I recently ran into Dominic and he said, “Hey, I’m the guy who uploaded his skull to Thingiverse!” We promptly printed a smaller version of his skull and spent a good chunk of the afternoon chatting about design, materials, and the state of the world. He’s really into materials and I’m excited to announce that he’s going to be writing the occasional blogpost here on the Thingiverse blog! By way of introduction, I interviewed him!
Bre Pettis: You’re a professor at the UW. What is your favorite thing to teach?
Dominic Muren: Yeah, I teach Industrial Design and Design Studies at the University of Washington. I think the thing that gets me the most fired up is challenging design students to re-examine what their impact can be on society at large. Sure, a well designed car or quarterly report is visually interesting, and serves a functional purpose, like getting you to the store, or telling you if you should buy more or less IBM stock. But when taken as part of a larger system, those same objects alter the way we collectively live our lives, resulting in new social constructs, like the suburb, or the corporation. The things we make make us us.
Bre Pettis: You write and maintain a blog called Humblefacture. What is the mission for Humblefacture?
Dominic Muren: Even though the things we make — and the way we make them — influences our society so profoundly, we have remarkably little discussion about the consequences of our manufacturing technology. In particular, as a society, we tend to assume that we can only maintain our current standard of living by evolving our current manufacturing infrastructure, and that anything else would move us “backward”. This is the argument employed when dissenters bring up the environmental costs, energy shortfalls, social injustices, or economic instabilities of our current manufacturing infrastructure — that change would require us going “back to the stone age”
Humblefacture is founded around the idea that developing different methods of making can lead to a comparable standard of living for a larger proportion of the population, with reduced costs to the environment, society, and individual users. In short, developing new ways of making things will not only make better things, but could have positive side effects as well. We are particularly interested in new making directions which support product modularity and interoperability, small-scale production, and low-investment, low-infrastructure fabrication. I would go so far as to say that making is a form of modern speech, is just as important to protect and enable. Enabling this making-as-speech requires that we build new tools and techniques like makerbot for articulating ideas, but also raise awareness and interest in making in general. Free speech is only useful if people have big enough vocabularies to share interesting ideas.
Bre Pettis: Describe the frontier of Materials today.
Dominic Muren: The world of materials today is a very interesting, very divided place. On the one hand, you have places like Stanford and Tokyo University working on nanomaterials which are some of the most high performance, but also high cost and high embodied energy materials ever made. Call this the Inaccessible Optimum — sure, it’s amazing, but it requires so much infrastructure and expense to make that only the largest, best funded corporations or militaries can ever hope to work with these materials in bulk. On the other hand, there are amazing strides being made in accessible technologies for the developing world — everything from new architectural materials, to cheap ways of making electronics and solar collectors. Call this the Undesirable Mundane — it’s incredible, but only if you’ve never had access to reliable electricity, or durable building materials before. These accessible materials pale in the face of the stuff produced by the developed world’s industrial complex.
I think that there is a major opportunity in materials to explore the intersection of these two frontiers — call it the Mundane Optimum. What can we make by focusing all the advanced understanding of the last 100 years of technological development toward making materials that are super high performance, but also super accessible to average-joe makers? Policy-makers might tell you that the frontier of materials is technological, but I think the true frontier needs this social dimension to reach its full potential. Truly open manufacturing will never be possible without highly useful, highly accessible materials.
Stay tuned for Dominic’s post here on the Thingiverse blog!
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