BUS 6300H

After days of relentless snow, the weather became more tolerable for an expedition to the Museum of Art and Design. My main purpose for this visit was to get more insight and understanding about 3D printing through the museum’s special exhibition : Out of Hand.

After paying 12 bucks on the student ticket, I was excited to enter the main exhibition floor. Even though the museum seems small compared to the Metropolitan or MoMa, there are a lot of novel and artistic works lying everywhere, waiting to inspire anyone who land his sight upon them. I quickly browsed through the first floor which is the main entrance and a gift-store, which comprised of original works crafted by designer and artist from all over the world.

The main Out of Hand exhibition was my next destination. Immediately, I was immediately awestruck by what I have seen there. The first 3D-printed work that greeted my sight was a dinosaur-head-skeletal-like structure named Protohouse. At first I thought it is just a replica of some fossil dinosaur bone. I was dumbfounded when I realized that is actually a model for a house. The technology behind this model is developed by Softkill design using selective laser sintering.

More like a Dinohouse

Interestingly, this model was not printed as one whole piece, but consists of 30 detailed fibrous pieces which can be assembled into one continuous cantilevering structure, without need for any adhesive material. In London, Softkill Design started the Protohouse 2.0 project. If completed, it will be the world’s first 3D printed house and its size will be eight meters wide and four meters long.

This was also the first lesson I’ve learned from my visit. In the future, 3D technology might help us to build customized house which is  both functionally superior and aesthetically pleasing.

Nylon plastic

The other thing I learned about 3D printing is the variety and flexibility of the materials being used by a 3D printer. One of the example is nylon plastic, which I believed was the same material used by our school’s 3D printer. The characteristic of nylon plastic is it is durable and flexible, so it can be built into interlocking components. Besides plastic, metals like steel, sterling silver, brass and bronze are compatible with a 3D printer. However, the cost of metal materials are much higher than the plastic.

Model of 3D Building

My third observation during my exciting exploration in MAD museum is the potential of wide-scale 3D housing construction. As you can see in this picture, it is possible to 3D “building” a house if we can build a large enough 3D printer. A truck will then carry the printing materials. The entire process is automated and the only worker here is the truck driver. This could reduce construction cost substantially. One possible downside, however, is the unemployment of construction workers, who got replaced by the 3D machine.

This whole revolution in construction industry is exactly what the book Fabricated mentioned in the beginning. By actually seeing these models being tested, I was only more convinced by the potential of 3D printing technology.

Intriguingly, I saw chairs,  customized 3D printed chairs of all kinds on every single floor at the museum. This observation revealed the importance of chair to the mankind. We can find ourselves sitting on a chair for long hours, be it working in the office, attending class at school, taking the subway, playing computer games, eating and etc. Therefore, it will be great if we can customize chairs that will fit snugly to our body and reduce the negative impact of sitting like back pain.

Last Wednesday, during our unusual class at a special classroom located in the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship, we got the chance to put our creative mind to work and get physical with different toys and mini-machineries, awaiting to be assembled by the eager zicklin scholars.

Before long, the classroom was filled with a bunch of 20-years old children, dispersed around the room working on their little project. I teamed up with my buddy, Mike to build an auto-rotating-circular-sketcher. The main reason we picked this particular project is its ability to draw circles in various patterns and the parts are not too complex to assemble. The sketcher is powered by a battery and a rotating motor that mobilize the machine. It is similar to the technology we see in a toy car, so that was not the first time we were using that technology.

The process is perhaps the most enjoyable moment because we had a lot of fun when we were trying to assemble different parts together. At one point, the machine was out of control and fell off the table because it was unstable yet. During the process, the sketcher generated artistic circles on the paper and also the table, which we have to clean it up later.

In the end, we ran the machine and drew a few circles with it before it was stuck by the uneven platform. We learned valuable lesson on how to construct and assemble different parts into a working machine, which was not taught in a conventional classroom. If given more time, I would like to also join the team who was working on the LegoLand, so I can build my own town too.

The state-of-art sketcher and a masterpiece created by it

Chapter 1

I like the unlimited possibilities that 3D printing technology can bring in the future. This chapter illustrates the potential of this new technology, including food fabricating, self-construction, duplicating organs as well as robots manufacturing. Of course, most of the contents are fiction and probably will never be realized. On the other hand, as a fan of dark fantasy, this 3D printing technology could also very well be the source of catastrophic power if it ended up in the wrong hand.

“A few of the roaming robots, however, seemed to have mastered a few unauthorized and slightly more colorful bits of wisdom.” (pg 4)

The ability of the printing machine to mass-produce robots reminded of the animated film ‘9’. The printing machine or fabricating machine was abused by a dictator to create an army of war machine to destroy his enemies. At the end, the machine went wrong and turned against humans, causing all lives to perish.

Chapter 2

This chapter basically describes how 3D printing works and its benefits. In short, we feed in data via computer to the printer and then the printer will do the work.

“The secret to 3D printing could be summed up as follows: 3D printers are
more accurate and versatile than any other mode of production—be it a human
or machine—at fabricating a complex design into a physical object, combining
raw materials in ways that were once impossible.” (pg 13)

The technology itself is very promising but it was too expensive and there were many limitations back then. This is very similar to the history of computer, when it used to be gigantic and occupied space up to a room with much less computational power. It will be extremely hard to predict whether 3D printing will follow the success of computer or  it is another  commercial flop.

Chapter 3

“3D printing is the platypus of the manufacturing world, combining the digital precision and repeatability of a factory floor with an artisan’s design freedom.” (pg 27)

This chapter tells us how 3D printing can overcome the issue of customization and mass-production.  That is because the cost of printing 1000 unique objects or identical objects are the same. There is no cost of customization, unlike traditional manufacturing method.

One obstacle to this technology is that it is fairly new to public and only a fraction of the consumers know how to utilize the 3D printing system, which requires some programming skills.

Chapter 4

Cloud manufacturing

By combining 3D printing technology with the cloud technology, everyone with internet access can share, edit and print out any products.

“Today, an estimated 60 percent of the world’s population owns a cell phone.
Each phone is physically tiny, when it stands alone. However, when billions
of cell phones all over the world are woven together into a distributed global
network, the combined effect is a disruptive, powerful, and gigantic system.” (pg 46)

I could imagine that when 3D printing has become a common practice, there will be 3D printers easily accessed anywhere. We can link our phone with the 3D printer via USB or WiFi and print out anything that is needed just like having a magic wand in a fairy tale. Maybe there will be a portable 3D printer in the future, or the printer is integrated into a smartphone and etc…