon to sell your stuff, the way Target does. It’s leasing pieces of Amazon to create something totally unrelated to Amazon.

Complexity is hidden. Interactions between companies are standardized. Customers become more comfortable with more control through crowdsourcing, customer co-design, and mass customization. You can sit at home, use a freely available CAD system to design a product, get feedback from users, send the design to a made to order shop (or stop there and sell the design on Ponoko), promote it using online tools like Ad-words, and distribute using something like UPS’s outsourced distribution services.

One might imagine a network of local manufacturers with a certain set of skills and specializations. Just upload your design to an imagined site which lists providers, the system automatically matches your design to potential manufacturers (maybe it’s a guy down the street with a great laser cutting setup…), and perhaps you put the work up for bid.

With such incredible flexibility and standardization built into a networked and interlocking system of vendors and services, there are bound to be huge disruptions and an explosion of creativity in the physical product space.

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It’s stuff like this that shows how product development, design, and customization will begin to explode in the coming years: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ 3D Fabrication in Sugar. (which will play right into my hands. ha!) In addition to being amazing (though I would guess it doesn’t taste too great), it illustrates a good point.

I recently read Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication which discusses the many permutations of home building and local building and small scale manufacturing of products that weren’t possible before. The coolest possibility, from my perspective (which is just about feasible today) is that someone:

1) Anywhere in the world downloads and implements the plans and software for the Fab@Home project or heads on over to a place like TechShop in Menlo Park (an open access workshop).

2) Gets the requisite raw materials and loads them into a Fab machine.

3) Downloads a design for the object to be built from, say, an online design marketplace provided by someone such as myself. Or open source, whatever…

4) Lets the machine do it’s thing. The resulting object could be a specialized farming tool, for example, useful in a specific region of a developing country or a toy or candy, whatever.

I have simplified the whole process to a ridiculous degree, but it is a good illustration. This process may therefore more fully distribute the various functions needed to create an end product. Someone in South America might concieve of an object they would like, someone in India might design it and post the designs, then anyone in the world could download the specs and make a 3D print of the object. (Granted it will always be easier to run down to a nearby Wal-Mart, but if you live where the long arms of the Mart have yet to extend and you need an extremely specialized item… this might eventually be the way to go.)

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