A Timeline for Distributed Manufacturing

In John Robb’s series on resilient communities, one paragraph strikes me as too optimistic, i.e. the timeline for expecting realistic local manufacturing.

Here’s what John writes:

Already, the fabrication equipment necessary to build complex objects/products costs only $20-50 thousand (some systems are in the hundred dollar range) and the costs are plunging. Given the technological trends, it will be possible in the next decade or so to produce nearly any product locally through these local fabricators in a cost competitive way — some at home and the rest at a local shop.”

I asked some our own own open manufacturing crew to give their assessments, here’s a selection.

Bryan Bishop:

3D printing is just molds at the moment, correct. The timeline might not be too absurd. I think it’s all possible *right now* given critical mass support and contributors.”

Vinay Gupta:

distributed manufacturing… **of what?** is the critical question.

mass manufacture is always going to be cheaper for things which are pretty much the same and have no need of variation – plastic buckets, paper, tires. There’s just no way, until you assume extremely sophisticated ultratechnology, that you can do that kind of stuff price competitively with mass manufacture.

stuff where a combination of supply chain logistics, customization, irregular demand and other factors makes mass manufacture implausible is already being done using distributed manufacturing. the biggest example of that, which nobody talks about, is housing which is all done with entirely redundantly stupid distributed manufacturing resulting in absurdly high prices for items which should come off production lines for 10% of the cost of hand-assembled individually unique boutique housing, which is currently the only model generally available.

Giant housing factories, trust me on this, giant housing factories.

The real sweet spot for distributed manufacture is stuff that people currently *aren’t* making because it’s impossible. The perfect pair of shoes, clothes you helped design, portable electronics and computers that do it your way, car seats designed to your personal ass, beds which fit perfectly in the space you have and are just as hard/soft as you like them, and so on. It’s not about direct replacement of stock with custom, it’s about custom and new in places where mass manufacturing is failing.

Any place you see 5000 functionally equivalent items in a store, and you go in and sort through for what you need, you have a distributed manufacturing opportunity. Off the top of my head:

* book shops
* shoe shops
* hardware stores
* posters / art
* clothes

Note that a lot of this stuff, in reality, would be feedstock supply chain bound. Ink and paper stream to the book printer at the local university book shop. Metal to the hardware store and so on. Going the whole hog, and doing resource extraction etc. on the spot is absolutely going to happen but mainly in rural areas for a class of products suited to that lifestyle niche.

Exceptions to that: places where the supply chain is a loop, where people drop off their items to be locally broken down and made into something else, on demand.

To me, distributed manufacturing is not about providing the current good and services for the most part, but about building what people actually want and need, once the gap between economies of scale and individual design is closed far enough that people will pay the premium for getting exactly what they want, here and now, rather than dealing with the remote factory.”

Smary McCarthy:

As much as I like the idea of 3D printing and the digital fabrication revolution and all that, as much as I am a strong proponent of it, I just really can’t see anybody with the right know-how addressing the real issues involved, which are that what we have today is just too high tech and complicated and useless to be deployed in the field.

So, before this timeline becomes realistic in any way, we need to figure out how to digitize and distribute the basic transformative processes such as, well. I’ll be happy when I can fabricate everything in the room you’re in, including the room itself, in my lab.

Once this is realistic, we can start talking about a timeline. Until then, nobody – not the MIT people, not the Fab Lab people, not the economics people trying to figure out how this will change everything, not anybody – is doing anything remotely as important as Marcin and the OSE crew, who are effectively scaling down /analogue fabrication/ and pushing it into a more sustainable pathway.”

4 Comments A Timeline for Distributed Manufacturing

  1. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    From Kevin Carson, via email:

    While 3-D printer technology is a worthwhile objective and may pan out
    eventually as affordable production technology for small-scale
    production for the average person, IMO the focus of distributed
    manufacturing right now should be something far less hi-tech and
    science-fictiony: the kinds of small-scale, electrically powered,
    affordable machine tools anticipated by Peter Kropotkin, Ralph
    Borsodi, and Lewis Mumford. The multi-machine would be a good
    example. 3-D printers might be included in this mix in the near
    future for a limited range of uses, like producing circuit boards, but
    not for production in general (especially moving parts).

    Distributed manufacturing doesn’t depend on production technology
    being entirely free and self-replicating. There’s a continuum here.
    The cheaper and smaller the scale of production technology, the lower
    the entry costs, and the more feasible distributed manufacturing by a
    team of people of ordinary means becomes–and the more the gap
    disappears between industrial production and production for the
    informal/household/barter economy. The cheaper the production
    technology, the closer we *approximate*–even if we don’t completely
    *reach*–“free” manufacturing in the sense of free beer, as opposed to
    free speech.

  2. AvatarMichel Bauwens

    From Smari McCarthy, via email:

    I agree with this, and this is part of why I put so much emphasis of
    taking state-of-the-art whatever it may be and deploying it far and wide
    with much haste while working on the next iteration.

    One of the key reasons for this is that if and when self-replication is
    achieved and arbitrary digital fabrication becomes viable, there’s going
    to be political implications greater than any of us can anticipate:
    Suddenly you break capitalism /permanently/ by eliminating scarcity for
    all things*, and you get into a situation where somebody really wants to
    *own* that technology. Patents, secrecy, etc.

    The key failure of Industry 1.0, in my view, was that the two major
    ideologies that arose from it (capitalism & Marxism) completely screwed
    up the ownership feature that Proudhon nailed so marvelously. Pushing
    technology out the door as soon as it becomes available and preferably
    in a sustainable way that people can replicate in the field is the only
    reasonable way I can see to prevent the same thing from happening to
    Industry 2.0.

    Then there’s the freedom stack to worry about. Free speech is the most
    natural human right because it’s inherent to humanity and humanity
    alone. The “right to fabricate” is so much deeper that we tend to forget
    it – the right to interact with atoms and make them do things. Free
    speech is irrelevant if we fail, for some reason, to have the “right to
    fabricate”.

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  4. AvatarDerek

    Hi all,

    I like the sound of Kevin’s email. At Ponoko we are setting out on a journey of laying down a distributed digital manufacturing network. And in deliberate preference to the 3D printer, we have started with the trusty old laser cutter.

    And to further amplify the simplicity, we have just launched a new service called ‘Photomake’ http://www.ponoko.com/photomake – where you can turn photos of your hand drawings into real life things! We believe simplicity and mimicking existing behaviour is the way forward.

    I also like Vinay’s words too … which echo some of Neil Gershenfeld’s … product individualization is not about making what we can already make – it’s about making what has not been made / making something completely personal that has a very limited use. Really interesting to see how this plays out in reality too.

    This is a very important space to the development of a greener world. So then comes Bryan’s comment – bring on the tipping point!

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