Lift12, New Futures: Lisa Harouni, 3D Printing [en]

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Lisa Harouni’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

3D printing! Lisa became fascinated with 3D printing after meeting a guy who kept fiddling with a little structure that was impossible to create with traditional manufacturing techniques.

Tomorrow we’ll feed our desktop 3D printers with material and they’ll produce objects for us.

How does it work? Create a 3D model and build it layer by layer from the base upwards.

Materials: plastic, aluminium-plastic composite, ceramics, metals, glasses, chocolate… anything that can be melted. Can also create large (2m) structures. Also, tiny (4 microns).

Prototypes. Also final products. steph-note: lovely lamp

Furniture. Structures that cannot be made any other way, so complex. Clothes.

Other end of the spectrum: engine block. Very heavy. Get the weight down? Remove the solid parts from the design. Create a system that builds a structure only when needed to hold the weight. Less material, less weight, better cooling channel. Again, can’t be built in any other way.

More porous implants. If it’s solid metal body tissue moves away. Porous implants mean the tissue can grow in it.

3D-printing has no economy of scale. So each one can be different. Adapting to specific needs. steph-note: wow, blown away by the implications — hadn’t seen it so clearly until now

Website of the future: pick your lamp, the designer has created customization experiences, pick what you want. Then… upload your product, to centres which will build it on demand. Reduce shipping costs, etc.

We’ll be able to download spare parts from the web. Hoover breaks down, you can fix it at home. Good-bye warehouses. But what happens with copyrights? The product industry might be disrupted just like the music industry is being disrupted now.

Bike: dozens of machines needed to create the different parts… in future we can do this with a single machine.

The landscape of manufacturing is going to change.

Price? lamp, 40-50$. Within a week or two but built within an hour.

Watch the video:

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