Hardware and digital information begins to converge. 3d printers dives in price and enables a new world where beautiful forms share and your 3D-printer print an exact replica. Look around and think of how many items the value is in the semi-rigid material such as plastic is shaped in a certain way. Both aesthetics and form in a variety of everyday objects lies in the design.
Rapid prototyping is a design concept that at each stage of a product design to create a physical prototype of the virtual design that can be used to test or demonstrate the product. Implied is that in every part of the design process also may be feedback from usage and unexpected proposal from those who only play with the prototype. The technology used in most manufacturing done through the design of 3D models, such as the automotive industry. Rapid prototyping is done through so-called solid freeform fabrication (SFF), which means technology for producing solid objects by applying energy or matter to some specific points in space. It includes, for example that with a laser (subtractive application of energy) cut out the shape of plexiglass or to use a 3D printer that plotters out thermoplastic (additive application of materials). Depending on instructions from vector based software.
Enough about the technology. What is interesting is not what makes the Audi in Ingolstadt, without the cost of these things start to come down to the levels where individuals or small groups of people can afford to get stuff. Just as we moved from mainframes to laptops and from printing presses to printers is the ability to go from factory to personal manufacturing.
2001 founded a handful of professors at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Center for Bits and Atoms, CBA, with funding from the National Science Foundation. Center's mission was and is to see what comes after the digital revolution. What they predict is a revolution in manufacturing, a move toward personal production.
It is available on our website for Fablab Sweden who will open up a series FabLabs (fabrication lab course ...) in Sweden this year, a concept that comes from MIT's CBA. The idea is to give people the opportunity to just walk in there and produce what has completely through rapid prototyping. The idea is to FabLabs become hubs that can trigger the revolution in personal fabrication. Another is a laser cutter bit too expensive for an individual, but start up business services where you buy time / materials either in person or online, it's not so difficult to obtain purchase costs to go around.
Already, there are options for the home handyman. The sexiest machine of them all is the RepRap, which I thought to devote a separate post for. But let's just say that it is a project (in beta stage may well be said) to create a self-replicating (it should be able to manufacture all their parts) 3d-printer where the cost of materials is not currently stands at more than 500 dollars.
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