Page 4 of 5
RepRap spawned an Internet community whose members all coalesced around the idea of open-source technology. They began publishing new designs for 3D printers online, including ideas that were purely speculative, Bowyer says, as a way to forestall other people from patenting them. As the open-source ethos caught on, the axis of power began shifting in the 3D-print industry — well beyond Bowyer's home base outside of Bristol. Open-source marked a conscious shift from the early days of patent mongering — a general redistribution of ideas and blueprints so that anyone could adapt them. And now, both attitudes are at war in Silicon Valley, and in tech culture at large.
By the mid-2000s, any regular garage tinkerer could make his own 3D printer. What had previously been a tightly controlled, well-insulated industry became the domain of funky start-ups and artists.
"Sculptors took up RepRap," Bowyer recalls, beaming. "Chefs began making machines so they could 3D-print their own food."
With the cost of materials reduced, a whole DIY infrastructure has sprung up around 3D printing over the last few years. In 2009, a San Francisco-based orthopedic surgeon founded Bespoke Innovations, a company that 3D prints prosthetic limbs. (It's now a 3D Systems subsidiary.) Last May, a 25-year-old Texas gunsmith named Cody Wilson crafted the world's first 3D printed gun; it fired 14 rounds before failing. In April, Canadian engineer Jim Kor announced plans to drive across the U.S. in a 3D-printed car with a metal engine and chassis — using only 10 gallons of fuel. He'll complete the trip in 2016.
Once the open-source movement changed the contours of the industry, San Francisco became a hub for 3D printing start-ups.
In some ways, it isn't the ideal habitat, Rutter says. The rents are too high, there's a paucity of manufacturing space, not to mention it's hard for a young start-up with an indeterminate future to negotiate with landlords who want long-term leases. But the culture here is replete with the type of people who want to dabble in risky industries, Rutter insists. With its own little nexus of maker fairs, hacker hostels, and workshops, San Francisco tends to engender small companies like Type A Machines, which began moving its operations to the East Bay when it outgrew the small workshop in SOMA.
"The reason manufacturing companies are springing up in San Francisco is just because the people who start them all live here," Rutter says, calling the industry a byproduct of high-tech, hacker-driven maker culture. Businesses like Bespoke, Type A, Autodesk, and the architecture firm Rael San Fratello all wanted to apply an assembly-line ethos to small-batch manufacturing. They were interested in creating efficiencies, but equally concerned about making art.
Last summer, Bryan Allen and his collaborator, Stephanie Smith, used nine Type A printers to make the Echoviren, a 10 foot by 10 foot by 8 foot edifice that they installed in a redwood grove in Mendocino. Big enough for two people to stand in, with chinks to let in sunlight and rain, the Echoviren should last between 30 and 50 years, they say — until its PLA structure rots away. It is the largest structure ever fabricated by desktop 3D print machine. It points to a future in which architects will create ginger-breaded, turreted, livable houses from their garages at home.
And it draws from an epiphany that Allen says he had while playing with Legos at age 7: "We should build things by extruding them from a moving robot nozzle."
In his view, the machine explosion began a couple of years ago, when all the people who would normally be soldering floats for Burning Man suddenly glommed onto the idea of manufacturing plastic goods. The first wave of 3D printing was entirely engineer-driven, steered by people who wanted to make functional things like car engines, or guns, or a cheaper form of mass production.
But Smith and Allen saw in 3D printing its artistic potential.
After graduating from UC Berkeley, the pair moved to a warehouse district just east of Lake Merritt, bought several 3D printers, and began configuring big structures from interlocking pieces of PLA. They finished the Echoviren in August, then began making a wall from hundreds of 3-D printed pentagons. They'll exhibit at the Interface Gallery in Oakland this month.
To Allen, these installations befit an aesthetic movement that's ascending in the 3D-print world right now. It's not "the next Industrial Revolution," he insists; rather, it's the first "Design Revolution."
"We have a very specific agenda with 3D printers," Allen says. By harnessing desktop 3D printers to make large-scale architecture, he and Smith hope to disabuse people of the notion that 3D printing is a technology fad with no substance — that all the media hype is just gloss for a few hackers who found a cool way to make trinkets. While everyone else is converging on the manufacturing side, Allen is thinking of aesthetic possibilities. He awaits the day when ordinary folks can print their own headboards and faucets and wall partitions. (It was Allen who coined the phrase "Printed Plastic Shit Syndrome" and posted the sign at Type A.)
Rutter, too, sees far beyond plastic cups and busts. He sees in 3D printing the triumph of the independent mom-and-pops over the conglomerated Rockefellers and Carnegies. Rutter foresees a world in which boutique-style car manufacturers will supplant the assembly line factories. You'll be able to walk into one, he says, and select from a variety of bodies, interiors, and engines. A clerk will print out the non-metallic parts using a large future version of today's printers, add the engine, and have a customized vehicle ready on the spot.
Once the technology catches on, he says, we'll have a new kind of production system that one single company, or patent-holder, can't easily commandeer.
