What happened to the 3D Printing Revolution?
A retrospective on the 3D printing boom during the early part of the decade and where it is today.
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Let’s take it back to 2009, back when the media were reporting about how everyone would own a 3D printer, how we could “make” anything and that we would soon be printing usable human organs for transplant use. New 3D printing companies were launching on Kickstarter and Indiegogo at at exponential rate. It seemed like 3D printing was on the verge of becoming mainstream
Today, more than 90% of these 3D printing companies are bankrupt. Media reports about 3D printing developments and new startups are infrequent and tempered. The companies or projects launching today are likely to be deep tech start-ups with close ties to academia and the industrial established players. Not a consumer facing company.
So what happened to the 3D printing revolution? How did so much hype, billions of investments and hundreds of companies just seem to disappear? Lets take a look back at how this revolution got started, what happened along the way and where 3D printing is today.
Seeds of the Revolution
On October 2009, Bre Pettis stepped onto the stage at Ignite NYC and “officially” launched the 3D printing revolution.
“We made a machine that prints 3D objects and its awesome!”
Before that, Makers, Tinkerers and Hackers had been grinding away with a variety of subtractive manufacturing machines (lathes, milling machines and laser cutters) in their garages. While these technologies were well established and effective in their own right, they had their limitations. These came in the form of speed, upfront cost, design constraints and ease of use to name a few. That was the gap that 3D Printing (at that time) was trying to fill. While there are many technological variants of 3D Printing, the general concept of 3D printing had existed for a long time, (the first 3D printing patent was filed in 1984) but they had been mainly the domain of multi-billion dollar companies like 3D Systems and Stratasys.
Pettis’ vision was something different. His was more akin to the Star Trek Replicator, which is also the the name of his company, MakerBot’s first product. His dream was a machine in every home that would allow anyone to print anything they needed (eventually). So when he presented his little “wooden box with wires” on stage that October, he had made it somewhat a reality. The MakerBot was to cost somewhere in the range of $1000 which made it extremely affordable and accesible to mainstream consumers compared to other home manufacturing technologies available. Add to it the fact that it was built on an open-source and “highly hackable” ethos, the community could retrofit off-the-shelf parts to improve the printer or remove parts they did not want, bringing together people within the company and the people outside. This made the space even more appealing. Soon, billions of dollars of investments poured into the industry resulting in the hatching of hundreds of 3D printer startups, research labs and cross industry “collaborations”.
There was so much promise. But just like every major technology that ascended to the Peak of Inflated Expectations (see Gartner hype cycle), 3D Printing made its rapid descent into the trough of disillusionment. Within just 4–5 years, things were looking bad. Kickstarter campaigns were failing to deliver their machines to consumers. Those that did deliver failed to function properly or were drowned in consumers looking for guidance on how to use the machines. People got bored with printing trinkets and industry partnerships amounted to millions of wasted dollars. Even the star wunderkid, Pettis, was replaced as the CEO of MakerBot.
Today, none of my friends own a 3D Printer. Those who got interested in the field at that time, treat it like a distant memory. The media is tempered in its reporting of 3D Printing related news. So how did 3D Printing go from “The Next Big Thing” to a distant memory in consumers minds so fast? Is 3D Printing Dead?
The answer is a definite No.
So What Happened?
Just like every other revolutionary technology that came before it, 3D Printing was not ready for primetime when it was launched into the consumer consciousness. At the peak, companies were promising what they believed to be 3D Printers for the consumer market. They promised, ease-of-use, plug-and-play functionality and little tinkering required to get things going, at lower and lower prices. As simple as buying a new microwave. Just bring it back home, press a couple buttons and you’ll get it working smoothly, 24/7 365 days of the year. You could find pre-assembled machines for as low as $100. I even managed to purchase a Chinese Printer on Indiegogo for $49.
Alas those were but pipedreams and promises that none of them managed to deliver at the time.
The Technology Constraints
The fundamental flaw of 3D Printing in the early 2010s, especially at the price point companies were trying to deliver at, was its stage of technological development. While 3D printers are not the most complicated machines, they still contain a large number of moving parts that over time, wear out or break. To get to that price point, a lot of quality was compromised. Minimal precision parts were used and companies often sourced for the cheapest parts they could find. Some of the printers, even if delivered, never could get up and running.
These machines were also meant to build 3D objects of certain defined dimensions. This meant that calibration of the machine was fundamental to achieving good results. While a variety of sensors and calibration methods existed on the market at that time, they were not designed for 3D Printers, especially such low cost ones. Hence to keep costs low, these printers moved the burden of calibration to the users, making things even more complicated. So even if you did get a machine running, you had to spend hours or days calibrating it. Even with that, you were almost guaranteed to have problems pop up every couple days or weeks. Imagine if you were trying to print a circle and it came out an oval or if your printer head keeps colliding into the printer bed once a week. It was all too time consuming and frustrating.
Once you target the consumer market, there is a minimum level of usability that is expected. Even for makers like myself, the amount of work you had to put in was substantial and you could understand why many consumers gave up. No one buys a toaster and expects to fix the toaster door every couple of days. Building the best or cheapest 3D Printer isn’t enough if it doesn’t meet a reasonable level of simplicity and usability. At that time it was more IKEA’s SVÄRTA and less iPhone.
At the prices the printers were being sold at, the quality of parts the printers produced were inconsistent and sometimes downright dreadful. The lack of quality calibration and the dependence on the user to setup the printer further aggravated such issues. Seeing poor quality parts as their first experience with 3D printing turned a lot of consumers off. It made them feel that the 3D printing was just another case of false promises.
The Content
In the early part of the decade, even if you had a fully functioning, “nespresso-like” 3D printer, it would probably have been left to become a dust magnet after a year. There’s only so many trinkets, characters models and other non-essentials that you would want to print out from the 3D model libraries (e.g thingiverse, grabCAD etc). At some point you’re gonna want to print out an idea that you had in your head. And you’re not gonna be able to do that if you can’t do computer-aided design (CAD). Sure you could outsource that as well, but that’s half the joy of 3D printing, creating your ideas and manufacturing it. Else, it’ll be like buying a wood-fired oven to make frozen pizza.
While CAD isnt something that is super complex, there was a certain amount of persistance and discipline required to get the hang of it. To design these 3D models, you also had to install additional software like TinkerCAD (now defunct) and Fusion360. All of which adds to more friction to the user experience.
The Education
Probably one of the most important reasons you should think about before getting a 3D printer is why you wanted it. Most consumers just bought it as they were enthralled by the prospect of printing whatever they wanted whenever they needed. But is just the wrong way to think about it and would probably result in you finding 3D printing to be a highly inefficient process. At its level of development at that point in time, there were only some circumstances where 3D printing something is the best decision versus producing it through a subtractive method via outsourcing or even just buying the part you want.
Most of the mainstream consumers who bought the machines also had no knowledge of why 3D printing should be used to produce their designs and not another technology which meant they could not fully appreciate the value-add of the 3D printing.
So Where is 3D Printing now?
Despite the lengthy orbituary about the state of 3D printing after its first hype cycle, 3D printing is far from dead. In fact you could say that its more alive then its ever been. The only thing that different this time is that its growth has been happening behind the scenes, out of the sight of mainstream consumers. Majority of it is also at the higher end at at enterprise scale. 3D printing today is thriving mainly in 3 segments, Education, Manufacturing/Engineering and Research.
Education
Today 3D printing plays a big role in the education market. In this market, 3D printing can play several roles: (1) to teach students and educators about 3D printing itself; (2) as a support technology during teaching where 3D printing is used to learn about other subjects; (3) to produce artefacts that aid learning e.g: mechanisms, prosthodontic models, macromolecular structures etc; (4) to create assistive technologies in special education settings. The ability of a 3D printer to produce something quickly and to a custom design is a huge advantage for teachers who wish to explain concepts using specific models or structures. Teachers today are using 3D printers and their products to explain concepts like bouyancy, printing boats with different shapes of hulls and placing them in buckets of water, molecular structure for chemistry and shark teeth for paleontology.
An increasing number of educational institutions are implementing 3D Printing into their curriculum. Higher education institutions are where the technology is most prevalent but already 23% of primary schools surveyes in 2017 had implemented 3D printing. Its just an essential part of tinkering and ‘making’ today.
The other aspect of 3D printing in education is also the certification. As more companies start adopting additive manufacturing technologies, demand for qualified employees should follow. Schools that want to have 3D printing and printers as part of their curriculum also want their staff to be qualified to use the machines. Hence, companies like MakerBot, Stratasys and 3D Systems all have robust certification programs to give professionals, educators and students the skills necessary to adopt the advanced hardware and software that they will be working with.
For the 3D printing companies, working with schools a much narrower scope of work versus selling to millions of demanding consumers. It is also a more familiar and established model, similar to when a school purchases computers or even other existing subtractive manufacturing machinery. They just need to plan a regular servicing schedule, upsell the school on the perishables and just have a certain number of staff on call to deal with unexpected events and breakdowns. this model is mcuh more cost effective and profitable for 3D printing companies. In addition, the certification programs are just such high margin businesses that helps to fund these companies further R&D.
Manufacturing/Engineering
In the Industrials/Engineering space, I have first hand witnessed how 3D Printing has aided and improved the workflows and outcomes. Today, any company doing any sort of hardware or product design and manufacturing will almost certainly have a 3D printer or makes use of some 3D printing services as part of their development workflow. It just makes sense. The quick turn around time and small up-front investment makes it a prime tool for rapid prototyping and to test the feasability of concepts. With the materials and printers available today, the printers are much more capable of producing parts that give a much closer representation to the actual parts that the company might be producing at scale eventually via injection moulding. Companies are also using 3D printing to produce jigs, fixtures and assistive structures that are used temporarily and highly customised for specific tasks. Being one-off or short run parts, a 3D printer comes it really handy as you forgo all the investment or time cost involved with traditional methods of production. This is even more relevant now with the maturity of metal 3D printing technologies.
Companies today are also using 3D printing to make actual end products. These are parts made using 3D printing that actually are or are a part of the final product being sold. The GE fuel nozzles used in their LEAP jet engines is probably the most common example quoted. The value-add to GE was huge. They managed to reduced a 20 piece assembly into a single part. That resulted in a higher performing, more robust part with fewer assembly steps with a part that could only be produced by 3D printing. In 2018, they had already produced more than 30,000 nozzles with each engine using about 19 nozzles. While 30,000 might seem like a fairly small number, the key takeaway is that parts produced from a fairly young technology is already been qualified for use in a critical machinery and you’ve probably been on a plane utilising it. Today, there is a much larger number of examples of 3D printed end products. Relativity space is already using 3D printing as the core of their manufacturing and development process in building their Terran 1 rocket. In BMW’s i8 Roadster, the roof bracket is also 3D printed.
Companies are all working the build up their own 3D printing capabilities or partnering with large players like Stratasys or Carbon3D to come up with new and improved ways to manufacture their products. and even more so udnerstanding what improvements to their design, performance and costs they can achieve without being constrained by traditional manufacturing methods. In this space, 3D printing really thrives as the benefits are extremely clear to the people using it who are more often than not mechanical or hardware engineers. These people know that the technology supercharges their workflows and also allows them to achieve the full potential of their designs and solutions. In addition, even 3D printing companies working with these manufacturing/engineering companies also have a less difficult time as their end users are engineering professionals who can quickly pickup how to use the printers and also probably know how to resolve minor issues on thier own.
Research
3D printing is a hugely popular subject of research but 3D printing also plays a role in advancing the creativity and capabilities of research into other fields as 3D printing is used as a technology platform achieve their goals. This use of 3D printing in other fields is helps to push 3D printing technologies forrwards as the requirements and goals of the researchers require technologies that have yet to be developed and hence, the entire field is pushed to new frontiers.
Take the exciting medical field where 3D printing is used as a platform to advance developments in the field from traditional medical devices to on-demand transplant organs. For example, with 3D printing, researchers have been able to design and create thousands of custom prosthetics for children. A group of researchers, in their goal to create medical appliances that can kill bacteria on contact, utilised stereolithography (SLA), to develop the first 3D printable resins with antimicrobial properties. These resins can then be used to produce medical devices and implants that remain bacteria free. The researchers achieved their research goal and 3D printing was also advanced with the development of new technologies and materials.
Or look at a company like Azul 3D, in their goal to achieve faster product manufacturing speeds, is now looking to commercialise their HARP (high area rapid printing) technology. This involves a shining a loop of video only a spinning glass holding liquid resin. This results in a final object that solidifies in seconds. No more of that slow layer by layer printing that we get from FDM, FFF, SLA and SLM.
In the field of robotics, 3D printing is used significantly in the research for soft sensors and actuators. The technology allows researchers in the field to create custom, geometrical, functional and control properties to avoid the tedious and time consuming aspects of traditional fabrication processes.
Looking Forward
While the field is still far from Bre Pettis’ early vision of bringing mass manufacturing into every home, developments and investments are still proceeding at a rapid pace. In the first quarter of 2019 alone, there were multiple major funding announcements including Desktop Metal ($160 million), Markforged ($82 million) and 3D Hubs ($18 million). For now, these printers are too expensive and complex to appeal to non-specialists or people not in the specific fields. On the consumer front, there are still companies like Prusa Research and Ultimaker fighting the good fight and improving the UX for mainstream consumers. But they are still fairly small and have been increasingly targetting the lower end of the enterprise market as they look for a more reliable stream of income.
Regardless, 3D printing will slowly but surely start eating into manufacturing and the development of more end products that gets into consumer’s hands. You probably just won’t know that it was 3D printed. That that will be the time when you know 3D printing has actually arrived. For all of these people who once held the dream of universal 3D printing, that dream still exists.
It’s just taking a lot longer than everyone thought.
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