:talkingfuture.com Come and learn about the future…

Martin: A few months ago I noticed that I hardly ever use my home printer anymore. At work I do a lot of printing, but at home I do practically none. All my photos are stored digitally and everything is so accessible that I rarely need to carry information with me in physical form. Printers are still one of the bulkiest items of hardware to find room for on your desk, so what are they going to do to earn their keep?

I have found a couple of suggestions, 3d printing and something called social printing. Lets start by talking about social printing. This is an idea that started in a blog post by Matt Webb. He talks about a social letterbox, which essentially sounds much like a fax machine for emails. But there is so much more to it. For example, I could send you some photos as prints rather than email attachments. Now this sounds a little pointless to be honest, you’ll print them if you want to. Taking it a bit further though, what if I could email a few people to tell them I was looking for a new car. They could add suggestions and ideas about what to buy and where to get a good deal by email and I could sift through the emails. Or, they could add them to an online document that automatically prints so that when I get home I have a simple, organized and easy to read document summarizing everyone’s thoughts and suggestions. This could extend to all kinds of areas from purchase decisions to holiday activities.

Would you find this idea useful? Would you rather have a load of emails or a crisp piece of paper?

Thomas: What a truly bizarre idea! I can’t think of a case where ’social printing’ would ever be of any use whatsoever! In short, I’ll take the stack of emails. Why? Because I like to choose which of my emails I read, I like to choose what photo’s I want printing. Just because my Mum thinks it’s an adorable picture doesn’t mean I need a printed copy! The problem is you would be delegating control over what you want to read to the people who want you to read it, and I think I’m happier when that decision is in my hands. I can see how this idea might have looked good in theory, in a world where paper grows on trees, ink comes out of a tap and everything is recycled and carbon negative. It’d be nice to come home from work and have a couple of family photo’s from the weekend and an interesting article on the new Jaguar concept car to flick though, but I can do this already with email, and I get the option to delete what I don’t need for a cost of almost zero resources.

So, as you can see I’m a huge fan of the idea and I’ll be letting you know just as soon as I’ve hooked up my social letterbox. 3D printing sounds more promising, how does that work?

Martin: I get the impression that you’re not a fan of the social printer then. I have to say I’m sitting on the fence on this idea. On the one hand I like the basic idea, on the other I wonder why it can’t be done in software by email and pdf’s.

Moving on to 3d printers. Industrial designers working for companies that can afford them have been printing models of prototypes for years. Many companies are trying to get the costs down so that more people can buy them. The basic idea is to take a 3d CAD model of a part and then “print” it out in 3d. This usually involves using a laser to cure resin in layers to make up a 3d part or spraying an air curing resin in layers. The part is simply split into thin layers along the z axis and produced one layer at a time.

Some organisations, such as Fab@home want to make 3d printers that are accessible to the home consumer. One of their aims is to make the printer itself from parts it could fabricate. Then it is able to self replicate, reducing costs further. A possible application the home “Fabber” would be to allow you to buy a product, download the 3d model and print it out yourself. The only limit would be the size of the part and the materials used. I imagine it could be used to make many consumer products, perhaps a mug or a case for your iPhone. There are many things you couldn’t make but there are plenty that you could.

As an engineer I would love one to own one of these, both for making prototypes and printing consumer products. I think they could put the consumer back in touch with the manufacturing process. How would you feel about making your own torch, for example?

Thomas: This sounds a bit more useful! I’d especially like to see one with the capability to self replicate, who know where that could lead! On the downside, though, most of the models you like to look like they’re just printing with cake icing. I know it’s early in the world of 3D printing but it just doesn’t look like it has the precision to do anything useful just yet.

It’s going to be a long time before we see the 3D printer popping up in peoples homes, but I do see a place for it in industry, it’d be great for rapid prototyping. I can also imagine a mail order service, where you can email your drawing off and the day after the postman delivers whatever part it was you wanted. That could get around the initial high costs of the technology.

I can only begin to imagine the endless possibilities if one of these was hooked up to my ’social letterbox’. Cross the list of spam I get with something that prints in 3D and you could end up blind in both eyes!

Martin: That last statement has given me a mental image that’s going to take a lot Bruichladdich to shift!

3d printing certainly isn’t there yet but it has a lot of potential for the future. To close this article I’d like to mention something I read a couple of weeks ago about Blackwells book shops introducing a facility to print books in their shops on an ATM like machine. Surely, it would make sense to offer a service like this through the web. I’d happily read the next Malcolm Gladwell on a few hundred sheets of A4 stapled together if I could choose to print it myself (and save a little bit of cash on the cover price).