3D printing taken to the next level

It's good to see entrepreneurs popping up who are taking 3d printing to the next level, and searching for business opportunities for new products manufactured by this technique. One of these entrepreneurs is Siavash Mahdavi. He is especially looking into optimization of form through intelligent weight reduction and force redirection, and has come up so far with prototypes of orthopedic implants that bone can grow into, optimized shoe soles that vary in support and cushioning, an engine block with 22% weight reduction, and a structure that he intends to use for docking shuttles at a space station.



Watch his recent TED talk here:

Nanofactory

Nanotechnology to the common eye seems to be a little veiled in mystery, and to make it visible on a concrete level how this all could work, there is this video of a 'Nanofactory' as imagined by Eric Drexler. It seems almost incredible, but if we could ever manage to create this, it would be about the apex of the modernist dream and we will have almost completely taken control over nature. Watch it here:



I don't think it's impossible in the long term, but I tend to think that the enormous amount of resources that this will suck in building and maintaining it so it stays in tact, as well as controlling all the unforeseen errors that will happen from time to time, make us have to treat this as, and forgive my language, a kind of utopian nano-porn for the extremely wealthy.

The future of fabbing

This right here is a very amusing animation about the future of manufacturing. It starts out almost as the typical corny design video showing first a problem, and then introducing the solution, but this video emphasizes also the evolution of manufacturing products over time, which is a nice mix.

So according to this video, we are going from mass production to mass customization, from central manufacturing facilities to a decentralized system, and eventually to an increasingly intelligent system where we as individuals have the technology to scan objects -even when they are broken- and reproduce them in any kind of material we like. We can even determine a product's internal structure, based on a kind of molecular, DNA-like, blueprint.

This way, production of everyday items becomes more and more biological, with products becoming more and more adapted to their individual environment of use.

Embodied CAD modeling

When richer input devices emerge for human-computer interaction, applications like this physical CAD modeling system may come to the market. This tool was developed by Damon Millar as a first concept towards a physical modeling system with degrees of manipulation that we cannot yet imagine. Once we really bring the 4th dimension directly into the modeling system, we come a true cyborg craftsman with the ability to create anything we like in a matter of minutes.