The “new industrial revolution” promises a paradigm-shift that can favor the entrepreneurial small manufacturer. This opportunity for the little guy creates an opening for re-establishing manufacturing in our communities. The enabling technology that underlies the opportunity is called digital fabrication. Digital fabrication, for many types of products, leapfrogs the current stalwart of centralized mass-production and replaces it with new methods that can make the small producer competitive again. Here’s why …
You probably already know about digital fabrication because of 3D printing. It’s the super-star exemplar of digital fab. It would be hard to have missed the hype-cycle that surrounded the popularization of consumer 3D printing — we can all appreciate the straightforwardness of the 3D printing concept and its magic route to creating things right before our eyes. Not-to-mention, there is that ever-present meme of the Star Trek “Replicator” to help to get our visionary juices flowing.
Having gotten the excitement of 3D printing, it’s a short step to recognizing the power of a production process embedded in a digital continuum from design, through prototyping, to digital creation with computer-controlled equipment. The digital model created in CAD (computer aided design) becomes a highly portable, shareable, and collaborative instantiation of the object we wish to create. It can be efficiently developed through prototyping at different scales, in different locations, and with different materials; ultimately it can be seamlessly refined into the final set of digital instructions for production. Each step benefits from the continuity of the model at one end of the process, and digital control of the production equipment at the other.
But “additive” 3D printing is just one of several digital manufacturing technologies built on this design-to-production continuum. These others include “subtractive” technologies such as CNC-machining, plasma cutting, and laser-cutting, as well as robotic assembly. Robotic assembly and variations may eventually become the most important process—working from the nano-scale and involving smart materials that can self-assemble; to the macro-scale, with the robotic production of houses and even larger structures. In the near term, though, much of our new manufacturing will be about making the best use of all these methods. They are all closely related.
The continuum of digital fabrication reflects the manner in which creation and production is enabled by a linked set of digital processes to manufacturing that is based on digital control of fabrication equipment. Whatever the specific piece of digital fab equipment, the controls act similarly — all relying on mechanical components, underlying micro-controllers, and electronics that have much in common, whether the machine is intended for additive or subtractive work. Sub-serving the mechanical and electronic are software platforms that are increasingly universal. These tools are all essentially robots moving a delivery-head that can cut, deposit, or harden varied materials. They all do it in similar ways, based on similar digital controls.
The empowering essence of all this digital control is production that has extreme precision, high complexity, high fidelity, high quality, and repeatability. These are the consequence of digital control of the motion of production hardware.
It all leads to the important result: for digital fabrication, complexity and precision are a feature of the system; complexity and precision come with little or no added cost.
Sounds simple. But the effect is powerful. It is just as easy for a programmed, digitally controlled tool to cut a complex curve as it is for it to cut a straight line, just as easy to machine an intricate joint as drill a simple hole, or just as easy to build a shape with embedded components as to cast individual components and assemble them. Sure, such intricacy might take just a little longer. But now, the ability to produce features that once required capital-intense specialized equipment, expensive labor, challenging assembly, or extensive time and effort — if even possible — comes virtually free.
“Complexity comes free” has been a mantra of additive 3D printing. With 3D printing, parts can be made within parts and, in principle, many fully assembled objects with moving components, including components of different materials, can be printed as a single object in one process. But other digital fab technologies have their own unique advantages and practicalities. These involve optimal materials, size, cost, production speed, efficiency, and so forth. The reality is that digital production methods and materials will continue to rapidly evolve and are likely to integrate multiple strategies and scales, as well as leverage synergies with new developments we have yet to imagine. Complexity comes free, and employing it affords new ways to manufacture, new ways to assemble, new usages, and new processes that would not have been previously possible.
Digital fab can thus favor small agile producers who are quick to assimilate new production options and use them to advantage.
Here’s Autodesk’s Carl Bass’ take on how it all works for the small shop:
“Now, you don’t need to make things in huge volume to have those kinds of economies of scale, and one of the enablers of that is that we have software that embeds this knowledge. And the other thing is that most manufacturing is done with computers today. Sometimes it’s in the form of a robot, sometimes it’s a 3D printer or a CNC machine or a laser cutter. All of this is really brought about by the microprocessor. All of a sudden, now what reverses that trend of the Industrial Revolution is that I can make really high quality things in small quantities at reasonably affordable prices. That’s different, and that’s where I think this is an incredible opportunity for people to create businesses.”
Small manufacturing operations can be very hands-on. With hands-on, the design-build linkage can be very tight. Understanding how something is built and used feeds back to improved design, which feeds back to improved manufacturing, and so forth. Such tight linkage can be a key to product innovation. Digital fab integrates that tight linkage as part of the foundation of the technology, advantaging the small operation that is facile in putting it to work.
The important message communicated by the widespread enthusiasm for 3D printing is that digital fab technologies are becoming accessible today. Digital fabrication technologies that previously were used for high-volume industrial production were expensive. Primitive processors made them only appropriate for repetitive automation and mass production. However, once linked to personal computers and increasingly powerful micro-controllers, the equipment has become agile in ways not imagined when introduced for industrial production. As the technology has become accessible and human-friendly, it has become highly configurable and modifiable in production so that custom individual pieces and small-batch runs can be made at competitive costs.
For both additive and subtractive technologies, progress in computers and digital technologies — along with increasing adoption and improving pricing — supports broadening availability of digital fabrication equipment for small production shops. Software and training resources for digital fab are becoming readily accessible via the internet, even for those who have not had specific engineering or technology training.
These possibilities for the new (or next, or third, or fourth) industrial revolution based on accessibility of new technologies have elsewhere been described as a possible rejuvenation of “cottage” industries. Rather than cottages, though, the technology-driven opportunity to re-establish local manufacturing might be better envisioned as a rejuvenation of the small machine shops, sheet material fabricators, and cabinet and fixture makers that were once prevalent in the American landscape and contributed so extensively to our manufacturing supply chains.
An example exists in some of the shops that have managed to survive off-shoring. By employing the new technologies, the survivors exemplify how the adoption of digital fabrication methods contribute to efficiency in manufacturing and to the re-integration of local manufacturers into supply-chain activities where they competitively serve specialized niches. A recent New York Times article provides a good example. It describes a Baltimore sheet-metal shop that has adopted digital fab technologies. The shop survived and now successfully competes by making precision metal baskets for high-tech industries. At the same time, the shop is providing well-paying jobs to a small workforce that has bootstrapped its own skills for digital production technologies.
Other types of small, design-build-production operations with one to dozens of employees, are also beginning to appear. One example is your own local sign shop (if you have one, it is probably making signs with digital fab). Similar digital production is spreading to a wide variety of other niches. Many small shops participate as subcontractors in a broader supply stream. These shops are leveraging digital technologies in prototyping, custom fabrications, and small-run and medium-run production. Platforms and networks that offer resources and integration are emerging to provide support, collaboration, logistics, and marketing. An example is 100kGarages.com, our network linking thousands of small digital technology workshops and designers across the country and helping them serve-up their production services.
Perhaps the conditions may now be right for a positive perfect storm for small producers? There is an enabling set of methods in digital fabrication: additive, subtractive, and robotic assembly. These are tied in a digital continuum from design and development through prototyping and production. This continuum is itself embedded in a nexus of the broader contemporary technology stack supporting collaboration, marketing, business resources, supply chain, and shipping and logistics.
The competitive advantage of pairing the energy and agility of small manufacturers with the complexity comes free principle inherent in digital fabrication could now give us the new industrial revolution.
Summary: For at least some types of manufactured goods, digital fabrication promises to make small, clean, fulfilling, local manufacturing competitive again. Using digital fabrication, the lack of an incremental cost for producing complex quality components provides small manufacturers new competitive opportunities that can be enhanced by their particular capabilities, energy, and agility.
The digitally fabricated objects pictured here were produced using digital fabrication machines costing less than $10,000.
Links: Rob Bell’s Zomes, Zomadic Architecture (photo by Tristan Savatier — www.loupiote.com); 3D-printed prosthetics, Enablingthefuture.org
Suggested Read: Ten years ago, Neil Gershenfeld in Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication enthusiastically anticipated the potential for affordable, digital fabrication as an alternative to mass production. Since that time, hundreds of the “Fab Labs” he inspired have appeared around the world as experimental demonstrations of the power of digital production technologies applied locally (see: FabLabs).
Ted writes about the future of small-shop manufacturing and new fabrication technologies. Ted founded ShopBotTools (digital fab equipment), Handibot (smart power tools), and with Bill Young, started the open, small-shop, fabrication match-up & resource, 100kGarages.
