It seems to me it’s hard to just launch into a discussion about the effects on design of a whole new way of making things. Maybe I should be talking about how design rules change with the current generation of RM technologies — designing a part for SLS perhaps — and that could be useful. But this blog is about the future, about life in a world where additive manufacture has matured, reached a stage where many of the things that we make today in complex ways out of parts and pieces can instead be zapped out of a single fabrication machine, from scratch. A toaster for example. We know very little about how these machines will work and it’s hard to judge how soon they’ll get that clever, but whereas lots of people are talking about next-generation FDM machines and suchlike, no-one to my knowledge is really trying to get to grips with where it’s all going — and what we can do with it when it gets there.
And that is a conversation worth having, mainly because we can better steer the technology if there’s a long-term vision and Design2.0 is about that vision. But to think about design in an additive world it’s useful to have some ideas about how the technology will work and what it could be able to do. Maybe some structures are beyond the scope of additive — straightforward window glass perhaps — and perhaps a level of assembly will always be advantageous (see previous post).
Anyway, I’ll be talking, speculating about the technology for a while, to set the scene for Design2.0.