That is one piece of the story: the democratization of access to industrial grade manufacturing at scales available to amateurs and hobbyists (democratized innovation). Part two is extending the actual design of products to customers (mass customization and crowdsourcing). Somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Car project, which I wrote about previously, Local Motors sought to solicit ideas and designs from members (of which they have 5,000). They are producing a pretty wicked looking car designed by contributor Sangho Kim that will be built in distributed building centers. Similar to the ubiquitous Threadless, which inspired Local Motors to some extent, users submit designs and it is voted up until a car reaches a certain popularity after which it will be produced in limited runs. This fills in the market with specialized, small run cars and meet needs that would not be possible with the large auto firms.

Local Motor's first car

“Thus the new industrial organizational model. It’s built around small pieces, loosely joined. Companies are small, virtual, and informal. Most participants are not employees. They form and re-form on the fly, driven by ability and need rather than affiliation and obligation. It doesn’t matter who the best people work for; if the project is interesting enough, the best people will find it.”

Each step of conceiving, designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and selling are within reach of just about anyone with a surprisingly small amount of capital. Couple that with bringing in the crowd at any point to help fund or vet ideas and the current situation becomes that much more interesting.

The Next Industrial Revolution is a post from: co>innovative

If you want to design a product and have it built you currently have three options — short of contracting with a manufacturer which is complex and expensive.

Slap a graphic design on a commodity product: You might be familiar with Zazzle and Cafepress which allow anyone to upload a design and sell physical products, but these services are limited in that you are stuck simply printing a graphic design on a preselected commodity product which is then shipped from a central location.
Design an object from flat materials that are laser cut. Ponoko is the best example of this. You can choose from a whole host of materials. Designers post designs, Ponoko handles the sale, cuts the material, and either sends it to the seller or directly to the buyer. (Can I interest you in some biohazard coasters, perhaps?)
Design an object in 3D and have it “printed”. Shapeways takes 3D models and creates physical objects from them. (Or would you prefer a small skeleton sculpture?)

Each of these services have been available in the past to people and companies with significant resources, but never before have they all been available and affordable for normal folk. And now, ShopBot and Ponoko have partnered to create 100KGarages. Ponoko is supplying it’s online “click to make” system and ShopBot, which makes CNC routers, brings the distributed digital fabricators who are in 54 countries around the world. Products designed anywhere, printed wherever you are, in runs as small as 1 unit.

This allows for designers and builders to essentially sell a product before it exists! Instead of design->prototype->test->manufacture->market->retail->Sale, the process can look like this: design->market->Sale->manufacture.

The great innovation here is not only the atomization of the process (you can design a product and put it out in the world to see if someone else wants to build it or you can just build other people’s designs) but at the same time the loose coupling of the process (if you want you can take it from start to finish using several services that are tied together). The basic infrastructure is there.

For now it will be relegated largely to hobbyists and, no, it can be expensive (3D printing in particular), but I would imagine within a few years we may see a successful product that comes about through this loosely coupled chain of services… a design student in India uses a free online design tool… a retail site such as Ponoko hosts the design… a buyer in the NY purchases… a 3D printer NY that has the correct materials prints the object and ships it to the buyer.

UPDATE: A few weeks after 100KGarages launched, a similar idea was introduced through CloudFab.com, “a central marketplace to connect buyers and sellers” of 3D printed parts and objects. So, for now, think of this as very similar to 100KGarages, with the main point of differentiation being that CloudFab is focused on 3D printing, and 100K Garages is focused on 2D materials. More info at MadeForOne

Distributed design and manufacturing is here; or How I correctly predicted the future… is a post from: co>innovative

Level 1: Mass customization.
Mass customization puts a certain level of choice in the hands of the customer starting with a base, unchanging object. It allows you to customize a mass produced product to your specification along certain pre-defined configurations. Anyone can do this. There are thousands of examples of it and most people have experienced this in one form or another. Buying a Dell. Uploading an image for a product on CafePress. Designing a Nike shoe. Even your own tea.

Level 2: 2D and 3D printing.
Ponoko is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of personal manufacturing in the 2D realm. Users can upload image files (whether that be CAD or scanned in free-hand drawing), specify any of a number of flat materials, and Ponoko will input it into their magic laser cutters and send you the result. It doesn’t stop there: you can also sell your resulting products through the site. Ponoko has been improving and releasing new features at an impressive clip over the last 2 years or so. Keep an eye on them. Manufacturing as a service.

Going from 2D to 3D: While Ponoko seems farthest along in democratizing 2D printing of objects, Shapeways seems to have the best, most user friendly, option for 3D printing and distribution of objects.

Confused about the various 2D and 3D printing technologies available? Check out this great compendium of videos on much of the tech.

Level 3: Home Fabbing
For the power-geek: home fabbing (with self-replicating machines, of course) you too can build a CNC machine that creates 3D objects or cuts flat materials. Just download the design and let your machine have at it.

Of course, the current adoption of these various technologies stand at about the same level as personal computers in the late 70s: expensive, geared towards geeks, inconvenient, and a small market.

Bringing this all together you have a decoupling of the design, manufacturing, assembly, and marketing of physical objects down to the individual level. As this evolves further the options expand incredibly; here’s a scenario (And Shapeways comes pretty close to this today). I post a design, then there are many paths:

- I can then order a copy for myself.
- Someone else orders the physical object which is printed in a one-off run.
- Another person licenses the design for the right to produce the object for personal use and downloads it to their home-fabber where they can tweak the design and actually create it.
- Someone licenses the design for 100 copies and sells them locally after having them produced at their local personal manufacturing facility.
- A large retailer licenses the design for distribution in their stores.

Pretty rad, right?

Resources and examples:
Level 1:
Mass Customization and Open Innovation News by Frank Piller
Configurator database
Design a Tea
Dell
List of mass customization providers

Level 2:
Ponoko
Design Democracy ’08
List of Personal Manufacturing providers
FigurePrints (print out avatars in 3D)
That’s My Face
Fabjectory: Virtual Objects in Real Life
Shapeways
ZapFab
Design My Idea
eMachineShop

Level 3:
Some Rights Reserved
Fab@Home
TechShop
Breaking the mould
Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

Update 1/7/09:An interesting addition to the field: Automake which provides an online 3D modeling tool in the hopes of “combining generative systems with craft knowledge and digital production technologies to create a new way of designing and making objects that blurs the boundaries between maker and consumer, craft and industrial production.”

Part 5: The evolution of mass customization and personal manufacturing is a post from: co>innovative

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.

Self propagating user manufacturing is a post from: co>innovative

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.

Amazon and User manufacturing is a post from: co>innovative

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.)

3D Home Fabrication is a post from: co>innovative