We've made a lot of bad decisions about innovation and manufacturing in the US. We're looking to just get a lot of ideas on the table, not to converge on a single point of view, but understand what the world is thinking about this and what innovators are thinking about this. What do we think about the way things are heading, and we'll share this with you. Treat this as a way to talk about the things to really talk about exciting things, and get this on the agenda and then share this with the people we talk to. One of the follies of our research is that everything goes into the public after a year or less. Everything we do here will be public domain eventually, we will share the report eventually. Our next wokrshop will be where we share the research itself. We have a history of doing similar projects. 4 or 5 years ago we did the future of making, which was a map. If you haven't seen those, you're welcome to take those.<br /><br />

- eric wilhelm intro<br /><br />

- david ten have intro<br /><br />

Ten years ago when I got in front of any audience and explained what I did, I had to explain a bunch of other stuff, and explain the precursors before I explained what I did. I don't have to do that any more. And now it's gotten to the point where I can go to art galleries and kind of  the, the other edge of the social sphere, and explain what it is that Ponoko does, and how it sits in whisking society and the economic trends, and people get it. There's a real resonance that we're starting to see in this story. It's going to take at least 10 years to have Eric's dreams come true. It's going to be on us really quickly. I don't have show and tell, but the really exciting thing that I experienced over 2 weeks ago, was going into an art gallery and talking to an art gallery directory and telling him how we're going to engage people and having real kind-of meaning to him because he comes from an ex-manufacturing, he comes from a city that has lost its manufacturing base. All those things are important to people. The art gallery was in Wellington. It's great hearing in the introduction in the US are starting to realize that the decisions around off-shoring manufacturing were a really bad idea. There is little manufacturing that goes on in NZ. We're in a bad way, ahead of the game in this, and so, we've experienced it. NZ is really struggling with the kind of vacuuming-out of intellectual capacity that occured, so it's really a lot to bring to the table.<br /><br />

David Conz<br /><br />

- I recently used instructables to build a keggerator from a dorm fridge. My name is David Conz, I'm Asst. Research Professor, I'm interested in the grassroots DIY collaboration so people making stuff, not necessarily in concert with instutiotnla powers. I got into the field studying people making biodiesel and have branched out into other products, mostly consumables, beer. I just had Grossman sierra nevada come to my class last week. He started with little resources in the 1970s and he didn't have money to hire contractors. He went to community college to learn how to weld, he couldn't afford perforated aluminum, and he did it himself. He scaled up to a national corporation that is pioneering green tech and generating their own methane, bioiesel, they have their largest private solar collection system and photovoltaic system in the country. For my show-and-tell, it's not what it looks like, this is a really old, this is a packet of triple1-8 champaign yeast from France from Canada, this packet isn't millions of years. The stuff it came from is. It would be interesting to trace the steps for me to go down to my local neighborhood store, I could go on and on about it. Champaign was discovered by accident. This yeast does fermentation, and wine and beer and alcohol is a huge industry. So, my question is, what can we learn about cooperative competition and collaboration and DIY scaling up, policy restraints, working with institutional techno-scientists, or avoiding them for various reasons, and how do these things change over time from place to place. One of the catalysts for the grass roots movement is online tech, like serious gaming, internet forums, and arguably, video sharing like youtube, because if you, say, ok propagate a yeast starter or tritrate your waste vegetable oil to make biodiesel, you usually don't know what that means until you see it.<br /><br />

saccharomyces bayanus<br /><br />

My background is industrial design. I used to work at Apple and TONIC. It's all about mass production and perfect-cloned products. I got disheartened with it, and the static quality of products and that never change once you design it. I started a company in SF. We're funded with venture rounds. We're going to have a go with this, you can 3D print your way into a business. Our first offer is a safe low-hanging fruit, working with amputees. If you're going to create a unique product, a DIY 3D scanning modification and parametric modeling, this is the first perfect application. They have no way to get their body back after it's lost. She lost her leg  in a motorcycle accident. We got a parametric template, she wanted to be a sexy cyborg, that's every industrial designer's dream to do that, so we said yeah okay, we'll give it a shot. This was SLA and it's metal-plated, and she loves it. She gets cornered everywhere she goes where people tell her about how sexy her leg is. She gets stopped in airports about how sexy her leg is. This is not the limb itself, this is just ferric. When she rides a motorcycle, there's a faring which shrouds it. We give it slipstream aerodynmic qualities. We give them a sense of symmetry, it gives them a sense of healing and acceptance. We don't try to make it look human because that's creepy. We try to make it look cool and man-made. Natural as much as possible. Laser-tattooed lether. We're working with lots of soldiers, they have a very different taste in tattoos. This was Chad, a competitive soccer player, lost his leg. He wears a shin guard, and we offset the morphology, we 3D printed this with SLS, 5 mm so this is really strong for playing soccer competitively. He can play more competitively because you can't feel the ball if you have a titanium pipe. If it sees its own morphology, then you can sense that. We gave him his name and number built in, this was team equipment. We made thre or four legs for him. Deborah has six. To match his mood or weight oin some cases. Trade weight for fashion, or match their clothes. One of the women (Deborah )started wearing skirts again. She came in with this bad fitting skirt. I was commenting on that, she hadn't worn a skirt in years. She kept asking for more legs, we grandfathered her in. He starte thinking- Chad saw that this is the first time he felt that shape in seven years since the surgery. You don't think of something as primitive as your own body shape until you feel this cold titanium pipe, it's not quite the same. The whole idea is to use this tech for what it does best, it's a market of one, it's vastly complex, the geometry is unmakable in vevery other way. We can bring in the end user and take their basic morphology, so, it's , some of it they can't help and some of it they can help lik their taste, and influence the outcome of their design.<br /><br />

We have an afghanistan sniper who had both legs blown out from an IED, and another amputee who is a runner. He donated his sound-side leg to this guy Jodi, and we will use his leg twice, and mirror it, if he lost both legs we don't have the reference geometry. This runner, we scammed, we got into the body donor business. We scanned someone and donated their morphology to someone else. So there's a body morphology transfer document that our lawyers are drafting. I didn't know there were constraints on that. We don't want to get stung later on that.<br /><br />

This is all uncharted territory. We are selling product and making business. <br /><br />

I want to take out from there. I am selling direct-3D-printed. I have brought a bunch of consumer parts that I have made by metal printing. I brought a lot of crap, so feel free. I brought glass prints. Avoid smashing them please. These are among the first 3D printed glass parts in the world. You're right, you've picked the low hanging fruit in customization. I'm scompletely supply-driven. My sthick with 3D printed, you do need  … I am Beth Sheva. $250k/year. It would probably do more if I did more marketing. IT’s a tiny business that completely runs on 3D printing. I was outsourcing for a while, I owned a 3D printer, and that was a bad idea. I’m here to rain on anyone’s parade, I’m not going to speculate. Solid free-form fabrication.. I’m someone who works with 3D printing every day in order to manufacture stuff since 1997. I just see limits, constraints and problems. The state of the technology is primitive. Those computer graphs that used to be famous in the 60s that had the big square pixels? Jaggies? These parts are pathetic. I’m getting away wit hthis on novelty value and standing there with aperfect portfolio. I was trying to do this by hand whe nit started. I went to art school and tried to do bronze casting. I started at a math major. Were you inspired by the early work by the J artists in China? It’s impossible not to think of those. I can’t say that I was inspired directly? Tooth picks and times. The art of meditation , and the rest of their lives. I’m a rotten craftsman, I had a hard time trying to do  this in a studio by hand. ANyway, I want to rain on this parade, and say the state of 3D printing is not up to the state that consumers would accept as things that they want to accept in their lives. The plastic part is cheap plastic injected crap from China. We can have it any color we want it, you can give it to your baby, you could bite it, you tune the material properties precisely to make the elasticitiy and regidity, it’s going to retail to $4.95, that’s a tall tree to climb. It’s manufactured in 10’s of thousands. I’m a big believer in driving design from supply side. Most people are not interested in weak or strong customiazation. This is so the sweet spot. This is something that I’m getting away with, this is a market. I’ve seen two substantial innovations: hardware cycle business moves very slowly. There’s a massive growth in popular consciousness, that starts to push it faster, but the development of these machines is great. The advent of metal printing is the real advancement. And the second major advance is now printing glass. I’m only interested in these materials.<br /><br />

Gonzalo Martinez. Fascinating fact. I print some of your models. I’m the director of strategic research for autodesk, we have been 3D printing for the last 3 years every single da. For all of the things I do is bringing two new workflows to autodesk, which is the whole concept of capture of design by means of laser scanning, whatever technology, capturing on CDs, bringing it into our software, and then being able to 3D print. I am happy to say we have been doing lots of software on that. I have to admit that I’m responsible for creating for 3D printing out of this.  We embrace 2 years ago, one large project, rinting a full-size motorccle ,we did that. Why did we do that? People were not aware of this technology. They thought it was very expensive, bad resolution, and materials couldn’t be worse, so I wanted to bring to our customers, that this technology is improving a lot, that there’s a lot more to be done, and we did a motorcycle. So we tried to do something bigger the next year, like a full-sized jet engine. Turbopump, router system, we wanted to create a lot of awareness, so we started combining this whole concept of attaching an object, like this, to an entire site, bringing it to the digital medium, manipulate it, interact with it, analyze it, and if there’s a flow for 3D printing, we’re doing that. We have pretty much every 3D printer at Autodesk right now. The technologies is moving ahead, there’s a lot we want to see, like how we can better manipulate the software to accomodate the machines, and beyond plastic, like things with movement, moving kinematics, composites into the materials itself, and how that technology moves ahead. I have great connections with all of the printers and manufacturers, typical question is I want it cheaper, faster, better quality, I’m about to expose this tech to millions of people. So. <br /><br />

If any of you have not seen the youtube of Jeff Kowalski, your colleague, your boss oh, presenting the motorcycle, it’s really flashy and impressive. It opens lots of questions as to whether the parts of the motorcycel articulate. Do the pistons operate? Does it run? <br /><br />

Not at all. It doesn’t run. I have about 2 months to produce that motorcycle. We dsigned this in our software, we have to finish in 2 months. You’re out of your mind to do this in 2 months, so we started to print all of the components together, we have zero errors in putting everything together, fitting exactly. The piston moves- no. Nothing. But on the turbopump that I did, all of the planetary gears work. That’s what I drove the engineers crazy over. I want those things to come together. I’m going to put electric engine inside. I can’t print an electric motor yet. I want to see everything work and interact. So we did that, everything worked. But that’s the milestone - making it work-  making the parts articulate with each other. The jet engine is, whatever- you’re working in people with who are really interested in CAD/CAM who had some cooperation. I chose the jet engine because of my fascination, and I happened to have the design. <br /><br />

I’m Jamais Cascio. I’m a researcher here at IFTF. CCTP says hi. Christopher Pulmer. He knew most of the people here. Not a joke. I can think of terms in different scenarios. Here are different ways it could play out. One of it is that 3D printing is the tech of the future and always will be. These things will come out being competitive with evolved versions of manufacturing, so you can’t think 10 years ahead about 3D printing without thinking about the implications of traditional manufacturing models. Are there ways that this kind of stuff can adapt into more traditional models? And as a result, there’s also the trashapolooza, and the big question of these options, what do you do with them when you’re done? Are we talking about desktop manufacturing, where everyone has a bigger and bigger trash bin, do they just throw them away? Are they recyclable in the sense where they send it to the recycling plant, do they dump it back into something else? Is it closed-loop, 3d printing cradle to cradle? I want to call out as different possibilities. We covered the technology of the future scenario, but we need to pay attention to what happens to the waste, what happens to the stuff you’re done with, it’s still exciting and early, what can we make without thinking look at what you’re throwing away. For those of us who don’t know you, how about your introduction? I am a generalist, I have been involved in futurist works for 15 years, I was cofounder of worldchanging.com, they were a green-futures website, the largest, but it went the way of all things a couple months ago. I have been writing about interesting implications of odd combination of drivers. Futures work isn’t saying “this is what will happen”, but rather pull out the indicators of surprising indicators. I think future studies is an immune system for future implications ,to sensitize ourselves from the future.<br /><br />

Dominic Muren. We’re on the same page with this. I was a mechanical engineer, now I’m an industrial designer at U of W, and I’m particularly interested in the waste side of things, but the accessibility side of things. Rich white people get to print what they want, and everyone else gets screwed, and probably we get screwed when everything collapses. Wouldn’t it be better, I’m sure you’ve read Diamond Age, there’s a message at the end- seed versus feed, do you set up a system that relies on highly-refined feeds of materials that is controlled by one person, or one where raw materials is democraticaly available to evryone and people could access thos ematerials. I’m trying to make this happens, it’s Humble Facture, an alternative manufacturing, very based in accessibility, so I’m working on electronics. It runs on arduino. It runs open source software, it can be printed on Makerbot, and the skin is sewable, and it’s accessible and high-tech, but modular high-tech. On the other end, I’m working on materials like this stuff, and I have a couple ofsignals from the broader world. Evan Bear replacing styrofoam, I’m trying to do the same thing, he wants to do a business, and sell styrofoam, but I would much rather if people grew bikes, so I’m currently trying to grow a prototype in my bathroom at home, you can ask me how it works out in 2 weeks. No-fire clay that uses a bacteria to break down urea, and uses marble to break down in sand. This is another project that uses bamboo and locally-grown fiber.  Resin cross-linkd with borax. This stuff, once I make a chair, will be a hyperlocal chair that can be made anywhere on earth using different bamboo-ish things or willow or fiber-ish things, or crappy resin-glues. This is what I think open fabrication is, it’s open to everyone, and then SKDB can contribute to this. And then when we get the root. <br /><br />

meee<br /><br />

Jon Phillips. I come from free software. I’m more interestingly split my time in Beijing, Singapore and Sierra studying developing nations and how to do manufacturing. On the business side, Fabricatorz build sdifferent projects for clients around the world. The largest interest is in understanding processes and understanding them and how to understand what’s happening there, and understnading innovation and piracy, and what would some call piracy, but in China they call it Shenzhai culture. What if we can apply the same ideologies from free software to back-propoagate that into software. I have Shirizin at Work, there’s Qi Hardware. The idea behind that is, in free software you can have free software, and open source is the business friendly form of it. Then there’s this open hardware movement, and many people feel that it’s not deep enough to have true innovation, to go from hackerspace and the dad and the garage to a multi-billion company like Google.. Qi Hardware is a copyleft hardware company. It’s a knock-off dictionary. The processor is a inginix MIPS, it’s stollen IP on some level, they paid their licensing fee 15 years too late. But. That’s good for IP enforcement. Money can be extracted from that, we’re extracting the knowledge around manufacturing and the parts inside of it, and the goal is to have 100% copyleft hardware until you have the software inside of the chips free, we don’t think you can understand the entire processes around it. We have a new product, a Milkymist, the first processor on a chip, a video mixer for VJ’s, but it’s really a processor. <br /><br />

Andy Switky. IDEO. I’m going to be a little bit random. I’ll talk about cheese and music. So, IDEO is a dsign company and we do lots of product design. We used to do Apple computer, IDEO was the product development. Now we’re just IDEO. We look at the world as a design problem, and whether it’s a brand strategy, furniture or medical devices, there’s a system to designing things. There’ sthis approach to this producto r service that is massproduced. …. The cost of making a speaker-housing, was comparable to the tooling and injection molding, where you can churn out, the artist stamp and a personal appeal, wasn’t that much more. We’ve been trying to convince companies at this clean-esthetic, this purity of form, this ideal- maybe that’s a little bit sterile. I think a lot about manufacturing and how companies think, and trasitioninig the concept and the delivery into the market, I’m trying to give it personality because that’s what I want in the things that I own. I guess that’s it.<br /><br />

David Brin. I’m an old chum with the founder’s here. I remember the whole earth catalog. I guess I was invited most recently here. Did you guys get copies of Tinkerers? I was asked by the Metal Service Industry Association to do a political comic book about the decline of manufacturing in the US, and how it might return. As the bridge collapses, new for 2024, the Apple Honda iCar. What the heck. When you’re doing near future, and the archetype for that was John Bremmer, whih was how I modeled my novel Earth, you try to start something 40 or 50 years into the future, because it’s the most difficult, if you could grab an earlier self from 50 years ago, and yank him here, he would spend half the time going WOW, we never thought about that. And another half saying “you mean you’re still doing that?”. So this is the big art perspective that I use to pretend that I still have a mind as agile as yours, and so, this is why sometimes there’s a token scifi author at these gatherings. The big perspective is what are the grauchy things that stop the oughttabes in our civilization. We’re in a grouchy phase where grouchiness is deliverabtely inflicted of us as phase 3 of American Civil War. I am quite serious that it is deliberate. In our present situation we would do everything on your agendas, there’s no reason not to, the money is there. Our question is, how many of these ambitions could come true? I’ve seen al ot of the arks, and you’ve seen Webpages, and I’m credited. In 1987, you know, there were enough of us who had seen hypercard that it was bloody obvious what was going to happen. So, you know, if you get the Mark Andreeas out there, get enough people who are ….. cosmologist? cosmotologist? A couple of us were thinking about. I was in EECS dept doing astrophysics. I am going to give a speech in 2 weeks at the heads of the EE departments across the country. We were thinking about what it would take to beam information to a spae station for manufacturing htem. Some of them applicable in space. You can’t use the dropping table, not the liquid dropping method, unless you use a tether to create gradients for gravity. There were some other information available. All of you are dealing with fake 3D forming.. the real one would be like 3D television, the actual creation of micropixels or micro dots of polymerization, randomly accessed within a tank or a space.I’m holding out for zapping a hologram into existence in a 3D tank. Holograms are driven by linear amounts of light, so you are looking at, you have to be in line of sight of the surface creating this. You are looking at the surface creating the hologram, it’s fantastic mathematics, maybe holographic universe mapped out around the universe surrounding it. What occurred to us was that you need the crossing of two beams, then use the raster scan methodology in television, or what used to be before your guys, it was raster scan. One laser meeting another laser, you could write arbitrary points in another place. That can be done by burning, what you create is a non-linear effect in a matrix of setmyhtlaiate. This is glass.. well.. okay. You intersect the beams and you create something nonlinear, and if you have half as much energy then you would get half as much bubbling of course.. could you do this for 3D TV? It turned out that there had already been experiments, no patent, on taking mercury vapor in a tank, raster scanning it, and getting these dots. It was fabulous, and getting a bright dot in the middle of nowhere. You can do it because of sequential expofldfadfa fluorescence. You can have two intermediate electron states, and only states that have been activated to this electron level, and then they radiate visible light. If this one is not excited by a secondary beam, in its very brief time that it is excited, it just emits infrared and there’s no harm no foul, and this worked perfectly except there was one problem, what you do not want is in a TV phosphorous screen- you do not want the excitation of a bright dot.. if you get that you’re going to have ghosts and you would see right through it.You wanted seuqnetial excitation, and th black dots, and nobody has figured out how to do that. So we then thought about sequential excitation of poylemrization, you can polymerize methylacrylide, and the Tell Labs was doing this, I flew out to talk with them about this, and you start the laser here, and this crud would start to develop. This was 1981. So the point that I am getting at, the past has ideas tht might be worth revisiting. Our chemistry and lasers are much better now. I raised the possibility of moving the raster radiation point, moving it around rapidly to keep the spots cool while figuring out the calculation of matching these. That’s utterly trivial for us now, but before, the electromechanics was difficult. There’s lots of ways where our things from our crummy old past might be of relevance so that’s why I was invited. I have a new novel where a new woman saves a city, and she is torched, and is all prosthetics. It’s a fascinating concept. Eric I’d like to talk about a TV show, I’ve been pushing this notion called Rebuilding Everything, the notion that you can at the end.. at the beginning, you .. sterious voice announcer says “At this end of show, this will be deposited all across  the world so that Humanity can rebuild everything”. Seed banks. <br /><br />

Mark Hatch. I’m the CEO of techshop. TechShop is a membership-based fabrication workshop. It’s kind of like a gymanasium for hackers, makers and geeks. We have three. We have Menlo Park, SF, and a third one in Rolly. It’s 15 to 17k sq ft. We have woodworking tools, textiles, manufacturing, electronics lab, everything you need to make anything you want. The trends that I found interesting about the space. The japanese came in 20 years ago and wiped the capital tool industry in the US, China came in 10 years ago and wiped it out for Europe, and now with the ease of use or easier use of CNC machines with inexpensive tools, you can now take what used to be a $250k CNC machine, and have it drop shipped in CA for $17.5k. Instead of spending 6 months to 1 year how to use, we can teach someone in 2 class sessions how to uswe the tools. The most interesting example this year is the Dodo Case that a guy came in, Patrick Buckle, came into one of our dream coaches, our tagline is build your dreams here. What classes do I need to take to make an ipad cover out of bamboo and book? Bright boy, but what classes do I need to take to build a product? There were 3 classes :intro to CNC computers, intro to shopbot that does the work, and a textiles class, since our textiles instructor knew a lot about book binding. He built some prototypes using our machines, sent them off, set up a website, then gawker after 2 weeks from the ipad release, identified the royal’s royce of ipad covers. Got 1000 orders in 24 hours after gawker. A week later, to his excitement and consernation, the unofficial guide to Apple did a frontpage on it. He got 6k orders in 48 hours. Six weeks in from what classes do I need to take, he had almost a half-million dollars of orders, he did three million dollars last year, and he’ll do $6 to $8M this year. He created 40 jobs at Dodo Case, and 15 jobs at a local book binder. It’s interesting when you give powerful, easy to use open access tools to the creative class. I can’t hope the China or India folks yet, but maybe they will get it later. This woman took a $40 laser cutter class, and this was a $600k/year business and works out of home. <br /><br />

<br /><br />

Let’s hear from our IFTF perspective. <br /><br />

Anthony Townsend. My first research project was the garment industry in NY in the late 90s when NY had lost 500k manufacturing jobs. For some reason, the garment industry was still clinging to life. It played a role in supporting design. Rapid, small-scale manufacturing of prototypes. So I want to carry that into this project. My signal was my wife’s grandfather, Salvado Lourisa, 86 years old as the forman of a machine shop in New Jersey, making everything. He made some of the parts for the nuclear bombs during WW2, he did prototypes for the Manhatten Project. He’s 86 and still has a machine shop. If something, a part breaks on a lawn mower, he’ll go down and make parts. I look at him doing that, and I have no concept of how he knows how to do that, he has all sorts of skills. I just sort of consume things that were mass produced. All of my knowledge is abstract- code, databases, software. That way of understanding the world is being reborn, so that’s something we’re really trying to understand. We’ve been so wrapped up in the world of data and abstract things for the 10 yars. The whole Maker things. It’s just the last 10 years. <br /><br />

Devin Fidler. I’m a research manager. My most relevant background. Prior to joining IFTF, I was working at USC to work on 3D printing for building printing. Fuse-deposition printing. Adobe. To build up structures one layer at a time, 8 ft walls now. I find that to be where my interest lies in large-scale manufacturing and what doesi t mean when the means of production can be unbolted to the floor and physically shipped to where it could really be of use.<br /><br />

Mathias Crawford. I’m researcher manager here at IFTF doing stuff related to communications. On this project, I’ve been building a thing-o-matic. As someone who has rudimentary skills in electronics and design, in tinkering, I wanted to see first hand what it felt like from going first principles to the full thing. I’ve been chronicling my path. It’s very frustrating. I got it working over the weekend after a motherboard that wasn’t working. I had to send it back. There was this weird moment Saturday morning when everything was working, it was printing out a test cube, and it was like... okay, now what. Shot glass is next. Daff Punk helmit, an IFTF logo, a Boing Boing logo for Dave Pescovitz, and it’s fascinating for the two sides, the notion of, three sides-- IP, one side who wrote the IP (“It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up”), the waste side of things, when can I actually use these things to replace things in my life? And third, not just the accessibility of the design tools, but the usability that, I am a fairly computer proficient person and have been doing some programming, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what I can build to replicate something or build something in my life. It takes many hours of manipulation of testing, I’ve spent enough time on this project already. How do we move from the tools and affordances are there for anyone who wants to dedicate time, is there a future where people can just plug something in and make a replacement widget? Design is hard. The relevance of designers in this space is paramount. This was one of the mistakes we made. The resource side.. even that, something as simple as that, requires the harnessing of technological social infrastructure that harnessed from tons of different people. There are parts from Mexico, nothing manufactured in America, the only thing was the solder flux that I was using.. it was the wire strippers actually. The rest was Brazil, Italy, China, Japan. Digital fabrication and personal fabrication is meshed in a global network to get all this stuff from everywhere around the world.<br /><br />

-------------------------<br /><br />

tag cloud generation session<br /><br />

lunch session<br /><br />

insight: business models<br /><br />

What are the main obstacles to a more democratic open fabrication future?<br /><br />

What are the main business problems to be solved for people to make money doing this?<br /><br />

----------------------------<br /><br />

David Brin<br /><br />

David Conz<br /><br />

Anthony Townsend<br /><br />

Bryan Bishop<br /><br />

If the DARPA and the govt were to spend a lot of money on developing seed technologies for this, the way they did the internet, this could be the next brilliant, unexpected gift from the US to the world. George Marshall, Truman, actually for the first time in history, a PAX Empire encouraged trade, beneficial to the regions than the mercantelisit. The third great brilliance was the release of the internet. Overcome rapid financed. <br /><br />

“Architects”. Gentlemen, design us a new humvee in 48 hours. And then the one, the second was aired where a fire commissioner stood in front of us and asked us for new ways in and out of videos. “The Architects”. Email me and I’ll send you the URL. Then you’d have the DVD here. Then you can see the, how we handle the creative process for coming up with ideas and mentally prototyping and visually prototyping them in 48 hours. <br /><br />

Obstacles? Funding. IP. Massive amounts that we don’t know. The solution, one solution, not the solution, as individual crowdsourcing builds momentum, is to get the government doing it. <br /><br />

I find that, it’s a lost caused at this point. You’re talking to a person who has patents and pay for his college education on royalties. I’m in favor of maximum information flow. There is no contradiction here. If you look at the original discussions for why patents were put into place for the American context, the American justification for patents is one reason and one reason only. There is no basis in mythology to own ideas. It’s a pragmatic tool to own ideas. Oligarchs moved in and captured IP and re-designed the system for their own benefit. The original purpose was to maximize openness. <br /><br />

Opacity of patents. Refusal to license patents. If you can’t find the best deal in one year, then you need to drop the price until someone in the market actually buys it and actually exploit thing. <br /><br />

Hoarding, or refusal to license, or just buying small companies out and burying them is another practice. Sunsets in copyright have been extended beyond any reason (Mickey Mouse). Cost of enforcement. One potential solution is with small guys entering into a consortiu, enough value-added stuff, that they can participate in these big boy network. Nathan Murvald. Rapidly trying to become satan incarnate, trying to buy everything in the world. If you were to get consortiu of open source guys, a large enough consortiu, then they might come to a point in time when they have something really really wanted. <br /><br />

It has to not be so ideologically pure that nobody is making any money. Ideally the situation is that there is some consensus methods of deciding how much should we charge that maximizes throughput but still brings enough income to share among our members, that is allocated among our members in some degree in proportion to the degree that they contributed? The ideology of open source stands in the way of this pragmatic model. <br /><br />

People know how to start a coffee shop, then you charge for coffee, people know how to do this. There are not a lot of well-worn models for how to monetize open source. There’s lots of people that don’t know about this. If they had infrastructure, office, lawyer, marketing, a consortiu of this sort, if George Shortz, few social skills and few friends, one of the things you do is take the income of this open consortium and devide it among people. One criteria could be popular voting on who developed the most. There has to be a variety of inputs on how this is redistributed. Those things are an answer to the problem of scale disparity between small makers and large corporate markers.<br /><br />

There’s one fundamental difference between open source software vs. hardware: when Bryan writes code he is immediately allowed a copyright, and then he licenses it. Whereas patents are rigmural. You are not automatically granted a patent for just having an idea. This is the fundamental difference. The open hardware summit and people, behind that license-- oops, the definition--. TAPR. You can’t write an analogous thing for patent law. Patents cost money, and have significant rigmural attached ot them. A small innovator isn’t going to be able to leverage patent rights.<br /><br />

There’s a whole nother category. As far as obstacles, who has access to the priners, what are people making in general, thse tech centers that should be getting huge support all over the place. High schools used to contain these things.  Development infrastructure is an obstacle. Development assistance and infrastructure. All of this revolves around the difficulties that matter exist in a place and is more difficult …. it costs a lot to transmit matter around. It’s hard to have distributed open innovation on hardware. <br /><br />

One could invision high schools.. my sons go to a high school built in the 1930s, so on their FIRST robotics team, they go into this metal shop that has new machines but basically it was welding, formers, twisters and benders and, none of the nearby high schools had anything like it. If we were to invest in something like that, it would create this thing that people are calling for, but that is the .. the industrial educatio.. . vocational.. but also it would be there available to the communities to tinkerers. <br /><br />

Cultural value: is open innovation important? Stigma of sharing innovation? I am ashamed in all three cases. Their total rejection of their dad... stuff... goes here. Making stuff. I think that’s the disconnect. Up until 20 or 30 years ago when shop classes were systematically closed, you go work in a factory, you would either weld or sew, so there’s a difference there, and we still need them. The interesting things of rebuilding of this network as having two motivations, instead of one, that you are creating these facilities in part to restore the master seargant’s of American industry, the hand enlisted men, the .. of industry. But your second reason is to make available the unleashing of potential in the most advanced people in your community who want to tinker. And so you have a sails pitch for this- by level. That would effect the design of the facility that you’re building. The high schools that do have these facilities, evening ROP classes. Upgrading the skills of master seargants, they are not for the officers. And what we’re trying to do is justify it by saying it has a secondary effect here. The machines get more expensive. <br /><br />

The fundamental aspect of industry, if you want to cause industry to happen, other than open fab, if you want to re-invigorate making, that has these two different components. The design-down component, and hand-build-up, and maybe they meet in the middle, but there will be some specialization on some level, and we have lost both ends of the education for those things. Both the people that know what is possible to made, and because of hyper specialization, .. I teach industrial designers, and they don’t have to know what things are made out of. Getting these people together with the fading generation of where there were a large number of master seargants.. if you take this bidirectional approach, it could lead to an interesting effort to say, what is the simplest turn-key high-schooler community college shop class. What’s the simplest and least expensive turn-key basic thing that could be based on local community demand, slip in an additional machine here, an additional facility there, and relying on local adaptable to local industries, because you have to create a template, a week-long template that could have a national template for high school and for community college shop systems that could essentially be ordered from a checklist. It could be similar to fablab.. the upfront infrastructure costs, if you could bootstrap that up from a simple hello world program where you get one machine and by teaching that tool a number of times, you can generate revenue to get another machine. And you can do a census of nearby industry and find what they can dispose of, what can they donate, and what can they mentor? <br /><br />

---------------------------<br /><br />

Mathias Crawford<br /><br />

Eric Wilhelm<br /><br />

David Brin<br /><br />

TV shows for instructables? People watch a lot of TV, just not on their TV. Like youtube. I’m into TV shows, but there’s a high, there has to be a high bar, and it has to not take alot of my time. Unlike the rest of the population, I don’t care to be on TV. They have this, they’re in this world where everyone they have run into deeply wants to be on TV.. but I don’t. <br /><br />

Main obstacles? Who cares? We spent most of the time to break down what we meant by “open, democratic open fabrication future” and we kind of deconstructed the concept of a market place of this kind of development. Only makers, they are the only people who care who care about the open democratic fabrication future. Eric was good at pointing at, if you want to print a cup out, which is the limits to me someone who spent 3 weeks building and implement 3d printing thing, I can print a cup out.. but why not just buy it at amazon? So the question is, so you want more innate bespoke objects that really fit a design aesthetic or demonstrably better than the general public could actually get produced from their mass production distribution channels? So, the things standing in the way is the access to the resources and machines, cost of the machines, materials that you use, but it all boiled down to demand. Is there a demand for something to print something out?<br /><br />

That’s what Cory Doctorow wrote about in Makers. We’ve all heard of it but nobody reads it. You create a reservoire of people who want this sort of thing by creating a product that enables them to do things that they haven’t done before. The devil who seeds the world with this desire is Disney, but then the underground .. it’s very Marxian viewpoint. Apple-Disney. The capatalists create the means of production for this, and the populace gets an appetite, or an Appletite, then you have your revolution. <br /><br />

Disney is creating the culture, then the Apple products to purchase, there’s this content, but then you have a product that can purchae it, the person is supposed to participate in the process in that chain of events. If you look at the history of Apple, it’s possible.... if there were a commercial product, this is the Doctorow approach, if there was a commercial product that gave you an equivalent of the playdoh press-and-mold but only instead of that it’s a system in your home that can make cool things, so what Cory talks about is making their money on the weekly download from Disney, the latest cool thing that you cna make in your home. INtellectual Property was the most interesting point in the last discussion.. that vision wasn’t really seen as the most interestin... why is the consumer want to have the thing to make that thing? What value is having the fabrication machine? Coolness? Totally imagine a situation where a fabrication thing.. or where you... a badge of honor. Yeah, I hit print too, … with tablets, there’s less parts, there’s less ability for you to connect devices, you can’t do certain things, you can’t connect it to, you can’t tether your devices to it, but what you can do is buy movies, can you put your own movie on there? So maybe they will be … they are making their Woody doll this week, or their interlocking thing from Bathseba, once the repracious capitalist, then you have your Marxian ability to have a revolution. Then there will be the nerds that will hack it, and then.. put an X and a Z somewhere, and 0.001 of the population... the machine that comes from the thingiverse and thingomatic, you can do anything, and that’s awesome, and theorretically now my imagination is the constraining factor.. and I can sort of see this. I have a $1k machine in my kitchen doing nothing. It’s cool, it’s awesome, but it’s $1k that does nothing. First mass product after toys.. sculptures of your family. The photography industry is gigantic. Why would you own the statue/sculpture making machine? This is just a scenario. If you look at home photography, most people do not have a photo-quality printer at home that you use for that purpose. So what they do is not just kinkos but it’s their local.. costco. You need an input device that takes 3D rather than 2D. Once they have 3D pictures of their family, they have something they want to print out. <br /><br />

YouTube. One of the largest contracts is with the company is like AudioScan and it analyzes the 30 hours of HD video uploaded every second and flags it for illegal content. The companies that feed their content into the system, Disney, the others, it’s not unlikely. Xerox did this same thing for copies. It’s easy to make a case for consumption..  like the Amazon Kindle. Nobody approached the Kindle.. you can’t author on it. It’s pure consumption. Is the future of personal fabrication moving towards consumption device, or is there a market or latent desire in the general public to create 3D things for themselves? If they are made out of useless materials that cannot withstand heat, abrasion, or contain bearings.. then no. One possibility is that some devices would receive just the important guts and these would be shipped to you, and you might make the blades of your windmill, and you would slide in the more difficult components. The parallel with photograph printing is apt.. but I think that one of these things with a long S curve.. just like a long curve for the paperless society to start to arrive. All of these Xerox printers created mountains of more paper. People still take their photographs to CVS. This number is dropping like a rock.. within 5 years, it’s simply going to be in the home for the printing of your photographs. The printers are coming free when you buy a digital camera. It’s so cheap to take a video or a camera.. they shoot video on still cameras now. The D7s or whatever. The printing aspect of it is dropping. Yeah, we still have our bodies, we want to have some shape, but I’m not so sure that people are really printing. They’ve nuked that person now. <br /><br />

You’re a writer that uses these networks of putting together these movies by proxy.. doing this project, it was boring when my dad left, and it stopped mattering (T-o-M). Some people in the garage do that though. In my next novel, my fans will provide multi-value material .. hyperlinks in the material.. in earth circia 1989 that Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear are now doing in the Mongoloia. I plan on .. substantial fan network and going to recruit a dozen guys and probably include toys. So they will be helping editing your book. There’s been five versions of the Makerbot extruder. The thing-o-matic just came out in November, then the cupcake came out before that.. there’s demand for this incremental growth. I think the demand.. I don’t know enough.. what I want to find out if people are designing stuff .. or are people printing stuff off the internet? Are people just consuming, or are people creating the cool things?<br /><br />

Would $1B from DARPA do anything here? Can the open source movement benefit from lobbying the federal government to create the open source community in the first place? VehicleForge? National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010 to give every congressional district a techshop? Are their interests economic or personal? There is a market for 3D printer, therei s a market. It’s a techie/nerd market, and customizer. OLPLC was an interesting project because of its failure. When I was working with them, you can look at the price of computers and it was dropping.. there were already $100 computers, and now Ben Nanonote. Their UI was special (special ed). Can you plot that, that market? Is there some black swan that jumps out that allows this to be developed? <br /><br />

Chinese Patent System. They are taking innovations outside of China into China, so when you move in they charge you a licensing fee. Light bulb? Oh yes, we have that..<br /><br />

Copyright vs. patent. You are immediately granted a copyright. But what about a patent? What if I go and build something that someone else has built, what are they going to go do? If you get sued, that’s success. Just like in China, if you do an art show and they shut it down. That’s the shit. You’re doing something right.<br /><br />

The open source hardware community. <br /><br />

---------------------<br /><br />

Share at this point:  we talked about the main obstacles to overcome to make this future real and the main business problems that need to be solved in order for people to make money. What I want you to share is, an answer to either of these questions that you heard from someone else articulate in a compelling way that is something that you learned. <br /><br />

What are the main obstacles to a more democratic open fabrication future?<br /><br />

What are the main business problems to be solved for people to make money doing this?<br /><br />

The software was a big obstacle. And how specialized that is. Very expensive. Solidworks. Architectural forms. $4,000 a seat. From a democritization .. Gonzalo made the point that professional designers that, whereas, more and more features and complexity in the software, and non-professionals just need something that can do simple stuff. I was mentioning today, when I go visit my big large, small accounts, but they are already using my software, it’s the coolest thing, they are asking for even more complexity. We have tons of lists of things that people want us to do, so we try to keep up with it, but when we attach non-demographic non-professional. What does the simpler user want? To me, something interesting was, the notion Eric said, how would you build a cup, build a block in Sketchup, take out the middle, and you have a rough proxy for a cup.. you could just buy one on Amazon for a dollar. To me, that question is, what is the low-end designer tool, or what does the low-end designer want? Web tools. You used to have to know how to do programming, but now web tools, you just have to know how to program stage for CAD... garage bands. You drag and drop stuff. You can do that in any level of profiifiency that you want, you can be very precise with music, and just plank along. An interesting piece of software is called Mesh Merge. You take two meshes, and it finds the normal of those meshes, and it generates a new mesh. It burries the mathematical operators like union or merge. You can download stuff from google warehouse, thingiverse or turbosquid, and squish things together. It’s playful and easy to use. That’s the sort of other end.. just to give you a... you talk about TurboSquid. Most of the stuff you see out there, it’s cool, it’s very cool stuff, it’s not printable. There are all of these libraries that are great.. and for people who aren’t.. for the high-end versus low-end.. when you say sorry your mesh isn’t manifold... lots of questions says my model isn’t printable. Expectations of the tools... with SolidWorks.. you expect the tool to work.<br /><br />

All of what you’re making right now is dumb objects. One of the barriers for the consumer for the democritization end, there’s a limit to what you can build. But what about smart objects? Electronic polymers, or polymers that can move, then you can start making more sophisticated objects, that can be more attractive to experiment with, and make new things. Not even as smart as having embedded electronics, the interesting assembly here. There are very few thingiverse objects that are assemblies of multiple pieces. There are very few 3D objects that are assemblies of multiple pieces. Look at all this stuff we’re using.. the actual only thing, this is an assembly of two things. This is not 3D printable. Until we start seeing assemblies out there, it’s a cup, why would I print a cup when I can just print it. The more pieces you can assemble together, the less likely tou can buy it on amazon. The customization. Sculptures of your family is something you can’t buy.. even that, it’s going to be better injection moulded though. You raised the point that, I had not thought of, whether Cory Doctorow’s image, of plato-pressed-and-mould concept. That’s the closest thing to Cory’s idea of a mass market of creating millions of market that wait to download next week’s from some capitalist or Cory follows a Marxian process in his Makers where the means of production are created by Disney and the objects are from Disney.. and then comes the revolution which then hacks this system so that everyone can exchange anything they want. Very Marxist (what?). The other model, and making 3D images of your family, and that is, that’s certainly a market, as you point out, people are more likely to do their photo printing at CVS or Kinkos and they will get them there.<br /><br />

The input to making the content that you might print out. How do you get those pictures? Reality capture? I’m not interested in stuff on thingiverse. Something that really needs to be addressed substantively.. if you want to go through “How does this become more mainstream and interesting to a general consumer?” The general consumer has a less nterest in thingiverse than I do (Eric Wilhelm). Busts and sculptures.. that’s kind of cool. Even the best ones cost $1000. We have in our legacy customers, they do 2D stuff. They are happy doing 2D stuff, we want them to move into 3D, and the subject is that it’s too complex, I want to learn, what about from your iphone, take a picture of your kitchen,  and from the picture be able to reconstruct your 3D kitchen, and from there place the object and move your object, just that concept, they really love that. Just from using a smartphone, they love that concept. We are trying to introduce this capturing device for.. there’s different subjects for people who say it’s too hard for them to model in 3D.. maybe they need something to help them. <br /><br />

From a high level, the inspiration isn’t going to come from those sorts of places. It’s going to come from the college kids who have … to death.. and have jerryrigged it do something new, something fundamentally different. That will be the catalyst for driving it forward. We haven’t reached, there’s... that moment in the evolution of a technology that when you look back, you go of course. Do you see that as inevitable? 18 to 24 months. Killer app in this.. there’s just this attractor, a tractor, a killer app.. who grew up with this.. what can we replace in the injection mould with 3D printed things? There are college kids who are in industrial design schools at the beginning of the year I gave them a makerbot, and at the end of the year they assembled it, and at the rest of the semester they are printing things out. I gave my best friend a makerbot for christmas, and every day, he was going between the workshop and the makerbot as he fixed this thing to print out, but the really valuable part of that, was that he has a disdain for this device, so when he wants it to do something, he won’t think twice about it.. he will insert what he needs to insert to make it work. It is about school. It’s school where they are learning to do this. <br /><br />

<br /><br />

There’s demand, from developer’s.. is the goal to keep this for developers or for mass customization. The goal is to let it do what it’s doing.. grow to the size its’ growing.. that market might not be everyone. You shouldn’t direct or constrain it. People are gravitating to it.. someone in high school is going to invent in the killer app and then it will be monetized and there will be plenty of venture cpaital... well I’ve heard that for the last 10 years. I’m not sure there is a killer app, I just think it’s a lot of fun, I don’t think that’s a bad outcome. Why isn’t just being fun a killer app itself? It’s hard to monetize. Mass production. Interchangeable parts. On railroads, a number six screws meant something. Railroads were a killer app. There could be for open manufacturing. So essentially there is no...... <br /><br />

Dispersed population? We did talk about the, it’s in the government’s interest to push this ahead it pushed ahead the internet, because of increased robustness or increased.. distributed uh.. machining is not going to help you with mass movement of food or the things that people really really need, there you need the more grow locally thing. It could enable you to take care of emergency parts, like beaming a prototype of a particular screw to a space station. It would be good to have a santa clause machine on the space station. <br /><br />

How are people going to make money? The fat tail. The sweet spot. Andy described- more than 10 but less than 10,000 in production size. The monetary value and cultural value things itself. When you manufacture like this, you have a fan base really.. not a customer base. <br /><br />

Two types of self-replication: nanotechnology, which is scary ,and we need discussion of standardizing feedstock. If we’re standardizing feedstock for this, then .. then you’ve created the infrastructure and the community for who want to standardize the feedstock of how we control nanotech without controlling it. Self-replicating probes. The notion of possibility of sending to interplanetary space, to mine resources and make the parts to repair themselves.. It’s possible to send a space probe in theory to mine materials, make copies and send them off to 100 more systems. We believe this is possible and our destiny if none of the other dreams come true. One of the reasons to do that is that it’s expensive to get stuff from here to there.. send one master machine and a sensitive electronics, bearings and really high quality stuff, and gets there, and lays that all out, and then creates a factory that can make grunt stuff. <br /><br />

One thing that Scott mentioned is that the structures for incentives.. not having health care in this country could be debilitating to your business or your body. The conversation I heard was the macro obstacle to really small scale entrepreneuralism in the US is the absence of healthcare. The entrepreneurs in NZ or in Canada, there’s a big willingness in people for people to leave their jobs and start their own businesses. I think that’s quite interesting when you’re trying to think about the business models, grassroots versus top-down. Compare this industry as the folk music level.. and what we need to move to is a hip hop level. And if we had some important kind of concepts around context and relevance and, as I kind of definition of success, if there was an object that was produced and completely meaningless, that was kind of a good thing, that was a strong relevance, to that object.<br /><br />

What’s the role for DARPA in this? It was around this, what this sort of, the high school - what should the high school maker lab look like? The room that replaces the metal shop? What’s the basic configuration and how you might customize it? The particular industry in the community? The idea that you put one of these in every high school. Maybe the new thing is that nerds are accepted into shop class. Part of the magic that Jim came up with is that there’s a minimal set of tools.. and it’s all of them. You can’t say, oh we’ll do everything except for electronics, or except for plastics.. you have to have all of the tools that you need for most of the industrial revolution, then you layer the community and get the explosion. With the educational component, they are trying to create mastery rather than enablement. We do a three-hour welding class, it’s not a 13-week mastery of welding class. We have a huge mismatch between our mission (to enable people to get shit done), and the educational mission to didactily prove that you have competency level. There’s serious issue with this. I would think that junior colleges are closer with this. The other component is that, we’re really targetting the creative class, and not all of the students in Palo Alto are in the creative class, so I need for foundations and institutions to subsidize them and get them into the space. Doing FIRST robotics? well you just need a machine shop and some electronics. That leaves out injection moulding and textiles, to really enable that class, you need all those parts. Who’s your, who’s your customer? Well. We have hobbyists, students, serious entrepreneurs, we have artists, where else do you go where you have this mismatch of folks? The tools don’t care what you are doing or why you are there.. but you need that set to attract those folks. It’s not large enough. But you’re not going to do a dodo case there. You’re not going to launch Etsy out of Fab Lab at least as it’s currently constructed. It’s a tough question, and it’s not for every student. I would argue 20% or 30% and we should expose them all to these tools. <br /><br />

The group of people who have a language to understand flathead from philips screws. A knowledgaeable to turn over an ipad and say they can’t open it.. that doesn’t even exist, that’s been bred out. There are many steps along this route. Another thing, sort of become more, but it’s been amplified from me, since you represent the peak of the stuff happening.. most people are talking about a very small subset of machines. These CNC-controlled machins that melt plastic in various ways. I feel like, more than ever, I’m going to fight for not only the breadth of machines included in the discussion, but also new machines. Why doesn’t TechShop have PCR?<br /><br />

Intellectual Property? Jon Phillips- IP is not a barrier. It doesn’t stop us from having fun. The barrier is when you have another problem when you have too much money.. if you’re smart you’re looking at having too much money, then you get sued. The patent thing is a complete distraction. Essentially, in China, the patent system is really interesting, it’s basically a copy of the US system. If you have an innovation from China.. you can take something from outside of China, then patent it there, and then when the other companies move into China, they get sued and have to pay a licensing fee. <br /><br />

At the begininng of the mp3 thing, everyone thought they didn’t have any money, they aren’t going to sue us, but we ended up with lots of infringers, and then it becomes worth Metallica suing every single person that ever... and then you have this ridiculous class-action lawsuit. Someone copying your stuff is good... <br /><br />

We’ve gone through this enough with digital property.. content.. audio/visual .. we could license our work under Creative Commons or some kind of license that protects us. But we have lots of people that will take it any way. Do you have enough money to enforce it? IP is a problem? The costs of enforcement favor big players. Look at when youtube got sued for $1B. Because none of this has happened, we haven’t had people ripping off patented designs. Suppose there was a patented fuel injection manifold, which is a simple part from a material point of view, and you could 3D print that or CNC machine it, so it was patented by GM, and somehow it was released, and 100k people make them at techshops. And install them in their cars. 100k people infringe it. That’s a lot of money for GM to upgrade those cars. It might be worth GM litigating these people. How do you protect, in that situation, what if GM instead had patented that thing and just sat on it, and it’s something the community wanted it, but GM under current patent law has no incentive to sell the thing, if they want to do that.. there’s tons of that. 3M is like sitting on 20,000 patents. I could go and look at the patents and totally reverse engineer them. There’s a company called BYD is a Shenzhai knock-off Chinese car company. Warren Buffet is a main investor. It had a Honda, a Toyota and a Mercedes logo on it. This is like one of the top car companies in the world.. it’s not even in the US. Sconia or Volvo had a Chinese company knock off one of their trucks, the whole thing. And they went and instead of suing them, they said change the truck in this direction, you get a better product, and it doesn’t look like ours. And then you force them into a licensing method. There’s a little bit more pragmatism with the big players in this space. It’s going to happen. There are.. one of the stories might be.. when it happens to the GMs, … then maybe they will start... in the music industry, it has not been an obstacle. It’s very easy to steal music, it’s probably.. people are probably unhappy about that.The music business model.. they can make money from their performance. How do you make money from something like that? So is the money from the licensing fees? The answer seems to be that piracy is a fact of life, it’s ubiqutiious, everyone does it, the ultimate pirating company: Disney. The coolest stuff is pirated. New art forms are built on it. Why do people pay for patents then? Why would you patent it then? To protect yourslef in the American market. You get fired if you don’t make patents. Chinese hardware companies that have developed IP, so now they are starting to do internal Chinese enforcement of IP.. so there’s a lot of piracy. Microsoft’s business model in China.. they charge like $1, they go around, they release a version of Windows, even though it’s $1 anyway, they go to the government, and before it was like sitting down, and saying, we need to do this one thing, we’ll do this thing, go to each company, and extract a company, get into a contract from them, like some Chinese company like BYD, how many copies of Windows, charge $30 million, we’ll charge $100 million, you’ll get paid $20 million. <br /><br />

Before, you were just talking about how it doesn’t matter if small actors or 100k small actors rip off GM’s thing, because that happens all the time, but now it sounds like, China enforces for China, and US enforces in the US, so if China rips off the US, then whatever. If small hackerspaces, techshops, whatever, were to rip off a patented design from a US company that was just sitting, would they get sued? So, how do we get around the patent exclusion points... <br /><br />

Autodesk, we get sued twice a week. People using our tools to copy other products... Andy? So our, official policy ius that we don’t do patent searches and we expect clients to do it. So we don’t know their domains like they do.. we’d have to spend all of our time. We don’t know the value of invention. GM might be doing a fuel injection, doesn’t work that well, they just patent everything, and don’t see value in it. That’s the reality of the way it works, and if you infringe on it, they will sue you. There’s no cycling back into the creative commons for these unused patents. So if you do a patent search and know about it, it’s triple damages for infringement.<br /><br />

At autodesk, we have an entire group just to patnet stuff. Part of our team, weh ad some breakthrough, we had 5 patents in a month’s timeframe, the employees get special bonuses and it’s good to have that, but we encounter many times where someone infringes some patents and we have to do all the legal stuff.<br /><br />

I will defend the patents, they are critically important for businesses.  The design patent, for the shape of something, if you don’t have protection, there’s no incentive for you to be in that business. It’s tough to make a living on that. Cannon.. Japan.. if you tried to photocopy and scan it on a high quality printer because it has built into its programming to recognize to pcurrencies so that it can’t print a good high definition.. maybe STL2 before initiating print would call up to the known signatures.. and deny that print. Haha, I’d disable that immediately. DRM is dumb.<br /><br />

Companies that have less valuable products, that people could use, but not enough to the company.. they shouldn’t be able to sit on it. That’s kind of orthogonal. It has no direct applicability. It’s a huge thing.. it’s a classic open innovation play. Who can do stuff with all of these patents? It’s a huge opportunity. In temrs of barriers, and you have $15k to spend on developers or a patent, you’re going to go develop it.. when you talk about removing the barriers, it just doesn’t make sense, but patents do have a place in innovation. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could ignore it? Knock on GM’s door, and get their back log of patents. <br /><br />

If you capture the shape of the object through photocopying and lasering, who owns that? Is that covered by a patent? Trademark is far more important, in my opinion. Social contracts seem like the only thing. The home depot model.. if they have the IP for replacement parts for your own products, if you can go click and download a replacement part, or home depot will print your part, there’s still value in the patent/trademark.. there’s some business model in there that makes sense, it’s protectable and valuable, and people wouldn’t flinch at it. Patent pools. The Creative Commons like with public patent license, or model patent license. We have all of these patents that are good for the world.. Nike/greenexchange. Scandal.us.. they made a scanner for the kindle, so you can take pictures of the screen, then you OCR it, and it’s then legal. It’s cool and fun, but totally insane.<br /><br />

patent immunities for startups? <br /><br />

business models -> startups. Rebuild industry. Policy issues for manufacturing... <br /><br />

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Last session. We’ve focused on empowering consumers and designers and empowering small businesses. A lot of the organizations that support the institute are dinosaurs, the GMs, governments, international organizations, I guess what I’d like to do is think about how they survive, thrive, decline, what does this mean for factories, what does it mean for recycling, what does it mean for waste, infrastructure, warehouses, inventories? Traditional manufacturing supply distribution chains, and post-manufacturing? <br /><br />

Replacement parts is really interesting. So, the discussion about patents- anyone in the business of adding value through.. so, what’s next, like a company like GM, getting more into servicing and upgrading of products over the lifecycle. It reminds me a conversation with Nokia(?) about the secondary parts market, and how, there are many people around the world that have made their livelihood around refurbishing their old phones, so they can’t keep all of their own parts in constant production. There may be another way to do that. It fills a need which wasn’t filled before, it’s going to be characteristic of what 3D printing does. <br /><br />

The idea of instantiating back catalogs is some really interesting opportunities around the extending the life time of a product. There’s been some interesting comments, and we’ve had some ou.. as an outsider, there’s some .. more and more closed cats, not being abl to replace backtrees. The environmental component to that is really seriously starting to worry people. There’s an interesting kind of counter-opportunity here, which is, you open it up, and it extends the life cycle and maybe even extend the value of the product to the manufacturer over an extended period of time, but not a one-off sale, but like a car company. Apple.. for manufacturers.. to get into services or other kinds of value adds, or do what the fashion industry does and keep launching your products. That’s what Apple does.. that’s not what Apple does.. a better example is in China.. there’s ZTB’s and they make ninety or 100 different phones, 4th largest mobile company in the world. They churn out different phones like crazy, and they are going to make up for it in volume because they don’t know what’s going to be a hit. There’s going to be another batch soon.. Apple is not quick churchn. ZTB/Nokia might be. Fashion item, totally. 3 to 12 month lifespan. OEMs? That let GM brand their phone or microwave or whatever. These companies that just make bajillions of random crap, and then companies apply their seal to it. That’s an intresting thing.. it’s the cheapest way to modify your brand. <br /><br />

Maybe GM will just buy new startup companies in hardware. Distribution is really hard, it’s hard getting your product out to tier 2 or 3 or 4 cities. Factories are by and large pretty sophisticated in making stuff. This little low volume thing isn’t going to be interesting to them.. it’s just more of a design and development thing. The scale of 3D printing isn’t going to be disruptive to established manufacturing. Automotive? I ran an autobody shop, and the distribution from 20 different brands, I could wait weeks for a silly component from Europe, and printing the parts.. and the files don’t exist for those parts. I would have been glad to pay the $30, but I need that knob. Automotive is an enormous businss, and supplying components is 35% of gross revenues. Are they going to use an assembly or a component, and component storage might not make sense, so they sell a $300 assembly.. but $3/pop for components, produced locally, might be better. Talk them into it. There are some interesting niches, like the one-offs and replacement parts. For traditional manufacturing, I don’t know. That injection moulded part is still a tall tree. Many products, aspire to high volume, and open fabrication isn’t manufacturing. (Wait, what?) It’s not going to displace injection moulding (what? Why not, build an injection moulding machine). <br /><br />

Complex air manifold, sonic air welding.. they are now designing for it to be printed, and throw those old designs out the window, and the supply chain becomes a lot easier. So Boeing and Airbus are.. taking ques from those guys, and seeing this as a methodology that they embrace, won’t happen for a while. Scott said... so.. factories are using 3d printer, to get a picture of what things are going to be like.. and things like that. There are many uses, the key question is, can I do volume? Can it be affordable, and how good is the surface resolution, and is that going to replace ABS plastic to what the machine is outputting? So you have to ask those core questions. Some industries, 3D printing can replace a lot. There’s a big conference called Rapid. It’s the main coalescence.. it’s in Miniappolis. 3D printing show up and just say “So, did anyone manage to monetize it this year?” They say no, then they go out to get a drink. JR Rogers from Local Motors is doing something in Berkeley. He’s coming much more from the kind of social pro-creation. Local Motors, DARPA..<br /><br />

If people can drink a finite amount of beer, at some point, theoretically, boutique places are going to chip into it, like Budwiser. Given that these technologies allow for smaller scale, but certainly more flexible, fixtures and things, to go inside the factory and be more nimble, more flexible, have lower over-head cost, if those technologies continue to happen, is it possible that we see a sort of, a fat tail idea, or the market becomes all tail, where instead of just niche-markets, it’s all niche, and everyone becomes part of a niche, maybe this isn’t 10 years out but 40, but maybe when niche is made better, it makes all niche better. This is what IDEO does.. the nicheness that you identify that you can design better. <br /><br />

Factories, have a long wave to ride. There’s a lot of people in the world. Vietnam is now a new attractive way to do business, North Africa, Brazil, Chile has some interesting opportunities, but for this audience in here, and my thing about my friends, the most important part is educational. Something like this, to extract the knowledge of how this is made from the factories, and the technologies and software, that’s one of the biggest aspects of what this means for us and for the next 10 to 20 years.  That’s a good point, at Autodesk, we try to expose 3D printing across our customers, we found 1 denominator: nobody knows it exists. I’ve talked with all of the CEOs of 3D printing companies, I told them the first problem is awareness, and better marketing, and people are going to have high expectations. We were thrilled that HP wanted to jump into that space, there’s lots of things happening, if they jumped into that space, they want to see this really flourish, so I think things are going to happen, hopefully happen faster.. in fact, we did a joke internally, I designed the iMake machine, and send this to Steve Jobs, how do you think about this stuff? We want tons of stuff invested in this to make this affordable and faster. Do you, do you think there will be some disruption or shifting of factories and warehouses and traditional supply chain? What I believe is that if you put in the hands of people a really simplified software to design, output it right away, it’s going to be an explosion of innovation, people that would never be capable of making would be making these things now. I would love to design something, this and this and this, but manufacturing I’d have to hire a manufacturing engineer, and you know how to do it. The complexity of manufacturing is the design software and 3D print, and that’s magical. Maybe you have a finite amount of consumption, and they will explore new options.<br /><br />

When we have Autodesk University, 10k customers come from around the world, we do massive 3D printing projects. 99% of them didn’t know about 3D printing, though. Where are the companies that do this, and where are they, and if you go there, the $100M for the large ones, the R&D, how many people do you have doing R&D in materials? 2 guys. I need big players to move forward on that technology. <br /><br />

I think that the one of the things we will see out of this is, Willis Communication. They sold radios, they only sold to third world countries, bcause what was happening they weren’t putting in telegraph, they went straight to wireless. They won’t have reached the stage where they need the massive production volumes in the third world, it’s cheaper to just run out with fabrication tech and run them out there for a while, it’s jumping a series of steps kind of mechanism. You can’t do the volume, but maybe it’s a different model. Maybe in these countries it’s not as big as a market. You can start markets long before traditional manufacturing gets there... and replicating car culture in Beijing, has been a huge problem. Prototyping things and showing to managers, that’s huge. To get a plastic shaker for salt, I’d have to go through $50k of packaging and so on. 3 to 6 months before, but now 3 days now. When you think about enabling the creative class, in a way that now for $300 instead of $50k, what’s going to happen? It doesn’t become a manufacturing platform, but the innovations are going to be enormous. That’s how we use 3D printing.. we build prototypes all the time, and the cost for us on our projects to do an FDM, is about $0. So we build it all the time. Do you feel it increases the quality or the quantity of the stuff? It proves the final product, and honing in at the right direction. You can build all kinds of prototypes the next night.. and shortens the cycle time. Does that increase the number of trinkets, it increases the quality of the trinkets. And the speed of the trinkets that we produce. The market is able to, if you, discount the waste, which is maybe a huge problem, but matching the changing customer space, they always want something new in cell phones. You’re doing rapid iteration at IDEO. <br /><br />

People suck at visualizing, even designers are bad at it. Even if I was ZFT, I’d make 90 FDMs of these models so that they can hold it and see it, and see if that $50k product would be better. So it’s better quality or better product-market fit. This industry of 3D printing is very labeled by “just for prototyping”. 1% of the things that I print are for prototyping, the rest is for final use. So, it’s low volume, this is the part that I need for my house, for a specific thing. A friend wanted a heater at home, so he wanted a counter on the heater so that it would count how many hours. The plate that covered the heater contact was a metal contact with no shape or weight to put this indicator. We got the shape of the heater, and did an attachment of this display, printed it out, fits like a glove, and it’s back there. We found a trick, I put it as Electronic Corporation, you need to disconnect this to do this, and my friends were impressed with this specialized unit.. how’d you get that? So, customization. It’s only accessible to engineers.... 10 years ago and probably 10 years from now.<br /><br />

Is there something qualitatively different 10 years from now? I’ve been curious about how people are talking about this.. hybrid between information technology and materials. Information technology has been exploding. Materials has been exploding. Atoms to bits and bits to atoms, and how literal is that? How are those real S curves in play here? It’s this real information processing with atoms. Web or web 2.0.. commerce on the web happened, it happened very quickly, crazy stuff started happening, and it was a long build-up, the S was spikey.. there’s a lot of key differences.. this and information technology is a little different. 0 and 1 is a feedstock. We have a complex feedstock here. Ponoko. We tried to have an undifferentiated materials catalog between the US and NZ. Transparent acrylic. I’m not talking unusual stuff here. Nobody wanted transparent acrylic. It was the first idealist step.. idealistic thing that we put on a lifeboat. So we had different materials catalogs. We talked to Proctor & Gamble, and they said, it’s not a problem for us... well of course not, you’re Proctor & Gamble. Materials development will be slow, but the economic expansion might not track that.. you might have 10k people in lots of little niches. <br /><br />

In one sentence, what are you going to be doing 10 years from now, based on this set of practices and processes?<br /><br />

We’re going to build 500 techshops. <br /><br />

In 10 years, we’ll have tens of thousands of open source hardware projects that can be downloaded. <br /><br />

I’ll have my next generation scan camera that I will take a picture, have my holographic system to manipulate it, and have my 3D printer to produce anything I want.<br /><br />

I’ll be creating 1,000 to 2,000 units a day, and addressing scalable issues from simple to very complex to otherwise address new problems. <br /><br />

I’ll be a retired media conglomerate still trotting this thing out and people will still be wondering how I made it.<br /><br />

People will be printing multi-story buildings in 10 years with plumbing and concrete. Windows too? <br /><br />

Flying my own private airplane that I 3D printed. More than once. With a successful landing.<br /><br />

I don’t know. (David ten Have)<br /><br />

We’ll have created free software but for hardware, by 10 years. (Jon Phillips)<br /><br />

It’s going to be the same conversation with clients now, about what they do for high volume and what they do for prototypes, this in between test-marketing quantities, btu I don’t think it will change that much. (IDEO)<br /><br />

I hope I will be able to buy fewer new things in 10 years and get more things produced locally. That’s my hope.<br /><br />

I hope to still be floating sculpture designs in the aether and that people will want to instantiate and materialize them in whatever greater varities of materials. And be getting royalties.<br /><br />

Mathias? No. Likely not. The net result of today is that I do not think I’ll be printing things in 10 years. At last, a customer!<br /><br />

At the Humble Factory, I’d want real, growable alternatives for mild-steel, fiberglass, and polycarbonate, not clear. I don’t think I can do clear. Those 3 things in 10 years in your backyard.<br /><br />

Anthony? I’ll be living in the world of stuff that’s been cheapened, in the same way that information media is kind of worthless now. I think it’s a world of crap. <br /><br />

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