Category: Uncategorized
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3D Printing People Power: meet Warren&Laetitia
In his 2015 book “The Zero Marginal Cost Society” Jeremy Rifkin includes 3D printing in a list of technologies that have the potential of transforming the economy beyond the “Industry 4.0” revolution. This transformation aims to create a system of distributed value creation based on our ability to create sustaiunable networks that reduce marginal cost…
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Camille, an algorithm to “compost” plastic with 3DPrinting
Haraway describes String Figures as stories that propose patterns for participants to inhabit. To a certain degree, 3DPrinting works in the same way. The most common 3DPrinting processes extrude a string of plastic and place it layer by layer with the help of a computer to build something. 3DPrinting uses this technique in such a…
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Topographic optimization for 3DPrinting
Despite being the most cited benefit of 3DPrinting, the implementation of complexity freedom is not an easy or straight-forward process. Results from two studies that form part of the PhD research project that gave birth to this blog cannot support the hypothesis that complexity freedom is influential in the conceptualization of products for 3DPrinting. The…
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Speculative design: 3Dprinting and the anthropocene
Most of the posts of this blog address different strategies to exploit complexity freedom, the capability of 3DPrinting to fabricate complex features in products without increasing the cost of production. This complexity freedom gives entrepreneurs the ability to merge the design and manufacturing processes and create new avenues for experimentation. However, there are more ways…
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Entrepreneuring with 3DPrinted tooling
The creation of a firm is a phenomenon that blends characteristics of two other bigger phenomena: the creation of organizations, and technological change. An entrepreneurial venture is a new organization that introduces new products, means, processes, or economic activities to a marketplace. Accordingly, an entrepreneurial venture entails the introduction of novelty to at least the…
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3D printed economics for climate change
I first found out about global warming writing a high-school project in 2002. The Intergvernmental Panel for Climate Change made clear since 1992 that the consequences of climate change would be global. Yet, 27 years later, the creation of global countermeasures is still the greatest challenge we face. Governments discuss complex carbon taxes and industrial…
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Data objects?
The main theme of this blog is the relationship that product architectures (the way components relate to each other within a product) have with the way we build organizations, businesses, etc. We have argued in other posts, that this “product architecture” influences the way teams are assembled in the design and fabrication of the final…
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Results from Design for Additive Manufacturing
A month ago we wrote an entry that showed an exercise to incorporate greater complexity into 3D printed products. The article makes a short review of the role of complexity in product architecture and how it influences our manufacturing costs and the way we build businesses around a product. Then, we continued to explain how the…
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Connecting complex components with Design for additive manufacturing: an example…
If you have already read some of the posts in this blog, you can tell that one of the main topics of this research project is the relationship between the product architecture and 3D printing. I refer here to product architecture as the product’s internal collection of components and relationships between them. Product architecture has…
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Freedom to fabricate … but what?
Today is rare to find someone who does not know what a 3D printer is. The popularity of this technology boomed in 2009 when the first FDM patents expired. Despite being a technology almost 30 years old, it remained a process for industrial prototyping until the expiration of the patents allowed open-sourced manufacturers to create…
The Firm & The Product 