Desktop Rapid Prototyping

Earlier today, the lead article on nytimes.com announced that rapid prototyping printers may be appearing in the home within the next two years. Those of us in the field of industrial design are familiar with available technologies for rapid prototyping, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Stereolithography (SLA), etc. Basically, these technologies allow a product which has been modeled in the computer to be spat out in solid form by a machine. So for example, I drew this:


An FDM printer gave me this:


I removed the support material (the plastic is hot when it's printed— imagine crossing a hotglue gun and an ink jet printer— so it needs additional material to ensure the prototype doesn't sag while cooling) and got this:


Which I then painted and got this:


A prototype of a sangria pitcher for a line of mexican tabletop items.

So you see, rapid prototyping is very cool, and also very useful for ironing out kinks like scale and connections, before you go and produce 100,000 pieces of more junk. But there's been a lot of talk in the ID community about the ramifications of everyone being able to design and print there own stuff at home. As core77.com editor Allan Chochinov laments, desktop publishing gear like inkjet printers has made everyone having a tag sale into a graphic designer. And now the trees along country lanes are littered with bad signage. So what will become of product design? Forget that, what will become of our landfills when every Tom, Dick, and Harry is busy turning his macintosh into an industrial production line of one offs? These neato gadgets and technologies can have tremendous consequences that need to be considered. Fortunately, the Times article included some encouraging pictures:


Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/technology/07copy.html?ref=technology