The Everyday Fabber

(Provided by Momentimedia)

I introduce Thingiverse to my friends as SourceForge for “STUFF”.  This expresses my hope that one day people who need a garden trowel will in fact be told, “Just Google It”.  I’m what you might call a “true believer” in MakerBot and automated personal fabrication.  To me it seems pretty believable that, with computation becoming a ubiquitous background phenomenon and advances in organic chemistry bringing us an ever-widening variety of carbon-based chemical wonders, personal on-site fabrication is going to become not only a reality (actually it did that when the first RepStraps were built well over a year ago) but a part of everyday life.

I don’t think it will simply replace our plastic equipment with homespun equivalents.  That is at once more and less ambitious than what I think will happen.  The personal fabrication of the later half of this century will not mean only that we make our own plastic models and the shell housings for our electronics, but also, and perhaps most significantly, that we will make things we never would have had without it.

My reasoning here stems from Economies of Scale, which are often used as an argument that personal fabrication will never go mainstream.  The argument is that, since manufactured products have tremendous compression of overhead, plastic parts printed-to-order will never be as cheap as mass produced plastic parts.  This is very true.  For certain products.

For products with vast numbers of customers, for plastic forks and knives, for things everyone needs, for lawn chairs and step stools and children’s scissors, I think the economies of scale truly WILL keep out personal fabrication, possibly even in the long run.  (There’s a big IF on this one, IF transporting those goods stays cheap.)

But the economy of scale isn’t infinite.  It isn’t *free* to maintain big factories that can spit out thousands of parts.  And in a lot of cases one doesn’t even need thousands of parts.  The argument that personal fabrication cannot compete with big production hinges on the notion that most people don’t need low-volume objects.

But really, practically everyone does.

A graze through the Make Magazine blog will be full of stories of this basic format:

“The company that makes *niche product* wants *ridiculous sum* for *something easy enough to make* so I did it myself.”

The truth is that nearly everyone does something that’s almost unique.  We’ve all got a quirky hobby, a specific habit, or something we do that only a small percentage of people share.  This is the area where I think personal fabrication will really change lives.  I don’t think personal fabrication will replace our plastic forks and lawn chairs.  Everyone’s need there will be similar enough that, in the long run, we’ll settle for a fork that doesn’t have our personal stamp on it.

But when we need a case for our lenses, or holders for our model tweezers, or a double-bar soap dish so there’s an extra place for the lava soap, personal fabrication will provide, often at a LOWER cost than factory made.  And call me optimistic, but I think that enough people will want enough oddities to let personal fabrication take over a BIG chunk of the long tail of demand.

And in the process, make our lives not only easier but a bit more FUN.