Over the past few months I have been thinking more about the impact of digitization on the tools and systems used to design, produce, market, and sell goods.

Taken collectively, the changes across these domains leads to a very different (hopefully better) place than the 20th century models of product development we are familiar with, but relatively few firms are adapting to changes and taking advantage of emergent opportunities or taking steps to mitigate new risks.

These disruptive technologies and theoretical frameworks were the focus of The Digital Factory event on June 5th at the MIT Media Lab — which inspired this post, where I attempt to delineate some key developments that are being driven or enabled by digital fabrication tools.

1. complexity gets incredibly cheap (but not free)

A bike stem designed using topology software & produced with additive manufacturing (from Spencer Wright)

One of the common blessings that 3D printing is supposed to provide is making complexity “free” — that is, the same kind of design for manufacturability and assembly trade-offs that an engineer or designer usually needs to make. If your part design would be better served by varying thickness, undercuts, internal cavities and complex curves, that isn’t a problem for (at least some) additive processes. That additional complexity would be a big driver of cost for something like an injection molding tool, but it adds negligible cost to create that same part in a printer.

Additive processes do liberate designers and engineers to make the best for a product’s end use rather than for manufacturing methods, but that extra complexity carries a cost in additional design effort.

Still, computationally-augmented design tools like nTopology or Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher demonstrate that we already have some powerful tools to dramatically increase the complexity we can work with with only slight increases in effort.

This new generation of CAD tools can act as a kind of digital lever, giving us the equivalent of mechanical advantage for cognition around part design. For instance, the lace-like lattice structures that nTopology can generate are mindbogglingly convoluted — well beyond what any one engineer could create from scratch using traditional CAD and maintaining sound reasoning of why those choices are best for part performance.

We will continue to see greater and greater complexity becoming lower and lower in its cost, enabling what could be one of the most significant periods of innovation in mechanical engineering. Just as high-speed steel and power tools led to an era of precision machines, or lightweight alloys and plastics pushed aerospace to new heights, I believe that the strange generative powers of CAD that we are able to tap into now will ultimately lead to new industries and novel ways of thinking that eventually become established as the best practices for certain applications.

2. just-in-time, localized production becomes typical

There’s a number of companies, large and small, working on methods for producing components as needed, with lights-out capabilities all while reducing the distance between where a part gets fabbed and where it gets used. Amazon patents for mobile 3D printing centers to deliver objects as they are made,

Diagram from Amazon’s patent for distributed additive manufacturing & order fulfillment

The production-focused technologies that Formlabs and Desktop Metal revealed at The Digital Factory all point to an inflection point (some some applications it’s already here, for others it’s only a matter of time) where on-demand printed parts are cost competitive with conventionally manufactured ones, greatly increasing the value of such technologies for real-world marketplaces, rather than primarily providing value to R&D labs.

Desktop Metal’s Ric Fulop said in his talk that their production system can achieve part costs that are competitive with casting , while Max Lobovsky of Formlabs mentioned they are using SLS printed parts in a final product (the Form Cure device) and for certain parts SLS beats injection molding costs up to part quantities of ~11,000.

Critically, the physical properties of the parts produced by these processes stand up to the stresses and strains of real world use.

A printed metal part being sintered (via Desktop Metal)

The economically optimal scale for printing end parts is still well below that of global mass market products so your next iPhone won’t be created with these techniques, but the next kickstarter project you back might be. In the next few years these quick-turn additive processes will eat into the existing market for short-run production and likely expand it by allowing a less capital intensive process of ramping up.

The automation story at The Digital Factory event didn’t end with part production: Tulip showed off how their software integrates with sensors and analytics to make even something like high-mix low-volume assembly go smoothly, and RightHand Robotics demoed their latest picking robot that makes order fulfillment even more hands off and high-speed.

Looking at this collection of companies it’s clear that there’s only a bit more connective tissue of technology required to have everything from ordering a part, to it’s production and packing totally automated. Which is not to say those bridges will be easy to build or quick to get to market- these are big, thorny, complicated problems to engineer for, there’s plenty of good reasons why they haven’t been been tackled by startups successfully to date.

3. products become more like album or movie releases — with one hit wonders, sequels, spin-offs

The recently rolled out Kickstarter Gold project, which invited past successful creators to run new versions of their products is a hint of things to come. It de-risks the crowdfunding experience for all parties: the platform gets more-likely hits, project creators get a better chance of funding and press to make the ROI more appealing, and customers get products that are much more likely to ship and live up to the marketing promises.

Importantly, this approach is implemented in a soft way — unproven creators can still post their projects, the platform retains its democratic mission.

Product development cycles have grown much faster, in part due to software development theory, in part due to increased access to rapid prototyping technologies.

Crowdfunding platforms have further reduced product development risk by helping individuals and companies validate demand even before producing the first manufactured unit. This acts in favor of smaller enterprises that may find the production of a few thousand units profitable enough to make a project worthwhile, where large firms would find such gambits too small to pursue. As I’ve written about before, mass production tends to serve interests of large organizations, even over the real needs of individuals and small communities. I predict we will see many more small bets, sequels and spin-offs as more successful business models for micro-enterprises or profitable side projects get defined and duplicated.

4. digital markets lead to more niche, oddball goods

The Public Radio, a single station FM radio that uses a Mason jar as an enclosure

One of the fascinating things about falling barriers to entry for prototyping, production, and determining demand means that really specific products can find a foothold and make it out into the world (a single station radio inside a Ball Jar, anyone?), the kind of products that would never see the light of day otherwise. People are immensely variable, and the way we produced goods in the 20th century didn’t do a great job of reflecting that. Now that we are getting to a point of producing a few thousand of something profitably, with that number continuing to fall, we will have a much more diverse (if fragmented) collection of goods for sale in digital marketplaces. The Public Radio, pictured above, is one of my favorite examples of this trend — no sensible large consumer electronics brand would launch such a simple, defeatured product but it has proven immensely popular with customers.

5. post-mass manufacture aesthetics and materials

A bicycle seat printed in Nylon using the Fuse 1 SLS printer from Formlabs

When the first synthetic materials started to find broad use and sale they were marketed as replacements for expensive natural materials like ivory. Eventually plastics came into their own, prized for smooth finishes, a broad range of available colors and low weight.

Since the 1930s we have moved steadily into a kind of worship of industrially provided surfaces: perfectly smooth glass screens, glossy plastics and anodized aluminum. But there is also a deep human desire for other tactile sensations and materials, as evidenced by the continued popularity of craft practices, art fairs, and digital marketplaces for handmade goods like Etsy.

The surfaces provided by 3D print processes are different than both industrial and craft practices- with greater texture and visible grain (if slight) than typical injection molded plastic parts, but without the heterogeneity common with natural materials. Additionally, the porous forms of generatively-developed designs can feel totally alien (even triggering a particular form of anxiety in some) now that we are accustomed to smooth, continuous surfaces.

For additively manufactured goods to gain the level of comfort, desirability and familiarity for regular folks will require the same focused marketing efforts that propelled the plastics industry to the forefront of consumer desire: by associating the materials with modern living and demonstrating the functional benefits.

Designers and engineers will also find ways to play to the strengths of these processes in a way that expands the visual language of additive. The bike parts (pedals, seat) that Formlabs used to show the capabilities of their forthcoming SLS printer are clever in how those parts require exceptional durability, are low-contact in terms of bare skin (the slight sandstone texture of SLS would be less desirable for say, a computer mouse), and will become smooth with the regular wear of use, a stark contrast to the glossy surfaces of injection molded plastic that consumers lust after only to discard when scratches accumulate.

The irrepressible movement towards greater flexibility (of design, of markets, of business models) is the goal of The Digital Factory.

It’s a shift in production powers towards a leaner, more automated system that can provide the right things, produced at the right time, in the right place — which means less waste from overproduction, in terms of fuel consumed in shipping goods long distances, scrap material from the goods themselves, and misspent human labor.