Materializing Ideas

An interesting set of ideas here, forwarded to me by Jamais Cascio, CRN's Director of Impacts Analysis.

This is from an article titled "What Is Manufacturing in the Era of Design-Art-Technology?"

There are a few things to say about manufacturing, design and digital arts. First, we’re not talking about manufacturing. Manufacturing is about making things on a large scale using machinery. Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to the experiences of mere mortals. Factory floors throwing sparks, littered with metal shavings, huge overhead cranes moving impossibly large masses of steel -- this is what manufacturing means.

Half-million-ton crude-oil-carrying super tankers are manufactured. The Airbus 380 is manufactured. Millions of Herman Miller Aeron Chairs are manufactured. Billions of cellular phones are manufactured. These things have meaning in the idiom of manufacturing. Manufacturing is the engine of growth and despair of the 20th century.

So it's a novel concept, to apply the term 'manufacturing' only to traditional Industrial Age factory processes. As opposed to:

If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between an your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material.

Why is this different from manufacturing? Because manufacturing deals in enormous scales -- scales of time, material, logistics, operational fortitude, finances, consumption of natural resources. Ultimately, manufacturing endeavors are impossible imbroglios of spin-doctors and reassurances, speculation, trust and hope as much as they are supply-train logistics and CAD systems. . .

The sad consequences of manufacturing’s scale is that it defaults to the least common denominator. Manufacturing on a mass scale can only be an effective business enterprise when you make one thing that millions and millions of people are convinced they need to buy. Customization as a manufacturing process has not moved much beyond Henry Ford’s Model T color option -- you can have any color, so long as it’s black.

And what are they describing instead?

What we are talking about are emerging 'materialization' -- not manufacturing -- processes. What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale -- quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer encumbrances.

This is the crucial element -- there are fewer and less awkward hurdles, deals, negotiations and alliances to be formed in the process of materializing an idea. The power of the idea and its “moment” is not lost through the trials of enrolling people, machines, enterprises, financiers into your cause. It’s as if a sketch in a notebook can materialize immediately. No more fumbling around with awkward descriptions of your weird idea -- let the material object speak for you.

That sounds an awful lot like a description of someone using a nanofactory, doesn't it?

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But it's not. What they're talking about at the Near Future Laboratory blog is a new approach that uses:

. . .“toolkits” consisting of digital software and hardware, fab machines, CNC “Robodrills” and 3D modeling. . . The “tooling” for this practice includes open-source firmware for inexpensive microcontroller-based kits like the Arduino; hacked Nintendo Wii controllers; low-cost, rapid-turnaround printed circuit board production houses; free development environments like Processing; online knowledge sharing communities; parts suppliers with no minimum orders, and so forth.

So it's really not the same thing that CRN and others expect from the coming age of personal nanofactories. The process described above will quite clearly be limited to a few specialists who can work with arcane combinations of hardware and software. As they freely admit:

Materializing ideas is about making your own -- “whatever” -- unanticipated, unknown, visionary, expressive things. It is not a manufacturing process. This is a process that requires multiple perspectives and multiple skills thoroughly mixing engineering-design-art into a hybrid sensibility. It is a process that’s strictly for trouble-makers and boundary crossers.

Nevertheless, we think this concept of "materializing ideas" is an important memetic step for designers, engineers, and others to make. It will help pave the way for the eventual introduction of inexpensive, easy-to-operate desktop nanofactories.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics

Comments

[Allan]

Just keep manufacturing those Herman Miller Aeron chairs and bring down the price a little. That'll make me happy.