er than any other means of production
that humanity currently has.”
new Design frontiers
In addition to enabling people to manu-
facture objects they never could before,
3D printers could lead to radically new
designs that are not possible with tra-
ditional fabrication techniques. “Your
first instinct when you have one of these
machines is that instead of making
something in the machine shop, you are
just going to print it,” says Lipson. “But
at some point you realize you can make
new things with complicated geometry
that you cannot make any other way.
You don’t have to stick to straight edges
and flat surfaces that can be easily ma-
chined or thin walls that can be injec-
tion molded. You can make absolutely
any shape that you want.”
For instance, Lipson’s team has ex-
perimented with printing objects with
both hard and soft materials. When the
materials are printed at a random 50%-
50% ratio, the results are ordinary. How-
ever, when the dots of hard and soft ma-
terial are printed in special patterns, the
material, when stretched like an elastic,
actually gets thicker.
Indeed, one of Lipson’s favorite 3D
printer materials is Play-Doh. He recently used it to create miniature copies
of the U.S. space shuttle during a school
visit as part of the Fab@School project,
led by himself and Glen Bull, a professor
of instructional technology at the Uni-versityofVirginia.Th e Fab@School’s
goal is to use 3D printers to show K– 12
students the combined power of math,
science, and engineering. The MacArthur Foundation and Motorola have
awarded $435,000 to the Fab@School
group to develop curriculum, build more
3D printers, and expand the project.
a Larger ink Palette
Although Play-Doh and other squishy
substances can be used in 3D printers,
melted plastic remains the primary
material. Other desirable materials, including various metals and ceramics,
are more challenging to use. Progress
has been made in printing with metal,
but more experimentation is needed to
make the process easier and overcome
fundamental properties in the materials like melting point and viscosity.
For Lipson’s Fab@Home project, the
ultimate goal is to design a robot that
can walk out of the printer. Before that
can happen, “inks” for batteries, actuators, wires, transistors, and numerous
other pieces must be developed. However, Lipson’s lab has already developed
an actuator that operates with low voltage and a printable battery.
Adrian Bowyer at the University of
Bath has had success making a printable conductor that melts at a lower
temperature than the plastic does. Due
to the temperature difference, the 3D
printer can manufacture plastic channels that do not melt when filled with
the hot conductor for wires or other
electrical circuitry.
“At the moment the way we manufacture goods is from economies of
news
scale,” says Bowyer. “It is more efficient
to make lots of one thing in one place
and that’s how conventional industry
works all over the world. But there are
many things we used to do that way that
we don’t do anymore. For instance, I’m
old enough to remember my parents
getting personalized letterhead printed
at a local printer, whereas now we have
computer printers. Imagine the idea of
a whole industry disappearing, and everybody making what they want in their
own home. That would be a pretty profound economic change.”
Further Reading
Bradshaw, S., Bowyer, A., and Haufe, P.
The intellectual property implications of
low-cost 3D printing. SCRIPTed 7, 1, April
2010.
Hiller, J. and Lipson, H.
Design and analysis of digital materials
for physical 3D voxel printing. Rapid
Prototyping Journal 15, 2, 2009.
Malone, E. and Lipson, H.
Fab@home: the personal desktop fabricator
kit. Rapid Prototyping Journal 13, 4, 2007.
Sells, E., Smith, Z., Bailard, S., Bowyer, A., and
Olliver, V.
RepRap: the replicating rapid prototype:
maximizing customizability by breeding the
means of production. Handbook of Research
in Mass Customization and Personalization,
Piller, F. T. and Tseng, M.M. (Eds.), World
Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore,
2009.
Graeme Stemp-Morlock is a science writer based in
elora, ontario, canada.
© 2010 acM 0001-0782/10/1000 $10.00
Crowdsourcing
Foldit Research Paper’s 57,000+ Co-authors
Since May 2008, tens of
thousands of Foldit video
game players have competed
online against each other,
and a computer program, in
figuring out how 10 different
proteins fold into their three-dimensional configurations. in
the end, the players managed
to outperform the computer
program—and are cited as co-authors on the resulting paper,
which was published in Nature.
while scientists understand
the general process of how the
primary structure of a protein
is transformed into a three-
dimensional structure, the
method of using statistical and
related software algorithms to
predict protein structures is
computationally demanding.
“if you were blindfolded and
all you’re doing is picking pieces
at random, that’s more or less
what the computer is doing,”
says Zoran Popovíc, an associate
professor of computer science
at the University of washington.
“the computational methods
are eating up huge amounts of
resources.”
Foldit’s top scores are
posted online, allowing
the players, who compete
individually or in groups, to
compare their scores. in the
10 separate protein-folding
puzzles, the players matched
the results of the computer-
generated solutions in three
of the puzzles, outscored them
in five puzzles, and created
significantly better solutions in
two puzzles, according to the
scientists.
author list in appreciation of
the more than 57,000 players’
contributions “through their
feedback and gameplay.”
Such extensive author lists
will soon become commonplace
given the increasing online
collaboration between citizen
volunteers and scientists, says
Popovíc, who plans to establish
a center for Game Science at the
University of washington this
fall, and will work on problems
that can be solved with the
symbiosis of human volunteers
and computers.
—Phil Scott