ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

The first time I heard of 3-D printing, or rapid prototyping, was about two years ago. I had a friend who worked in an architecture office in New York and they acquired a rapid prototyper for their shop, already a wonderland of tools, toys and models that must have been amazing to work in every day. The rapid prototyper cost tens of thousands of dollars and looked sort of like a miniature soda vending machine with a trap door. Inside, tiny parts quietly performed incredibly complex and minute tasks that delivered unbelievable results—especially to an untrained eye.

Though at the time this seemed a mystery greater than the Pyramids, when it comes to rapid prototyping technology, there is actually a fairly easy (albeit grossly oversimplified) explanation; you send the prototyping machine a file from a 3-D modeling or CAD program and the machine renders, or ‘prints’, the design in plastic, one tiny layer at a time. (Wikipedia has a much more detailed entry about how 3-D printing works.) The 3-D printer can create any pattern or shape within the size limitations of the particular machine. The plastic used is usually a distinctive, spectral white, a little more opaque than HDPE milk jugs.

Point is, I became obsessed with rapid prototyping when I first learned about it and now I feel like I can’t turn around without finding evidence that other people are obsessed, too—which is comforting I suppose.

At the ICFF last week, the lone souvenir I picked up at the Designboom mart was a 3-D printed ring by Nervous System. I love it. It looks like something that Matthew Barney would give to Bjork and having it feels like owning a little piece of the future. Maker Jessica Rosenkrantz of Nervous System told me that she sends her designs to Shapeways, a company in the Netherlands, which prints them and sends them back.

Other examples of 3-D-printed objects seem to be turning up everywhere. I’ve stumbled across a couple of 3-D printed flash drives, like this one from Cina, and the key-shaped “Cle USB” from byAMT inc. Jeweler Arthur Hash creates biomorphic 3-D-printed jewelry, using the online design-your-own service Ponoko. And of course there were the incredible LED fireflies I noticed at Harry Allen’s Design Week party.

All this leads me up to a question, though. What is it that’s so fascinating about 3-D printing?

Last year, I wrote a short piece for GOOD magazine about the RepRap project, which is an open source rapid prototyping initiative. Its founder, Adrian Bowyer, dreams of a world in which people would own machines that could quickly print many of life’s necessities, so that the means of production could quite literally be shared. It’s a utopian dream, but also a little offputting somehow. What if rapid prototyping were to become ubiquitous, to the extent that ‘making’ something primarily came to mean pushing a button and printing it out? If we all had versatile 3-D printers in our houses, would human creativity flourish? Would our relationship to objects change in interesting ways? I can imagine that. And yet, I can also imagine something being lost. If objects are all ‘printed,’ then human labor as we know it is all but cut out. How would we regard and value objects in a world where everything is made with the mere push of a button? There’s excitement in that possibility, but also the specter of loss.

This is getting awfully metaphysical, but there’s something about 3-D technology that invites futuristic speculation. And despite its eerie overtones, I can’t deny that there’s an allure to the 3-D printing idea, and I feel a weird attraction to the delicate plastic objects that are its current end product. Right now, I think part of my fascination is precisely that the material is plastic. We all live surrounded by plastic things and yet the ways in which plastic is worked are, for most of us, one of the modern world’s biggest mysteries. Plastic is everywhere but it’s a material that regular people can’t really do things with. It’s synonymous with factories, heavy industry, processes that happen somewhere else. So there’s something cool and subversive about having something that’s plastic but made in a way that seems less distant, more…dare I say it…artisanal?

These are the things I’m thinking about as I twirl my new, cobwebby nylon ring.

Ring or no ring, how does 3-D printing strike you?

Photo by Nervous System