3D Printing

5 3D Printing Stories to Prove How Far We Can Go

Pre-2014, there were plenty of people skeptical about the possibilities of 3D printing.  The technology was even laughed at by my close friends and family and deemed “a gimmick” by the founder of Foxconn, Terry Gou. Well, close friends, family, Mr. Gou, who’s laughing now? 2014 proved just how far 3D printing has come since its invention thirty years ago.  And these five breakthroughs demonstrate just how far it can take us.

3D printed wrench ISS made in space
Commander Barry Wilmore shows off a 3D printed ratchet / NASA

5. Made In Space

You can’t go much farther than space, can you? That’s a rhetorical question with a silly answer.  2014 witnessed the successful launch of the Made In Space Zero G Printer to the International Space Station, followed by the first successful space print. Now, the human race is a baby step closer to 3D printing in space, freeing up cargo room and weight for future launches.  Since the Made In Space installation, the European Space Agency and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have planned to send their own 3D printers to the ISS.  And this is only the beginning!

Lunar base made 3D printing node

As we expand our presence out in space and our technology improves, we’ll see space 3D printers fabricate objects made from surrounding space materials, like moondust.  This is already the plan for UK architecture firm Foster + Partners, NASA’s JPL, and USC’s Behrokh Khoshnevis, all of which are developing technologies for sintering lunar regolith into buildings on the moon.  Deep Space Industries claims that it will send printers to nearby asteroids and 3D print machines to mine for resources on the meteors themselves.  I, like many people out there, am burdened with cynicism, but, like many puppies, I’m also blessed with unbridled optimism and naivete. So, I’m beginning to believe that these are all very real possibilities that will come to fruition in my own life time.

4. Organovo

I’ve sometimes wondered, though, why people care so much about space when there are so many real problems back on Terra.  One company that is attempting to improve the quality of life on Earth is Organovo. This year will described in history books as the year that the first 3D printed liver cells were made commercially available.

3D printed liver exvive3d from Organovo

After undergoing substantial testing, the exVive3D™ Liver Model from Organovo hit the metaphorical shelves as a three-dimensional alternative to traditional, flat cellular arrays for pharmaceutical testing.  According to studies done with Roche Pharmaceuticals, the 3D printed liver cells were more capable of detecting toxicity levels than their 2D cellular counterparts.  The Roche studies proved that exVive3D could even detect the dangerous toxicity of previously FDA-approved medicines that were later taken off the market.

The exVive3D paves the way for more accurate drug testing, the ability to bring new medicines to market more quickly, the elimination of animal testing in drug research, and, ultimately, 3D printed organs.  Building on top of this research, the company also partnered with Yale this year to begin work towards 3D printable, transplantable human tissue.  And the Methuselah Foundation, which is contributing $500,000 to the duo’s research, is also funding the New Liver Prize, which will award $1m to the first team of scientists that “creates a regenerative or bioengineered solution that keeps a large animal alive for 90 days without native liver function” by 2018. If that doesn’t say “human progress”, then I don’t know what does!

strati 3d printed car
Photo by Danielle Matich

3. 3D Printing Cars, Houses

I can’t quite explain my reasoning, but there’s a part of me that knows that houses and cars belong in the same category.  I guess the category may be “Iconic Symbols of the American Dream”? Either way, this year saw the 3D printing of both of those large, functional things that are vital to the US economy.  And both exemplify just what 3D printing is capable of.

In September, my wife, Danielle, and I had the opportunity to see Local Motors drive its 3D printed Strati car off of the showroom floor at the IMTS trade show in Chicago.  There have been other 3D printed vehicles, but the Strati was manufactured and assembled in about four days and its design was partially crowdsourced by an entire online community.  This hints at a future in which even goods as big and expensive as autos can be completely tailored to the individual.

3D printed house

Taking the concept even further, we can imagine complete homes being 3D printed for their residents. In Minnesota, this year, engineer and architect Andrey Rudenko 3D printed a small castle in his backyard as a proof of concept of his ability to 3D print large scale structures.  While he has plans to 3D print a complete home, we haven’t heard back about this next endeavor quite yet. In China, however, WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. 3D printed 10 houses in just 24 hours.  Rudenko doesn’t exactly approve of the quality of these homes, but they further prove that 3D printing buildings is entirely feasible.

More than vane customization, 3D printing will give architects, designers, and urban planners a tool with which to construct complex structures not previously possible, perhaps optimally designed to catch and deflect heat or divert rainwater.  Vehicles, too, might be manufactured to be aerodynamic and lightweight, so as to consume less power while driving.  In turn, 3D printing may drive us towards living in a more sustainable, eco-friendly world.

2. Nervous System’s Kinematic Dress

Anything that happens in space research is easily mind blowing. And printing organs is so sciencey and mediciney that every new development is an obvious breakthrough.  And, of course, cars and houses are big things, so the feat of printing them quickly catches the attention of the public. The real change that 3D printing is fueling, though, is affecting us on a more ubiquitous and quotidian level.

3D printed Kinematics Dress from Nervous SystemThis month, 3D printing design firm Nervous System unveiled their Kinematics Dress, printed as a single, folded nylon piece using one of Shapeways’ laser sintering printers.  With their Kinematic Cloth app, developed with software from Body Labs, the firm imported the body shape of their model and tailored the dress to her own proportions.  Removed from the printbed, depowdered, and unfolded, the dress became a lightweight, breathable, moveable piece of high fashion tailored to the body of its wearer.

The Kinematics Dress is a visitor from the future, where dynamic, custom-tailored objects are manufactured in one step.  The concept of vague clothing sizes (size 10, 38W, 32C) will be as outdated as knitting when everything is tailored to a scan of your own body.  And the days of attaching multiple pieces of cloth together with a needle and thread could, too, become a thing of the past.  Researchers currently working to print complex electronics in a single print process illustrate that this same single-step manufacturing concept could be applied to complete electronic devices.

Someday, we’ll no longer have to rely on centralized factories, with poor labor conditions (like Mr. Gou’s Foxconn facilities) for the production of goods.  And won’t need to ship goods across the planet, pumping CO2 into the air as trucks and planes carrying them to their final destinations.  Instead, it’s possible that manufacturing will be distributed through 3D printing networks, like 3D Hubs, or individual printing machines owned by homes and neighborhoods.  When something is needed, it’s printed in a single piece.  When it is no longer needed, it is disassembled and re-used for subsequent print tasks.

So, just to recap: in this future that 3D printing has carried us to, sustainably shaped cars and homes are 3D printed in a single job.  We’ve been printing homes on the moon and mining asteroids.  And we’ve shortened the list for organ transplants tremendously.  And, we’ll say that we’re living in ecological balance with the planet, we’ve eliminated poverty, and cured as many diseases as is existentially viable.

Then, we can move onto the bigger picture, the thing that unites us as a species.

3d printed goatse 3D printed tubgirl cosmos

1. Tubgirl and Goatse

When Danielle and I had the infamous shock memes Tubgirl and Goatse 3D printed (<- 3DPI link SFW), thanks to designer DotCX and Zcorp 3D printer owner/technician Mark Sherman, we weren’t merely trying to shock people. To both of us, these two figures (NSFW) represent that portion of the collective psyche that humanity is too afraid to confront. If a person can stretch an orifice so far beyond social constructs and common perception, that hole opens up into the larger question of “what is reality?” Why are we alive? What is this thing that we are that is happening to us?

Bound by human suffering and our existential plight, we have a duty to pursue a state of being in which every living part of the collective is treated with respect and dignity. Once that is accomplished, we can turn our attention towards this fundamental question and attempt to answer the unanswerable.

But, in order to get there, to a future of comfort and contentment, we’ll need a lot more than 3D printing. The human brain is the most powerful computer in the world and, at present, there are about 7 billion of them on the planet, loosely connected through social networks, natural and technological. These computers, however, aren’t being fully taken advantage of, with school systems and large economic structures neglecting them and allowing them to stagnate, while a very, very small minority reaps profits for no satisfactory reason. If we want to live as a content and comfortable collective, almost all of these 7 billion computers will need to be given the tools and resources to become empowered, self-actualize, and flourish.

The good news is that I think this has already begun to happen.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!