3D Printing – Industrial Revolution or Sinclair C5?

Cheap, eco-friendly transportation is obviously still a great unrealised idea, but for any good idea to work, the planets need to align: timing, demand, price, benefit, practicality, distribution. The C5 got most of these wrong.

Too often, vision and potential fail to capture the imagination of the public, or more importantly, keep it caught. So when I first heard that 3D printing – a new type of printing that prints objects, not paper – was the next big thing, I was a little skeptical.

Stick 3D in front of pretty much any word and another springs to mind – fad. 3D is often used to disguise a poor product – just watch Jaws 3D to see what I mean. 3D simply too often leaves me feeling flat. Why should 3D printing be any different?

It wasn’t until I really started thinking about the implications and potential of 3D printing that I finally managed to banish the vision of a huge floundering rubber shark out of my mind. Quite simply put, 3D printing has the potential to impact the world like nothing we’ve seen since The Industrial Revolution and the invention of the World Wide Web. There, I’ve stuck my neck out with a ridiculously overhyped prediction. But for good reason.

First of all, it’s probably best to clarify what 3D printing is. Traditional manufacturing processes are subtractive processes. Broadly speaking, you take a lump of raw material, remove the bits you don’t need and you’re left with the bits you do. 3D printing is an additive process. Layers of materials are built up from nothing to form the thing you want. There is no taking away of materials, just adding. This means there is very little waste compared to traditional methods. Also, unlike most traditional manufacturing methods, 3D printers can infinitely change what they produce. This makes prototyping and innovation much easier as expensive bespoke machinery isn’t required to produce something new. Complex objects can also be printed in one fully functioning piece, with no need for assembly.

Just like the early days of the Internet, 3D printing is in the hands of enthusiasts and corporations trying to unlock its potential. But just imagine for a minute that over the next five, 10, 20 years, 3D printing takes off in a big way. Suddenly almost every home and business in the world owns a little factory capable of producing nearly anything they need, with virtually no waste. And I don’t just mean tiny plastic airfix kits, or Ikea style flat-packs. I mean virtually anything, in virtually any material, ready to use.

There are people out there already printing circuit boards, clothes, guns, a full-size flyable plane, simple foods (pasta, chocolate, breakfast cereals), you name it. The building industry is even looking at the potential to 3D print entire buildings, layer by layer.

The next natural step is to develop processes that could produce complex molecular structures. This opens the door to printing organic materials, such as complex foods. This in turn opens another door to teleportation (I’m embellishing somewhat here) but that’s a stoner conversation I’m not having today.

We’re at the very start of something big. But there are also some even bigger implications to the world we live in today.

We’ve seen the radical impact the Internet has had on the world in our lifetimes. We’ve also seen what it’s done to industries and companies too slow or unable to adapt. What will happen to shops, suppliers, shipping, and manufacturing when people can design, customise, download, and print a pair of trainers, a mobile phone, or a car in their homes, or local 3D printing stations?

The need to physically send something from one location to another could pretty much vanish overnight. By plugging production directly into every home, business, and industry via the Internet, 3D printing could take digital distribution to the next level by eradicating virtually all physical distribution.

In the UK, over 3.6 million people work in the manufacturing industry, while a further 2.3 million are connected to the haulage industry. That’s nearly 20 per cent of our entire workforce directly affected by the potential of 3D printing in these two sectors alone.

What will China, the US, Japan and the other great goods producers of the world do when they no longer need millions of people producing and moving stuff for internal consumption or export?

What will happen to copyright and intellectual property rights when we can’t even enforce legal music downloads, let alone legal anything downloads? Last year, Defense Distributed obtained a federal license to manufacture and market 3D-printed firearms in the US. But how do you keep data behind borders and in the intended hands?

Daily Mail scaremongering aside, the pros far outweigh the cons.

Just imagine the potential for innovation and invention when you remove risk. Anyone will be able to come up with an idea, prototype it, demo it, find out if there’s demand, and then simply sell the schematics online to produce it. Limited upfront costs will mean there won’t even be a need for huge investment or crowdfunding. TechShop is halfway to achieving this entrepreneurial petri dish already with some impressive success stories.

How much weight, space and money could Nasa save if it only had to launch with the absolute basics? No need for spares, tools, and emergency stuff it rarely uses. It could finish the International Space Station and move on to further exploration in a fraction of the time.

But most importantly, there won’t be any need to disrupt my bank holiday by having to trudge off to B&Q to search for a single missing screw or tool. I’ll simply download it, or if it doesn’t exist, create it and move on to more important stuff.

Crystal balling is all well and good, but as Nietzsche (or Yoda) once said: “To look forward, first we must look back." In this case, back to the Industrial Revolution. It completely changed our world, quite literally. Not only in the way we produce and consume goods, but also in the way we live and where we live. It took people out of villages and towns and moved them into factories and cities. It destroyed communities and forged new ones. I find it quite poetic that The Digital Production Revolution (catchy huh?) could completely reverse this industrial side effect. If every home is a factory, then every factory will inevitably be knocked down to build homes.

Just like the early Internet, 3D printing needs to be honed, packaged and made simple enough for anyone to use. It’s going to take years to break through and capture the public’s imagination, but it will.

I’m merely scratching the surface here and it may not pan out this way at all. But 3D printing in one form or another is coming, and it’s going to change everything.

Some companies will adapt and thrive, while others will be too slow to react and will become the next HMV, Blockbuster, or Kodak.

Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to a 3D future. When it finally comes, I’ll probably print off my very own Sinclair C5, just for the hell of it. My 10-year-old brain would have exploded at the mere thought.

David Gamble is a Bima executive and founder and creative director of advertising agency Hometown London.