We discovered an interesting blog on sustainable design, originating with the same people who are working hard to develop a fully featured desktop manufacturing system for physical goods: Ponoko.
Here’s what the blog predicts:
“here is a whole slew of amazing new technology out there right now that can facilitate collaborative design and development of sustainable products. It just hasn’t been harnessed yet to apply to a new model of making and selling. With technology as it is now and how it will be very soon, like the advancements in rapid prototyping, desktop manufacturing software and tools and basically the web – all these together can be used for the benefit of creating, making, selling and distributing sustainable and personal products. It’s a very ambitious goal. But one I think can be reached.”
How will their own implementation of this project, currently in beta, work?
They write that the Ponoko website is like having your own personal workshop and factory … and online showroom to sell your designs. Here’s a graph showing how it works …
How does it fit with our own P2P vision?
One of the things we feel is very likely to emerge, is a new modality of physical production which will combine Open Designs, as a modality of peer production, with more localized “desktop manufacturing”.
Ponoko is not designed especially for open designs, but can work both with open and proprietary designs.
More on Design Trends:
According to the introduction to the event Digitability, the design world is moving from just using software, to combining software with rapid prototyping.
The exhibition will show three types of technological developments:
“the first category deals with creation where we present the digital tools for designing, followed by production for digital manufacturing techniques, and communication that deals with the integration of digital technology in designed products.”
Reading the interview of the curator, one can surmise the following evolution of design: centralized design in the industrial era, with very constrained choices for designers, and limited choices for the consumer; a decentralized design phase, where the designer no longers designs, but creates the possibility for design for others, thereby also limiting their possibilities, and also localized in corporate sites (Nike ID is emblematic of this trend). The next phase then, which Ponoko is preparing, is fully distributed design, by the user, who is also able to have the product produced, without leaving his desktop.
Awesome! Thanks for this tip, i’ll dig on it and write something 🙂
Michel,
You see, as we discussed earlier in this blog, that people will be moving towards decentralized production. The question that a lot of economists and industrial experts have rightly been asking is “How will P2P translate into the manufacture of material goods?”
But, the question should really be “how will industry, and industrial processes change and morph and evolve in the emerging P2P design environment?”
Current technology already supports customized manufacture and production. Having been in the fabrication trade for a number years myself, I can say that it has actually been possible to support small scale manufacturing and fabrication for quite a while, in terms of manufacturing technological capability, and distribution capability. But, the demand in the market never really existed, and efficiencies made it too expensive an option. In the 1980’s and 1990’s many efficiencies problems in production, and distribution were solved (mostly with computers and communications developments).
Now, the internet is starting to create a demand for rapid prototype-to-small scale production, and the basic building blocks of te technology exist. I think that first, we’ll see the production of simpler designs, but, eventually, we’ll see complex machines and equipment emerge.
I think that many of the first instances of this phenomenon will resemble Ponoko, and Crowd Spirit, and other for profit service/venture websites. But, I think that open tools to coordinate support open design and on-demand production/fabrication markets can, and will quickly emerge.
If I were to make a projection about how much time it will take for this to become widespread in America…I would say perhaps about a 4-6 year time period. Although, I believe there will be lots of media hype about starting this year and over the next 2 years, because it is a “next big thing”, and this is the type of content that (broadcast) media look for.
I think that this paradigm takes a lot away from the traditional economies of large industrial corporations and governments. It devolves a lot of power back to people, who previously had collectively handed that power to corporations and governments in exchange for standards of living. So, I can see right here in my own location some real social tension about the prospect of this type of production and the apparent economic and political changes it suggests.
Michel, I could not have said it better myself. We are so excited by this future. It’s nuts! Thanks so much for your critique.
Sounds like a great idea and I’m for it. But I have to say, I’m also very skeptical. It’s a matter of cost. I’m not sure it’s scalable. For someone that wants a customized solution in the form of a product, maybe they will be willing to pay to have it done and wait the amount of time it takes to create it correctly and in quality fashion. But, the without the cost of human labor, materials, tooling, time, and everything else being amortized over a higher volume of units, how will this be economically feasible and desirable to the average consumer or designer?
I have tried to get access to the Ponoko website for a deeper explanation, but the page had trouble loading. But let’s say they want a product that is made out of ABS plastic. They can rapid prototype the components and glue them together on a one-off basis. But the amount of time taken to design the product, get it to the factory, make sure the factory understands all the requirements involved, manufacture it, and send it back to the client, could be substantial. So how much will they have to charge to make it worthwhile? How many will they have to make? If they have limited production capacity, but have 100 orders placed at the same time, how will they manage that? And this is just a hypothetical scenario for a very simple plastic product.
I hope something like this can be realized. But I’m just not sure we’re quite there yet. I would love someone to educate me, Ponoko themselves perhaps, on how they will accomplish this.
When I was first introduced to this idea, I was very skeptical too. Soooo many hurdles. The ones noted in comment 4 include cost and scale. To take each in turn:
1) Cost – in history, disruptive technologies that changed the world were more costly than the staus quo. But for a specific segment of the market this increased cost was meet with a new benefit not delivered by the current technology. This is the case here. We are not setting out to replicate or replace the amazing benefits of global mass production. But we are giving people an alternative to making and distributing individualized products. In short, you will be able to buy an individualized one-off product made just for you (and no one else) at a lower cost from Ponoko than from your hyper-factory in Asia.
2) Scale – this is probably the most exciting part of this. Scale can not be achieved inside of today’s manufacturing model, without substantial cost. Hence the rise of distributed manufacture – the ability to create and make from your own desktop. If you start thinking about manufacture in terms of the printing industry, a small part of the picture takes shape – ie, next to ‘every’ PC is a desktop printer, and down main street there’s a digital print bureau and out in the industrial park there’s an offset printer. Now apply the same model to manufacturing and you can see how scale at the right price for certain size/complexity/volume can be achieved (over time).
[Apologies for the website being down – our hosting provider was having a bad hair day (or week)!]