RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Fabrication Networks

Here's a look at the future of manufacturing and how it applies to community resilience.
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A couple of years ago, I designed and built (with a fantastic software team that I hired), a global digital printing system for a new start-up company (HubCast).

BACKGROUND: The printing industry (a $300b + a year industry that produces high end products that you can't produce on your desktop printer) is a classic manufacturing system that is optimize for high volume/low cost production. However, with the introduction of digital presses (like the $300k + HP Indigo), it's possible to produce high-end products in short runs when you need them.

Essentially, the HubCast system takes a printed product you designed digitally on a Web site, routes it to the global printing company closest to where you want it delivered (just-in-time and place), and then monitors the production process for quality/timeliness/etc. As you can imagine, the system eliminates wastage, storage, and transportation costs at a big savings to the customer. So, what does this have to do with community resilience?

Fabrication Networks

The digital printing process I described above is extremely similar to Digital Fabrication -- a process that uses computer controlled machines to print objects in three dimensions in any material (plastic, metal, etc.) you desire. 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. The system like the one I built above would make it possible to take designs you purchase or acquire on a Web site, modify them as you see fit, and then send them to a local fabrication company (or your desktop) nearby for production.

So What Does This Mean?

The shift towards local fabrication and fabrication networks, added to local food/energy/security/etc. completes the transition of barren bedroom communities into resilient communities. It's a 90% solution for communities, where only the most complex and difficult items are globally sourced. It also enables:

• A torrent of crowd-sourced improvements. Rather than a small design team deciding when/how a product is improved, products can be improved by vast global tinkering networks. Further, you can modify it yourself, if you are so inclined. In the not so distant future, buying a mass produced or unmodified product will be seen as a buying a broken/used/antiquated item.
  
• Self-supply. 21st Century military units (like Marines in the field), with a trailer full of fabrication equipment, will be able to produce nearly anything they need -- from parts to DIY weapons. It takes "make do" to a new level. Capturing and sharing (in real-time) the innovation produced here is going to be a challenge.
  
• Comparative/competitive advantage. Communities that shift to self-production early will benefit from an ability to not only deal with shocks/disruptions better than global competitors, they will be able to generate wealth faster through cost reduction and commercial exploitation of innovations.
  

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

Producing an item is only half the trick; the other half is marketing it.

Anybody can publish a book on Lulu.com; but making it a best-seller is a different matter.

I would presume that the market for these items also would be local.

Some pre-modern communities marketed themselves by beng famous for certain specialties. E.g. Florence was famous for woolens; Toledo for swords. But that would entail trade secrets. Nobody now knows how to make Damascus steel.

[carln]

What if there was a cheap, open source 3d printer out there that could print (almost) all of its own parts?

http://dev.www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/ShowCase

[damian_nz]

Duncan: marketing is what you use when you want to convince people to get stuff they don't already need. this isn't really what resilient communities are about: if you need it, there's no need to market it; if you don't need it, there's no need to make it. why do you want your book to be a bestseller, anyway?

i don't think localised specialisation would entail trade secrets, necessarily; i think in the past it was more about geography and history, in a world where knowledge could only transfer through the movement of people, and the movement of people from one place to another was difficult.

i come from New Zealand, which is in the middle of nowhere. being from there teaches you that geography and place is incredibly important. i'm currently in Europe where i can do the things that i'm doing easily (electronic music making, collaborative media/software art projects); if i go back to New Zealand there's little to no opportunities for anything like that.

[damian_nz]

ps, John: thanks for keeping this blog. it's inspiring.

[jim moore]

Here is a link to a company that I have been following for a while:
http://www.eoplex.com/whtp.html
They have been able to modify older printing press technology to make thousands of small complex devices out of multiple materials (plastic, metal, ceramic) simultaneously.

They call the process HVPF High Volume Print Forming.

[dano]

John, good observation. I hope you don't mind if I expand on it, both for historical analogy and for potential uses.

For several centuries up to the mid-1980s, printing was an expensive, complicated and laborious process reserved for specialists with large and very expensive machines.

In the 1980s, with the advent of desktop printing software and the laser printer, anybody could print anything from handbills to books. (And it could be said that too many did.) The laser printer of that period cost about US$6000. THe computer and software cost about US$3000.

Last year at http://www.wirednextfest.com in Los Angeles one could see a desktop printer/fabricator that cost, coincidentally, about US$6000. Nowadays the computer and software could be acquired new for US$1000, or less if one is so inclined.

This makes design and fabrication of objects - static or mechanical - within the grasp of a cohort much larger than even the print designers of the late '80s. In essence, a South Asian (or South Santa Monica) adolescent boy with access to an OLPC computer and some open source design/CAD software could not only design objects, but could go to a service bureau with a not-too-expensive object printer and actually get a copy printed out. (The Marine squad in the field, or the mechanic in the forward operating base are easy to assume as users.)

In fact, the non-professional designer can work with any number of online friends - each with different specialties - to create all kinds of complex objects, either for art or for real world use.

It seems to me this has as much potential to change machining and fabrication as the DTP revolution changed printing.

[Doug Goncz]

Lots of craftsmen know how to make Damascus steel, still.

[dizzyintellect]

What ink would you use in the 3d printers?

A clever choice of globally ubiquitous functional smart materials could solve many global problems.

I suggest using biology as a starting place for looking for materials to use to print things out.

It takes quite a bit of energy to produce a lego brick. But not so much energy to assemble lego bricks into a functional 3d Shape.

The energy cost of producing the lego brick is thus shared over each model in which the lego brick is ever used.

So, rather than starting from raw materials every time, if you just made a job lot of 'lego bricks' and used them as the basic material in a printer/dissembler, then the total amount of energy used in manufacturing and transport would plummet. You would only need to transport 'lego bricks' and once there was a uniform distribution of lego bricks everywhere, you'd only need to move the changes. If you chose a 'lego system' that could use low energy intensity sunlight to power the final stages of assembly/dissembly then you could use solar energy with out energy storage/electricity distribution.

If the lego brick system was chosen such that all materials used in it's manufacture and operation were biodegradable then you would be unable to pollute the environment.

You could tackle the problems of global poverty, the 'energy crisis', sustainability, climate change and environmental friendliness with this paradigm of manufacture.

Oh yeah and the global poverty gap and security asymmetry of developed/undeveloped countries is the root cause of terrorism. So you tackle that at an ideological and fundamental level as well.

NB Good marketing is about matching supply and demand. It is not about convincing people to buy stuff they don't want. Convincing people to buy something they don't need is expensive.

Marketing is easy with the internet. Once you've used the biodegradeable solar powered lego system to make something you can post how to do it on the net and then someone who needs to do a similar thing can simply search first.

Thus local innovation can be shared globally if the same materials platform is used globally.

BTW: If you are looking for a self-assembling, low energy intensity, globally distibruted smart materials system that is bio-degradeable that can operate using sunlight you only need to look at biology.

Nucleic acids, amino acids and amphiphilic lipid molecules, controlled by small molecules, coupled with an information storage and retrieval system called: evolution.

biology = material, energy and information control at the molecular level.

Good luck. :)

[kunkmiester]

The biggest problem with printing parts is the materials. Steel and aluminum won't be easily printed. Fortunately, you can print templates to make molds from, and CNC cutting and forming machines are also readily available, although out of reach for most hobbyists. That and the fact that few rapid prototyping/3D printing technologies can maintain very tight tolerances.

[victor falk aka french swede the rootless vegetable]

I'd like to refer to this very interesting discussion on Charles Stross' blog about desktop replicators and rapid prototyping, their economic and cultural impact, on what time frames you can expect different type of products to be possible to be "fabbed" (apparently clothing demand quite complex operations)...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/06/the_future_today_maybe.html

The impact of wide spread replicators would have on the economy is mind-boggling, it makes you feel like a New Guinean meeting modern industrial production.