Even for them, we have the same issue. For instance, if I want to have a custom part made at a machine shop, there are a couple of places I can go. I can go to OMW in San Rafael, or to a shop in Sacramento. The OMW facility has lots of machines. They can do almost anything in metal or plastic. They are hi-tech, flexible. They can do just about anything. In Sacramento, the shop has a bunch of machinists who operate independently. They share some equipment, and they can do a lot of stuff. Show them a part, they can duplicate it. Bring them a broken assembly, they can take it apart, make replacements and fix it.

The Sacramento shop is fairly large. That brings them lots of work, and they are located in an industrial area where there is a lot happening. OMW has grown, and their capabilities are very good. A shop like OMW would be a good bet for 3-D printing. For them, it would be just another machine in their arsenal to get the job done.

But neither manufactures a product on a regular basis.

When you talk about 3-D printing, you have to get into the nitty-gritty details.
1. What items, exactly are you going to produce?
2. What are the complete parts lists for each item? What is the reorder point? What is the lead time? From that you calculate the inventory on hand you need.
3. What is the source for each part? How will it be shipped?
4. How will you receive your parts? Where exactly?
5. What is the precise assembly plan for the item? This is no small thing. You have to map it out completely.
5.a. Map out precise movement of parts to their point of installation in your item.
5.b. Exactly where and how will each part be handled to optimize its availability to the assembler?
6. How will you monitor and test?
7. Where will you hold your inventory prior to shipment?
8. Will you package it as part of manufacturing? Or later?
9. How will you move it out of your facility? How will it be shipped to customer?

There is more. But you should start to get the picture. There is a lot more to making something than printing a part.

Here is another way of putting it.

Would you think that micromanufacturing was going to take off because of metal stamping machines?
How about CNC machines? Both of those have been available for decades. Both of those take roughly the same skill level to operate (if you want good parts coming out) as a 3-D printer does.

You can buy an inexpensive CNC machine these days for a few thousand dollars. Have been able to 10 years. And yet micromanufacturing using CNC machines hasn’t happened. Why?

Answer that and you understand why micromanufacturing using 3-D printers is just another tool.

PS – I had to change my info because the system wouldn’t let me post. It said I was posting too fast. I presume because of my typing speed. Or something.

Having said that – aren’t you selling the 3D printing / micromanufacturing movement a bit short – just the same as you claim others have done for traditional manufacturing?

I.E. it’s not like 3D printing enthusiasts with any degree of nuance are claiming we’re going to get to a Star-Trek like replicator situation any time soon. Rather, what we’re seeing is “Maker Labs” – where often highly trained, enthusiastic people, get together to share ideas, skills, and work on small-scale production- and where presumably, re-configuring the machines on-the-fly is a big part of the process. (And this is I think one of Kevin C’s original points – the “Open Source” nature of the technology is one of its strengths, that should be protected from the urge to proprietary-isation by big players).

So the new technology still happens in cities using a mix of capital, human labour, raw parts, human skill, networks, information :- but in theory at least, with less of the first 3 and using more of the latter two.

So I think we have to ask whether this is (a) feasible, and (b) a “good thing”, esp if you’re from a left/progressive persuasion and actually try to give a crap about the fate of factory workers who would be displaced.

Either way its an important debate :- e.g. here in Melbourne, Australia, I’m interested in a couple of trends:
a) a further steady de-industrialisation and loss of our complex manufacturing industries like automobile production;
b) increasing import of consumer technologies and concern about logistics / transport having -ve social and environmental effects on our urban areas

and I’m wondering if encouraging Maker labs and micro-manufacturing could play some beneficial role in addressing both of these. Or is this just “pie in the sky” as you suggest?

I’m thinking of getting a speaker from one of the local Maker Labs to speak at a TED Cities event in late September – will post the link here if this happens (http://www.thecity2.org/).

It looks like there are already a range of interesting perspectives posted on the P2P Foundation Wiki:
http://p2pfoundation.net/?search=3d+printing&title=Special%3ASearch

I agree with everything Brian Hanley wrote, but wanted to add a couple of flips:

The Toyota Production System in a lot of ways was a P2P system, which delegated control of the production streams to the people running the nodes. It proved to be more efficient than the US MRPII and ERP systems, which were “push” or command-and-control systems. Later, Toyota adopted more planning and US auto companies, especially parts manufacturers, adopted variations on pull systems.

I also agree about the human component and flexibility. I worked in one plant with workstations on wheels, where production lines could be reconfigured in a minute or two. The planned the work by writing the jobs on cards and dealing them out on a table with the line leads, who took the cards they wanted until they were all gone.

Yes, for very narrow sectors, you might see a little manufacturing. The success of home printers is legendary. But think about the evolution of that and the extreme simplicity of printing. What did it take to successfully create machines that would print words on paper for the home?

But in general? Those who make such predictions are universally people that have never had to operate or participate in operating a manufacturing facility.

You see, it is not just a matter of making it work. People (particularly economists) think of manufacturing as static, like a flour mill or a sawmill. But in the real world, manufacturing is extremely dynamic. It has to shift, retool, modify constantly. This fact has been the bane of so many CIM (computer integrated manufacturing) efforts.

Apple, 15 years ago, had showpiece automated factories building its computers. They were state of the art. And what did Steve Jobs do when he took over Apple? He killed them. He killed them because he knew that the name of the game is dynamism, flexibility.

This curious reality is why human labor remains absolutely critical to manufacturing. Nothing is as flexible, as able to reconfigure, as capable of coming together quickly to perform a new set of tasks as human beings are. In the books above, you will read about things like ‘change of die’ time and how that revolutionized manufacturing at Toyota. These simple things, but a myriad of them, constantly being refined, improved, streamlined, is the beating heart of manufacturing.

So there is a crucial human component to it also. People come together and create a cultural phenomenon that either works well, or the system breaks down and the facility dies. This too, is an aspect of why large manufacturing facilities, like large cities, are not going away.

Consider a city. You can use exactly the same logic against cities. And yet, cities continue to exist and grow – most people would immediately see the problem with this idea applied to cities. Everything we consume, from food and clothing to materials for building homes to locations we junk our cars – all follows laws of distribution efficiency.

A modern automobile is made of upwards of 25,000 parts. Those parts have to come together with precise coordination, to the right spot at just the right time in order manufacture a car. You simply cannot do it any other way. Subassemblies bought from suppliers, from tires to raw steel for the stamping dies has to get there.

Maunfacturing is a combination of things: Expertise in operating the manufacturing facility – because everything that can go wrong will; Transportation – materials have to come in, and product and waste has to go out; Machinery; Logistics planning; Engineering – of the product itself – on a typical day in an automobile plant over 100 engineering changes to the vehicles being built are made; Labor. Labor is the hardest thing to get a handle on in the system, because it is so many things.

Read a couple of books that are the best I know of to understand manufacturing today.

Those books are: KANBAN: Just In Time at Toyota. http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9780915299485
Zero Quality Control: Source Inspection and the Poka-Yoke System http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Quality-Control-Inspection-Poka-Yoke/dp/0915299070

Most people who discuss manufacturing have no clue what they are talking about. These two books will educate you better than anything else available.

I mostly agree, since I also do not believe in market absolutism,

Michel

I do agree with aspects of his core proposition, in line with P2P thinking more generally, that new tech and modes of production both supports and makes feasible a more decentralised, open, resource-efficient economy :- and we should change both ‘the state’ and ‘the corporation’ as a result to speed and encourage this.

But to imply that once the big bad State is out of the way, it’ll all be rosy and market competition will produce things effectively and efficiently is a big over-simplification in my view. A few aspects:-

First: a more realistic critique of the political-economy of high technology:- yes, the internet infrastructure, and existing software tools (many of them open source) as a large networked society-wide investment, reduces the cost and delays of startup companies to individuals. And yes, theoretically anyone around the world, and in some cases innovation has happened from developing countries, can take advantage of it. But this ignores 2 things :- ‘agglomeration economies’, whereby even with the internet, innovation still happens often in prosperous regions, with stable governance and idea exchanges, large universities, critical masses of educated, ambitious, and sufficiently economically secure people to take risks and think big.

And second:- all the criticism of monopoly IP does tend to hide the fact that good ideas and systems do need time and hard work, funded _somehow_, to bring them into existence. This may not cost a lot of _physical_ capital, but to turn a software project from a cool startup idea with a few users, to a real big workable platform in our current economy with a polished UI and stability :- takes the _time_ of smart, well-fed, well-paid engineers. Yes, Twitter, Facebook etc may employ way less than General Motors, but they all employ now 10K+ smart IT people, and that costs real dough. I’m keen on Open Source and can see how it challenges these economics, in some cases very successfully :- but in others not, as Nokia’s loss of the Phone OS wars with their more genuinely open-source Maemo showed.

My point here? (a) The state is very big in funding high-tech innovation historically. Even if it doesn’t appear so in the case of the innovative garage programmer, they got to that point via an education, food, transport, communication system that was at least in part state funded, in all developed countries in the world today.
(b) If we want to help shift the balance from the Googles and FBs of the world to small-scale distributed production and still keep a decent standard of living, I think it’ll take more than fighting over-reaching IP laws and state complicity in monopolies. It’ll also require supporting a strong and explicit _commons_ of health, food, transport to support the self-provisioning of groups using new tech etc.

I guess an anarchist-libertarian P2P-ist like Kevin would argue that this necessary ‘commons’ of sustenance and re-producion would still manifest in his desired stateless future. Perhaps because people would probably all have some share of the surplus via small-scale local cooperatives earning value in a market economy? And secondly, that any necessary extra coordination and commons provisioning (which he would probably see as small) would occur via non-coercive, democratically agreed local arrangements?

Whereas, as a more social-democratic P2P-ist, I have a problem with this and see several flaws.
1) I’m less convinced than the market always does a better job than collective (state) approaches to provisioning of services, both in terms of social justice and economic efficiency. I see flaws in all approaches, but it seems in areas like healthcare and education, given the history of the 20th C and relatively good performance of scandinavian welfare states in particular, and the bad outcomes of neoliberalism on the working class in so many countries, the burden of proof is on the ‘marketeers’, of whatever stripe, that their system can be both better and acceptably just.
2) While appreciating the value and effectiveness of markets in certain ways, I’m a lot more concerned with ‘market failures’ than a libertarian P2P-ist. For example, even without state support of monopolies, isn’t there always an interest in a strongly market-based society to grow businesses and destroy competitors, leading to oligopolies over time? Even with periodic tech disruption, I think this is a problem and will lead to strong inequalities etc, unless opposed/regulated by some counter-force.
3) From a moral-ecological view, a too strong “market society” also concerns me. I.E. I align markets with continual aggressive competition, accumulation of goods & status. I’d admit that these are all fundamental parts of human nature and can’t be wished away, but my point is that unlike Adam Smith, I disagree that if a market society constantly encourages these traits, then it’ll always redound to the public good. In fact, as per Polanyi, I think we still need a strong counter-movement to the Market Culture, and in at least the medium term see a more democratised state, with some level of Commons-provision via taxation, as a necessary part of this.
4) A particular version of the above issue is a deep concern with markets’ abilities to deal with pressing global environmental issues. Both because of their failure to “price” abstract yet crucial issues of water use from aquifers, atmosphere pollution etc – and because it seems any market-based business has an interest in fostering a culture of continuous consumption and status-competition not well suited to a need for greater modesty, constraint, and care for common goods and resources. How are these issues going to be dealt with without some kind of instrument of collective concern which actually has real power, I.E. some form of State?

Still, its always good to learn a new perspective and engage in respectful debates, and providing a venue for such is the great thing about this site. E.g., perhaps I’m missing that if the nature of Corporations was fundamentally transformed (as discussed by Tellus Institute), a market-libertarian P2P society would start to look something a lot more like I’d be happy with?

And I’d like to engage more with Elinor Ostrom’s later work arguing we need more multi-level commons regulation, and can’t rely on global government agreements.

On the other hand, perhaps Michel’s idea of a ‘Partner State’, once more decentralised, democratised and oriented more towards supporting space for P2P self-provisioning :- starts to look quite a bit like the kind of local town-hall participatory democracy of which a Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin or Kevin Carson would approve, or at least tolerate 😉 ?

I see Gar Alperovitz’s new book has just come out – http://whatthenmustwedo.org/ – and seems to explore this kind of ground quite a bit. Maybe a good one to feature an excerpt from or interview with on the blog soon?