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2015-07-23 12:10:07
TJ McCue
July 21, 2015
Surveys indicate that more than 30 percent of the top 300 largest global brands
are now using or evaluating 3D printing (often with printing technology
in-house) whether for prototyping and other innovation projects or in actual
production of what they sell. Over 200 universities and colleges already offer
3D coursework in their curricula covering aspects of not only 3D printing but
also 3D scanning and design. To my mind, there is no question that 3D has
reached, as Dartmouth s Richard D Aveni argues in a recent HBR article, a
tipping point.
Even Terry Wohlers, founder of Wohlers Associates and publisher of the most
cited research tracking the rise of 3D technology, is impressed. In a recent
email exchange he told me: We re seeing a level of investment in 3D printing
that we have not seen in the past not even close. As much of a champion as
Wohlers is for the technology, he marvels at how the pace is picking up: It s
really very interesting, and to some extent, mind-boggling, especially given
that 3D printing has been around for more than 25 years.
But perhaps there is a simple reason that the tipping point is arriving now. I
think it s connected to the recent arrival of very affordable desktop 3D
printers which means it isn t only big corporate R&D departments that are
coming down the 3D learning curve.
I saw this last year, when I spent eight-plus months traveling to hotbeds of 3D
innovation across America in a specially outfitted RV. Our tour took us to
government agencies like NASA and big corporations like GE, but we also hung
out in makerspaces, hackerspaces, and other places where creators were using
less elaborate versions of the tools.
I met, for example, Jeff Tiedeken, founder of the uniquely named business
Monkey Likes Shiny. He is a skilled metal fabricator, but that label doesn t do
him justice. Really, he is a renaissance man creating models that quickly move
from digital to physical, in the form of metal and also many other materials.
He uses 3D printers and also CNC routers, metal bending machines, waterjet
cutters, and other tools. That day, for example, he was happy to show me the
gravity bikes he designed for maximum speed on downhill coasts. Wild cycles,
for sure. He regularly volunteers at the San Francisco Exploratorium because he
wants to help young people learn to make things with their own hands
especially things designed from scratch. When I contacted him last, he was in
Hawaii helping community-college students machine up parts for a satellite.
People like Jeff and students all around the world are embracing newly
accessible technology to make the things they couldn t make as easily before.
For evidence, just look at the popular crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Over the
past couple of years, entrepreneurs have used it to launch no fewer than 300
3D-printer-related campaigns and many of them have funded at levels in the
millions of dollars. This must be what it felt like in the earliest days of the
automobile when, depending on which source you check, something like
1,800-2,800 auto startups were launched in the span of a few decades.
And in fact, it s also like the most recent days of the automobile era. The
Uber of 3D printers is 3D Hubs, a platform that allows designers, once they
have created 3D software files, to find 3D printer owners in their locales who
can, for an agreed fee, print them out of the desired materials. Already,
nearly 20,000 printers have registered with the site globally most of them
individuals who bought their machines for personal use but are not running them
at anywhere near their full capacity. That network footprint, 3D Hub reports,
means that one billion people on this planet already have a 3D printer within
10 miles of their homes.
My point is not that all these artisans and hobbyists and their shop-scale
technology are collectively producing enough 3D-printed output to put a dent in
the overall economy. For me, the most important tipping point isn t about how
many manufacturers have changed, it s about how many minds have. Thanks to more
accessible technology, we are now reaching a critical mass of people who, when
they think about how things are made, think in a different way. You could say
they are thinking in 3D.
It is simply a different world when the time lapse between creating a design
and having a tangible object of that design in hand is tiny. One inventor I
know says that with traditional CAD tools, he would spend 15-16 hours to build
a new model, but with web-based tools he has cut that down to only 15-20
minutes. Once you begin to assume that your iterations will be so quick, many
aspects of how you think about developing and delivering products change.
In the California leg of the 3DRV roadtrip, I talked with Jason Lopes of Legacy
Effects, best known for its ingenious contributions to The Avengers, Avatar,
and other Hollywood films requiring special effects, animatronics, and creature
designs. It was Jason who first helped me see how having a new level of access
to a technology can lead to different ways of thinking. The company has always
relied on service bureaus with very high-end equipment to render its character
designs, but a few years ago, it purchased a 3D printer to use for simple tasks
in-house. Unexpectedly, that ended up changing a lot about its design project
workflows. At the same time, having 3D printing technology right at hand opened
people s minds to possibilities for using it beyond the modeling of the
characters themselves for example, to print the parts, jigs, and fixtures
also needed to complete work and deliver it to clients. Jason says that having
a 3D printer in the office has changed the way he and his colleagues approach
design overall.
The same can be said about the 3D software tools that are becoming widely
available. As just one example, apps now exist to allow smartphone users to
snap some pictures of an object and get a digital 3D rendering of it. That
means, of course, that you can print a scale model of something like an
action figure of yourself, for example. But more importantly, if some
approximation of an object you wish to create already exists, you now have a
starting point for it rather than beginning with a blank screen. Beyond being a
timesaver, that might spell the difference between pursuing your novel idea or
never getting around to it.
3D technology has a special ability to capture people s imaginations. In
Florida, we connected with 350 seventh-graders at the Electa Lee Middle School
in Bradenton, where educator Bekka Stasny invited us to demonstrate the
process. My 11 year-old son was the natural spokesman for this stop, showing
off simple toys he had created en route with an app and printer we had on board
the 3DRV. You would not guess that 350 middle school students could watch and
listen with such rapt attention.
It might not always occur to us that this is true, but the people who work as
operations management executives in large manufacturing concerns are also
people with outside lives, who take interest in new trends and who have hobbies
and side projects suited to their skills. Some of the people going to work in
today s big businesses are young people who were not long ago learning about 3D
in classrooms and science museums. Some aren t so young but have kids doing
that. Some are makers or even casual entrepreneurs, earning extra cash
selling 3D printer access to their neighbors. The more people like this who
arrive in a workplace, the more likely that workplace will be to undergo a
change. This is how tipping points are reached: not when some key percentage of
big companies has installed a technology, but when enough people see its
possibilities. Expect to see global manufacturing transformed as more people
see new ways to make things, because they re thinking in 3D.
TJ McCue led the 3DRV project across the USA in 2014. Version two of that
project is called GoExplore3D which continues to visit and explore what brands
and individuals are doing in 3D technology.