A decade ago I was so excited about the possibilities of what we called "downloadable design". This was before affordable 3D printers were even on the market, but about the ability to make what you want where you want when you want it, taking the choice from the retailer and giving it to the consumer.
It is like the music for our iPod; dematerialized bits and bytes put together again where we need it, without the waste of a physical intermediary. In a world where we watch our carbon as closely as our waistline we don't want to be driving to the big box stores; in a world where almost everything can be digitized, why move material when we are interested in ideas, creativity and talent?
The desire for 3-D printing to take over from traditional manufacturing needs to be recognized for what it is: an ideology. Getting all of our goods from a box in the corner of our home has attractive implications, from mass customization to "the end of consumerism." With stakes like those, who wouldn't want to be a true believer.
Advocates of 3-D printing also neglect entirely the fact that so much of what we use continues to be made out of natural substances, and for good reason. By any number of measures, wood is pound-for-pound stronger than steel, and the move toward natural products for packaging suggests that the strength and affordability of paper, bamboo and even mushrooms mean that in the future there will be more and not less of all of these.
I was convinced that it was just too soon in the development of the 3D printers, reminding readers of what we went through with 2D printers, where we all had go through the low res dot matrix phase, and that it took almost 30 years to get to where everyone can own a laser printer. That fancier stereolithographic home printers like the FormLabs machine would give us all the resolution and quality we were looking for. Not.
As Cranz in Gizmodo notes, "the 3D home printer market has quietly crashed in the intervening years—brought down by extremely low-quality print materials, a painfully long and difficult print process, and worst of all, a complete lack of interest from the general public."
I learned CAD programs for architecture and then Rhino for product development, spent years at University getting the skills I needed to be an architect; it's tough. But just like having a plotter doesn't make you an architect, or having a laser printer doesn't make you an author, having a 3D printer doesn't make you an industrial designer. It is exactly that, a printer. At some point soon there will be a critical mass of designs available to be printed and quality high enough to make it worthwhile having.
Clearly, I was wrong about that, and the stuff that one can get is not exactly making the heart pump with desire. Of course, 3D printers and other tools for doing digital fabrication are being used in industry and by hobbyists all over the world and even in space; they just haven't found their place in the home. And remember what Mims titled his post: Why 3-D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality. VR seems to be getting pretty big right now. Perhaps it is all still just too soon to tell.
It was so big a few years ago; now even Makerbot is throwing in the home 3D printed towel.