Overcoming Dematerialization

A couple of years ago CP+B bought it's first 3D printer to help bring to life the products we were creating. Now, with the growth of our Industrial Design group we've been using them more and more to overcome the dematerialization that's been brought on by our digital age. In a world were everything has become virtual and digitized, from books to communities, it's nice to have a tool that reverses the trend.

Today, I was doing some research about the future of 3D printers for Baked-In when I came across an article that painted a fantastical picture of the future:

Whether or not they arrive in the home, 3D printers have many promising areas of potential future application. They may, for example, in future be used to output spare parts for all manner of products, and which could not possibly be stocked as part of the inventory of even the best physical store. Hence, rather than throwing away a broken item (something unlikely to be justified a decade or two hence due to resource depletion and enforced recycling), faulty goods will be able to be taken to a local facility that will call up the appropriate spare parts online and simply print them out. NASA has already tested a 3D printer on the International Space Station, and recently announced its requirement for a high resolution 3D printer to produce spacecraft parts during deep space missions. The US Army has also experimented with a truck-mounted 3D printer capable of outputting spare tank and other vehicle components in the battlefield.

Another possible future application is in organ printing. This is where replacement parts for the human body may be printed via an inkjet style process with the nozzles outputting layers of organic materials. This is also an area of rapid development, with the US National Science Foundation currently funding a multidisciplinary project (see organprint.missouri.edu).

As reported by Nature in March 2008, a company called Organovo has already managed to output blood vessels and cardiac tissue via a printer that dispenses cells instead of ink. The material so created actually fused into living tissue just 70 hours after being printed, and started beating 20 hours after that. Replacement bones or parts thereof are another obvious application for 3D printers in the future, with 3D patient scan data used to enable doctors to print precise replacement parts before any flesh is cut.

The future will materialize faster than we think.

Comments

[grahamfurlong]

I think it's remarkable that you guys have a 3D printer. You can truly fall in love with an idea when you can hold it in your hand. Great stuff.

[sivam]

3d printing will soon be a consumer technology. Already companies like shapeways, jujups and figureprints have begun to offer 3d printed consumer products.