Futurismic

Wired ed-in-chief Chris Anderson emerges from the back rooms once again with a lengthy piece lauding what he calls “the next industrial revolution” – which is, in essence, the imminent explosion of small companies using modern fabrication equipment and outsourcing techniques whose agility and low overheads will enable them to sweep away the old guard of corporate giants. [image by oskay]

That’s the theory, anyway, and it should be fairly familiar to regular Futurismic readers: we’re talking consumer-price-point 3D design software; 3D printing and fabrication; outsourced manufacturing; garage-industry electronics assembly techniques; open-source designs; hardware and software hacking; crowdsourcing for ideas, designs and feedback. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a slice that captures the spirit:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

From a globalist perspective, it’s pretty optimistic – as you might expect from the guy who came up with the concept of the Long Tail. That said, it’s not what the big corporations want to hear… and that’s probably the main stumbling block between the here and now and Anderson’s entreprenurial utopia. It’s become embarassingly obvious how much of a hold corporate America has over the engines of policy, and it probably won’t take much effort to spin Anderson’s vision into a dark and unpatriotic future where American manufacturing jobs are sent overseas (to those sneaky Chinese, no less!), garage makers are enemies of freedom (and probably a glass fiber’s breadth from becoming terrorists), and the people’s right to not be shafted by those who already hold all the aces is swept under the carpet so as to maintain a precarious economic status quo.

OK, so I’m overstating for effect, there… but you can see where I’m going with this, I hope. Given the staggering levels of obfuscation and deceit involved with the US healthcare reforms, I can’t see Anderson’s revolution happening without some serious back-room dealing and political psy-ops from those who stand to lose the most from it. And I doubt it will be a uniquely American problem, either; the government to which I pay my taxes is just as compromised, albeit in slightly different ways, and the richer countries of the Old World are all in the same boat.

What remains to be seen is whether Anderson’s maker revolution is an economic inevitability or an avoidable alternative. It’ll come as no surprise to most of you who read here regularly that I’d like nothing more than to see the bloated corporate behemoths of the world get their shoes wet while doing a King Canute impersonation, but only time will tell. This is one story where we can’t just skip to the last page to find out the ending; let’s just hope we don’t get squashed by the plot mechanics, eh?

Well, it was bound to happen – hell, Sven’s been writing columns that skirt around the idea for ages. Here’s the lowdown: 3D printing is maturing quickly, and 3D scanning isn’t far behind, meaning that material objects can be stored and transmitted as digital data. Digital data can be shared in many different ways, and – as the recording industry has learned the hard way – illicit filesharing is, for all intents and purposes, an unclosable Pandora’s box. So what’s to stop people trading, sharing and printing off copies of copyright-controlled objects – shoes, clothing, homeware, car parts, whatever?

The answer – nothing. Nothing at all. Welcome to The Product Bay:

RepRap and other 3D printers are the future. There’s no question about it. With the proud tradition from The Pirate Bay, we want to take all of this to the next level. TPB will be TPB, but for real life objects. For now, visit Thingiverse who already understands this.

We want you to download those new jeans.

We want you to share those new shoes.

It’s possible, let’s make it happen.

Granted, The Product Bay is just a one-page site with a provocative message, and I rather suspect it has been launched with the purpose of starting a conversation more than any real hope of kicking off the world’s first tracker site for digital files of real-world objects… but it’s also a harbinger of things to come, and the big-brand companies that aren’t scared by the idea should probably start planning for the worst. It’s not like there’s been no warning, after all. [via Fabbaloo]

Ah, those crazy geeks and boffins at MIT – is there any idea they can’t run with so far and long that it ceases to make any sense whatsoever? Here’s your trajectory: you already know about 3D printing, right? And that there’s a 3d printer called the CandyFab, which specialises in fabbing objects using the tooth-rottingly delectable medium of edible sugars?

So why not go all the way and propose the Cornucopia – a 3D printer that can output almost any sort of food ingredient you can imagine in almost any three-dimensional matrix, plus make sure it’s all cooked properly? [initial tip from @BLDGBLOG, whence a long chain of relinks takes us to Shapeways; image courtesy MIT Fluid Interfaces group]

As a thought-experiment into the possible uses of fabrication technology, it’s a pretty neat idea… but it’s taken me about two minutes to create a ten-strong list of impracticalities that make it an utterly pointless endeavour. I suppose the justification would be that the interim research into fluid dynamics, microscopic fabrication/extrusion, focussed heating and complex programming would produce a whole raft of new avenues for development… but come on, MIT guys’n'girls! Couldn’t you be turning those big brains to developing something we actually need?

Suddenly, touchscreen devices seem to be everywhere, changing the ways in which we interact with our phones, computers and tablet devices. But the next user interface revolution is already waiting in the wings – gestural interfaces will complete the user-interface paradigm shift that touchscreens have started. So says Stowe Boyd:

Gestural UI, or ‘hand jive’ as I call it, once deployed as a built in aspect of future computers, like touchpads and mouses are today, will set the stage for a rethink about user experience.

First we will see hand jive as a way to manipulate the gears of now-tradition windowed UIs: pulling down a menu in an app, moving windows around, dragging a file to the trash.

In the future, we’ll have real Minority Report stuff, without the enormous touch screens: we’ll also see the emergence of augmented reality goggles — Terminator goggles — where we can toggle back and forth between 100% computer screen sorts of display to 100% augmented reality. And the goggles — as an integrated part of the computing device — will be watching our hands for commands, and watching the world for reality to augment.

The combination of these trends will make computing primarily mobile: we’ll have an iPhone sized device we carry all the time, which will be a phone and a PC. We will be free of LCD screens — in general — courtesy of our goggles, and free of keyboards, courtesy of hand jive. A keyboard can be imaged on any flat surface by the goggles, and we can type without a physical keyboard because the gestural system is watching our fingers in 3D. And of course, a lot of things could be done without typing, especially once kids start using sign language and voice to communicate with computers. (I say kids because that’s who start first.)

While we’re waiting for that revolution to arrive, the inclusion of accelerometers in mobile hardware offers some avenues for interfacing with your phone without mashing the keypad or fingering the screen. Anyone who’s ever found themselves with a pocket full of unsolicited novelty ring-tone in a crowded cinema will probably appreciate the opportunity to silence their phone with a few well-timed slaps of the hand through their clothes:

With the right software installed, it may one day be possible to cut a call by “whacking” the phone in a particular pattern while it’s still in your pocket.

[...]

The team developed a simple vocabulary of “whack gestures” designed to rapidly communicate simple commands such as silencing the phone. To help the device distinguish the gestures from background bumps, each begins and ends with a firm “whack”.

The biggest roadblock for gestural UI will probably be the software houses, however. Keith Stuart of the Guardian Games Blog wonders whether anyone will actually bother using Microsoft’s Project Natal motion sensor device for truly new gaming experiences, or whether they’ll all play it safe with re-runs of what has gone before:

For a start, publishers are massively, obsessively risk averse. If there’s any way of leveraging market pre-awareness into a new product they’ll leap at it. So even if these companies are developing titles that work only on Natal – not just new games with vaguely specified Natal-support – it’s unlikely that they’ll do this without recourse to familiar brands and gameplay experiences. In other words, we may get a dedicated Natal version of, say, Mass Effect 3, but it’ll still be Mass Effect, it’s just that you’ll act out those in-depth personal relationships with aliens rather than just talking and watching the cut-scenes.

A little pessimistic, perhaps, but given the enduring tightness of the global economy, playing it safe is likely to be the order of the day for those with the most to lose. But we shouldn’t discount the independent hardware hackers, who the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests will be a growing cultural force in the year to come. Every day my RSS feeds are full of ordinary geeks doing amazing things with off-the-shelf devices and a handful of cheap parts, and despite the best efforts of easily-riled device manufacturers and their copyright lawyers, it’s getting harder and harder to keep the details of mods, hacks and retrofits a secret.

Cory Doctorow’s latest novel Makers (which I still haven’t had the time to sit down and read beyond the tenth instalment or so) posits a near-future economy where the agile and frugal make-do mind-set of hackers and makers changes the way the world does business for ever. With 3D printing showing every sign of maturing to the affordable “prosumer” level in the next year or so, and landfills across the planet still inhaling mountains of obsolete consumer electronics and tcotchkes, it’s far from being the most implausible future I’ve read about lately. [image by See-ming Lee]

What do you think – will our recent economic woes push us toward reuse and repurposing, or will we wander slowly but surely back to corporate-capitalist business-as-usual?

Here’s another sf-nal thought experiment to keep your brain occupied. We frequently mention 3D printing and fabbing here at Futurismic, but usually in the context of its positive disruptive potential – a potential sea-change in capitalist economic systems, for example. But here’s a negative response from analyst Nick Jones of the Gartner corporation [via Fabbaloo]:

… do we really want an affordable domestic fabber? Fabbers will likely “print” objects using some form of plastic. So the inevitable consequence of mass market fabbing will be a huge increase in the amount of non-biodegradable plastic waste clogging up the planet for hundreds of years into the future. Should we maybe ban fabbers before the problem arises? Like most problems there are solutions, like biodegradable plastic. But if we wait until all the problems with a technology are solved before we permit it, then we will waste a decade or two of potential value; and in any case there’s no way we can predict all the social and environmental issues associated with a new technology before it arrives.

I’d agree with Jones’ last point – social disruption patterns, particularly, are very hard to predict accurately (which is probably part of the reason they’re perversely fun to discuss), and it’d be a shame to lose out on the potential power of fabbing to transform the life cycle of many of the things we use on a daily basis.

But there will be plenty of people who will see fabbing as a threat, environmental or otherwise, and who will push for legislation to control or suppress it. A victorious climate lobby would certainly flex its muscle against a technology that promised to democratise mass manufacture, as would those corporations whose bottom lines would vanish overnight – not just delivery firms like FedEx, but the factories in developing nations that churn out tchotchkes and basic hardware at low-low prices. It will be interesting to see how the traditional left-right political binary will fall across this issue; I suspect it might not be in the direction most easily assumed.