“Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas”
– Charles Eames
3DPI is delighted to welcome Ivan Pope as a regular contributor to 3DPI. Here, he starts a series of articles with some insight into his background, his worldview of 3D printing and the future that stretches out before us. In subsequent posts, Ivan aims to join the dots and consider the power and the potential of 3DP networks.
There’s nothing so powerful as an idea that has grabbed the popular imagination. Nothing can stand in its way, it will come to be. 3D printing is such an idea: that you can take a digital model of an object and replicate that object in your own living room. The potential of this idea is just beginning to sink in.
Of course, to much of the world’s population this concept has not yet entered their consciousness. Many of us are perhaps too close to it: we take for granted the tension between what can be done now and what we believe should be possible. But for many people who are paying attention, who are active and interested and restless and looking for something new, this idea has staying power They are looking at the space with fascination bordering on incredulity. Some have already crossed over to take part, many are biding their time, but they will be here very soon. A concept that used to only exist in science fiction is now amongst us. We are not only making toys now, we have the prelude to a serious idea that will help shape the future.
It’s easy, of course, to make arguments against 3D printing technology. In the scheme of things, it doesn’t do very much. It’s hard to make it work. Not that many people are interested. It’s an expensive toy. Most low-end machines are difficult to work with and extremely limited in their output. But these so miss the point as to be already historical quibbles.
At the start of the nineteen-nineties, when the public internet was in its infancy and the world wide web was unheard of, it was a commonplace put-down to say that this was all a fad, a toy, a bit like the short lived CB radio.
Then I was a recent art graduate, who, having stumbled across the global networks at college, was desperate to evangelise what I had found. But to quench my desire, I had a mountain to climb. Not only had next to nobody heard of the web and even fewer had had hands on experience of the internet, but hardly anyone had a computer. Trying to tell them the virtues of email fell mostly on deaf ears. There was no internet to carry my internet messages.
As an art graduate and artist, it was a strange thing for me to be playing with networks. Although they fitted very well with my view of how the art world could and should operate, those networks didn’t actually produce anything or have much point at all. I didn’t see this as a problem. I saw the power and potential of being able to connect with anyone on the planet. Although I couldn’t predict Facebook or eBay or Twitter or indeed any of the myriad things we entertain ourselves with 20 years hence, I recognised the power of what was happening. The networks, which had a short time before been the preserve of a professional class, were opening up with frightening speed. There was no single thing that you could point to and say, that is what changed everything. Commercial access points were developed. Students discovered the joy of email at college. Tim Berners-Lee invented the web and placed the software in the public domain. People outside academia started to develop commercial uses. Journalists found a source of news. The monster was awakened and, after that, it was just a matter of diving in and seeing what happened. I started a magazine, then another. I started a web company because there were no professional web developers. It had to be done. I invented the cyber cafe; the idea was waiting to be created, the structure was there. I made a domain name company; it needed to be done. Everything fell into place, each step forward generated a new set of needs and an industry grew up from very little in a few short years.
Struggling to define what we were working with, I came up with the line, ‘The web is a medium, not a technology’. I wanted to clarify my belief that we shouldn’t concentrate on the hardware, or even the software, but the interaction of people with this amazing system, the ebb and flow of ideas and actions that the networks enabled.
Jennifer Lawton, President of Makerbot, has now coined a similar phrase. ‘3D printing is an ecosystem, not a device’.
The same issues are at play. It’s great to come back to atoms, but it’s not about atoms. The machines themselves will get a lot better at the consumer end, the software will grow up fast, but it’s not about software or machines. 3D printing materials will expand and diverge. Issues with patents, copyright and security will be solved. We will see a continued flow of technical development, new machines, software, materials and input devices. We will get to grips with how this technology fits in with and extends our place in the world. But it will always be about the ecosystem, not the device.
We don’t even know what will be dreamed up in the next year, let alone over the next twenty. We do know that this idea will broaden and spread through the network as millions of minds are focused on it. We are not beholden to any particular route to development. No government (except, perhaps, China) will even attempt to control this process. Things will develop for their own purposes, generated through a sense of wonder and potential to an unknown destination. There will be the Facebook, the Twitter, the eBay or the YouTube of 3D printing — these models are emerging already. There will also continue be the spam, pornography, trolling and moral panics of it.
It is wonderful to be involved with an ecosystem where the best is yet to come.
