The idea of making assemblies that were never assembled is intriguing. If you ‘grow’ a multi-part product by a direct manufacture process, can you then even call it an assembly? We don’t, after all, refer to animals and plants as assemblies — we call them organisms. My dog is not an assembly; neither am I. In the English language, the inanimate equivalent of an organism should probably be a mechanism (you can see the symmetry), but regrettably this word has a strict meaning in engineering . Not all multi-part ‘assemblies’ are mechanisms, obviously. What other words could work: construction, fabrication? To my mind neither implies the possibility of moving parts. We should most likely stay with assembly and live with the contradiction and irony it embodies when applied to things made by direct, additive methods.