The Macro & Micro of 3D-Printing

I noticed two articles today that are kind of linked in my mind. The first article if from inhabitat (“3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock“) is about what is basically a rapid prototyping machine for large stuff, like sculptures or possibly even buildings. This 3D Printer is built by Enrico Dini and basically  uses a print head moving about on what boils down to a scaled up version of a rep-rap style gantry system to precisely spray a magnesium glue over a sand substrate to essentially create rock. When I saw this I immediately began thinking about how a comprehensive pattern language for buildings, design software and A.I., and a building scale scaffolding/gantry system could lead to automated building construction. Assemble your scaffolding over the site, much like the protective scaffolding systems used to protect houses during re-roofing, add on the required print-heads, I am also considering a head for blown insulation to fill cavities purposefully left in exterior and selected interior walls, then just let the system run for 24 hours a day. There are other things to consider, like electrics and plumbing, but I wonder to what degree routing spaces could be left by the construction head, or whether a separate head could be developed to lay cabling and flexible piping and hosing from various reels. Maybe this is quite different to the way that we currently build houses in the U.K. but it is not so far fetched to imagine that there are different way to do so which are just as good as the current approach.

Considering this lead me to another article about researchers at M.I.T. who are developing self assembling computer chips (described in this Nature paper: doi:10.1038/nnano.2010.30). This is the important next step that we need at the other end of the 3D printing scale, from the macro-scale of constructing buildings to the micro-scale of constructing small electrical devices. Rapid-prototyping systems still need people to create the electronics to fit into the shells created by the printer. For a few years we have been pinning our hopes on the idea of printers that lay down conductive paths to form electrical circuits but we still needed the integrated circuits that the conductive paths joined, now we have an approach that might lead to hardware that can create the fully integrated electrical device, shell + circuit + Chips & I.C.

It looks like the future might be more of the same in some respects – everything gets automated. For the moment though, even with intelligent software to help manage the complexity of the task, we still need people to design the aesthetic aspects of products, whether they be houses or the next generation of MP3 player.