Oh my word…  I found this photo on Facebook this morning. The Lego shoes were worn to the White House MakerFaire by the director of an organization for children’s librarians whose enviable real name—no joke—is Starr LaTronica. 

One of the first stories I wrote about energy focused on distributed generation where I learned that not only was small, modular, flexible, scalable and inexpensive the right answer for energy grids, it was the right answer almost no matter what the question. It works equally well for food systems, urban planning, transportation schemes and social networks.. Yet for all the modular genius of Lego, before today I hadn’t considered its potential for shoes. Okay, the Legos are surface decoration, but then they start behaving like Legos with little characters taking up residence. The shoe as coral reef. 

•••••••••••••
As a rule of thumb, the smaller the module the more flexibility it offers. The ultimate module, of course, is a molecule. It turns out that carbon, a molecule that makes life as we know it possible and one that we’ve sliced and diced for decades, has, like Legos, managed to hide potential in plain sight in the form of its skinniest version, graphene. If you take a pencil, make a mark on a piece of paper, then take tape and lift off a layer of graphite, then tape the tape to another piece of tape to peel off another layer and repeat four or five times, you get graphene. 
 
…Just for starters, graphene is the thinnest, strongest, and stiffest material in the world; it conducts heat faster than any other known material; it can carry more electricity, faster and with less resistance, than any other material; it allows Klein tunneling, an exotic quantum effect in which electrons within the material can tunnel through barriers as if they were not there. All this means that the material has the potential to be an electronic powerhouse, possibly replacing silicon chips at the heart of all computation and communication. Its extreme thinness, transparency, strength, and electronic properties mean also that it may end up being the material of choice for touch interfaces of the future, not just the touch screens we are used to but perhaps bringing touch sensitivity to whole objects and even buildings. But its most intriguing claim to fame is that it is a two-dimensional material. This doesn’t mean it has no thickness, but rather that it cannot be made any thicker or thinner and be the same material. This is what Andre’s team showed: add an extra layer of carbon to graphene and it goes back to being graphite, take a layer away and the material does not exist at all…
 
— Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters

A two dimensional material? Whoa… The discovery of graphene set off a hunt for what other magic could be found in the itty bitty and the discovery of carbon nanotubes.  Miodownik’s book came out this month. The following news story came out just the other day: Move over, silicon, there’s a new circuit in town. By creating a sort of yin/yang mash up of carbon nanotubes and something called IGZO thin films, researchers at USC were able to create a game-changing hybrid circuit.
 
The potential applications for this kind of integrated circuitry are numerous, including Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs), digital circuits, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensors, wearable electronics, and flash memory devices. Even heads-up displays on vehicle dashboards could soon be a reality.
 
The new technology also has major medical implications. Currently, memory used in computers and phones is made with silicon substrates, the surface on which memory chips are built. To obtain medical information from a patient such as heart rate or brainwave data, stiff electrode objects are placed on several fixed locations on the patient’s body. With this new hybridized circuit, however, electrodes could be placed all over the patient’s body with just a single large but flexible object…
 
"…The possibilities are endless, as digital circuits can be used in any electronics," Chen said. "One day we’ll be able to print these circuits as easily as newspapers."

Hours of fun! Now the race is on to print electronics. Closer to home, a team at Northwestern has come up with pretty nifty solution to make graphene ink: High-quality inkjet-printed graphene circuits: One step closer to foldable computers.
 
With so much is going on in the field, there are trade shows. The big one in the US is in Silicon Valley this fall: Printed Electronics USA 2014. Note the “co-located events” on Wearable Technology, 3D Printing, Graphene & 2D Materials and Energy Harvesting Storage. This is the kind of conference that needs to start happening more in Chicago as the city grows as a digital manufacturing research hub. This is cross-sector, cross-disciplinary, paradigm-shifting innovation. 
 
Despite visions of Jeff Bezos hawking Amazon clothes wired to ring up  sales for Kleenex the instant a sneeze is sensed, the possibilities are pretty wondrous (Really, who needs a snoopy phone when you can dress your customer for 24/7 consuming? Think of the data collection…).
 
Extra points for figuring out how to wire Ms. LaTronica’s shoes…
 
— J.A. Ginsburg 

A two-fer good thing! Planning on purchasing a physical copy of Stuff Matters and want to support a fabulous new indie bookstore?  Check out Bookends and Beginnings in the old Bookman’s Alley space in Evanston—literally in an alley off Sherman Avenue (very Harry Potterish in terms of unexpected charm). This is a book store the way book stores used to—and really ought—to be. 

"We are at one of those huge inflection points in the industry. It’s funny—for some time everybody was thinking it is was mobile or maybe it’s wearables, but actually it’s way way bigger than that…There is the whole thread of  the Maker movement—people just getting interested in the hardware, figuring out how to make stuff. And then at some point it tips over from something that people are doing in their spare time that’s cool, just for fun, and turns into ‘Whoa, that’s the next big thing.’" 

— Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media

Welcome to the latest industrial revolution: software meet hardware. It is a full out paradigm shift with big time global economic implications rooted in play, driven by informal self-organizing networks, inspired by art and powered by math. It is the poster child for STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art and math—made possible, at least in part, by kids more interested in bragging rights for clever hacks than in grades. They didn’t set out to change the world or rewrite textbooks. They just did. 

O’Reilly’s Solid Conference, Maker Faire’s new more serious sibling, brought a crowd of hardware bootstrappers, software developers and industry players to San Francisco last week to show off new tech and talk about what’s next. The possibilities more than a bit mind-blowing: Materials infused with information. Mashups with synthetic biology. Machines chatting with machines. And, yes, replicating the Star Trek replicator. 

Several dozen videos of keynotes, interviews and primers are available on Youtube.It is worth surfing through the entire playlist, but these are some I found of particular interest: 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

BY THE NUMBERS

"It is getting progressively easier to go from a drawing on a napkin to a product on a shelf,"notes Renee DiResta of O’Reilly’s AlphaTech Ventures:

• By 2016, enterprise-quality 3D printers will be available for under $2,000 
• Arduinos and other cheap ready-to-use electronics platforms have vastly reduced the costs of functional prototyping
• Crowdfunding has made it easier to develop prototypes and demonstrate proof-of-concept, in turn making it easier for hardware startups to find VC funding
• Manufacturing costs are coming down due to competition between offshoring, reshoring, near shoring and "botsourcing" 
• Accelerator and incubator programs for hardware developers have started to sprout up

The shift from Do It Yourself to Do It With Others is another significant trend, demonstrated by the explosive growth in community hackerspaces over the last 10 years. According to DiResto, there are over 1,500 such spaces in over 100 countries, increasing at a rate of 200 per year. About a third are in the US. There is a correlation between the number of hackerspaces and digital manufacturing startups. California leads the pack with nearly 90, which helps reinforce the kind of critical mass of talent attractive to large companies such as GE that are interested developing their own internal digital manufacturing hubs.

Beyond hackerspaces, there has also been an upsurge in online groups and off-line meet ups for hardware entrepreneurs. This is certainly something I have seen here Chicago where grassroots networks have gained impressive momentum over the last couple of years. Catalyze, the city’s first hardware co-working space, opened in February and almost immediately had to double in size to accommodate all the pent up demand. 

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THE THIRD DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s The Center for Bits and Atoms, is perhaps most widely known for his work developing Fab Labs: community workshops kitted out with open source software and off-the-shelf 3D printers, laser cutters and other tools designed as a ”technical prototyping platform for innovation and invention, providing stimulus for local entrepreneurship.” In short, a kind of startup for starting startups. Gershenfeld has also worked on machines able to build parts that could be assembled to build a copy of the parent machine. Now he has taken the same idea to the micro level, biomimicking ribosomes, the protein-making proteins found every cell, by finding ways to digitize information within materials. 

"…From molecules up to mountains, the insight is we’re finding that by discreetly assembling reversibly joined materials, you can get to these wild regimes you can’t get to with any other kind of fabrication process because the information is in the materials, not in the computer…

…This is developing structures where there is no machine, where the material itself is shape-changing…

…The end result is the Star Trek replicator. The Star Trek replicator isn’t a 3D printer. That’s a piece of plastic or maybe metal. The Star Trek replicator is coding the construction of functional materials from micro-scale on up “ 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

THE FUTURE OF HOW THINGS ARE MADE

In his grand arcing overview of where things are headed, Carl Bass, CEO ofAutodesk, makes three points especially worth noting:

• Shape complexity is now free, meaning that is possible for anyone with minimal skills to design almost anything on a computer and print it out.
• Infinite computing is now so cheap, it is close to free, meaning that design can now be objectives-based with computers tasked with sorting through countless combinations to present designers with the best options from which to work. 
• Synthetic biology offers tremendous opportunities for manufacturing

Where Gershenfeld speaks metaphorically of modeling ribosomes, Bass is interested in efforts to literally print DNA, use DNA’s properties of self-assembly to create nano-robots, and even print out bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria), expanding the Autodesk software suite into the medical field. 

"They were able to boot up a virus from a text file. They specified the DNA sequences, they made a bacteriophage, they injected it into e.coli and it attacked the e.coli… There was no breakthrough in science in doing this. Another team had done this before. What I found astounding about it is that  what it took in order to do that was a smart guy like Andrew, but 14 days and a mail order account to order DNA and a $1000. The age of synthetic biology for manufacturing things is right in front of us…

…I think the future is that many of the things that we make will actually be manufactured biologically.”

•••••••••••••••••••••••

THE INTERNET AS MATERIAL

Ayeh Bdeir, founder and CEO of littleBits, an open source library of modular electronics, also sees big potential in small things. 

"Part of the problem with all the technology, particularly in hardware, sitting in the hands of experts and of companies is they’re going to guess what are the needs that you have and there has to be a certain critical mass of these needs for a product to warrant existence"

So she set out to make it easier for non-experts to play and prototype in hardware. 

"Some of society’s most transformative technologies have started in the hands of experts and then someone or something came along, democratized them and made them accessible to everyone and they really had a chance to transform society… 

…How do we democratize hardware? For me there are four principles:

1. Lowering the barrier to understanding 
2. Lowering the barrier to iterating 
3. Making it universal 
4. Raising the ceiling of complexity"

There are dozens of modules in the littleBits library, color-coded for function and designed to pop together with magnets. Don’t let the candy colors fool you. This toy is capable of some serious play. The latest module is internet-enabled making it possible, for example, to hack together a version of the Nest thermostat, the company purchased by Google for $3.2 billion just a few months ago. It is absolutely gobsmacking how quickly a disruptive innovation can itself be disrupted. 

"Can we make the internet a building block? Can it become a building block that is empowering people to invent with the internet the way you would invent with light, with sound, with cardboard, with paper and really make it material?" 

•••••••••••••••••••••••

EVERYWHERE

Of the three words in the Solid conference’s tagline—”Software / Hardware. Everywhere”—it may be the last that is the most game-changing. Software and hardware, bits and atoms, have been circling each other for some time. The technology for RFID tags has been around for over 40 years (re the “internet of cows,” see time code 5:59 in Andra Keay’s talk, "Are Robots the New Black?"). The first human “wearable” was arguably a sensor-soaked, satellite-connected smartphone, capable of tracking our every move. 

Smart—or at least sensor-enhanced—things are everywhere and  spreading fast. By most estimates, the Internet of Things (IoT) club will include at least 50 billion members by 2020. Machines are routinely chatting with other machines (M2M), leaving us largely out of the day-to-day conversation altogether. 

Everywhere also refers to manufacturing. The tools to design and prototype products have become so cheap and accessible that given the talent, anyone can do it, no large company required. Autodesk has actually made its powerful cloud-based 360 software suite free for startups that haven’t made any money yet.

The economics of production are shifting as well. China’s cost-cutting rise to global dominance has come at a steep cost: an environment so trashed that a 2007 World Bank report estimated air and water pollution shaved off nearly 6% of GDP.  The situation has only gotten worse. An estimated one out of every five rivers are now too polluted to be of any use. Climate change has also taken a toll, contributing to a chronic water crisis in a country with 20% of the world’s population and only 7% of its surface freshwater. Predictions of rising sea levels will impact global shipping and ports scramble to adapt.

Fuel costs are another concern, increasingly tipping the scale toward nearshoring (hello Mexico!) and reshoring (made—again—in the USA!). It is a sign of things to come that China’s mega-manufacturer Foxconn is now looking to expand operations in America, in part to simplify supply chain logistics. Notably, Foxconn is also investing heavily in robotics as a way to stabilize or lower labor costs, another trend driving a more globally distributed manufacturing model. 

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SO WHY NOT HERE? 

Despite an evening playing field, some parts of the US are more equal than others when it comes to the new industrial revolution. Having an established tech sector and vibrant Maker culture are definite pluses, which tilt the scales toward the coasts—a reality evident in Solid’s speaker roster. 

But there is a third coast emerging as a player—Chicago—and I hope the team at O’Reilly considers staging the next Solid conference here.

Last February, UI Labs, a public / private / academic consortium made up of nearly 600 organizations, was awarded a $70 million grant from the Department of Defense (DoD) to create a digital lab for manufacturing. Another $250 million has been pledged from private source.

Why the DoD? Manufacturing becomes a national security issue when 40,000 parts contracts fail to attract any bids as happened in 2012. Pentagon bureaucracy no doubt played a role in the lack of manufacturer enthusiasm, but US factories were also not up to task, out of date, unable to ramp up quickly for comparatively small runs. 

UI Labs will open its doors this fall in the city’s Goose Island industrial district and serve as a kind of national lab for manufacturing with an applied research mission. Already it has served to energize and focus the region’s considerable assets which include an estimated 14,000 factories, a deep bench in product design, engineering, architecture and biotech and a range of universities: UIC, IIT, Northwestern, DePaul, Loyola, the School of the Art Institute, the University of Chicago.

At the fringe, though in its way no less important, is a strong and growing community of hardware bootstrappers along with grassroots efforts such asDesignHouse, a nonprofit startup that brings together teams of designers to develop product ideas to match the fabrication capabilities of small to mid-size manufacturers. 

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THEN AND NOW AND NEXT

We were born to make things. In fact, we evolved to make things better.  Toolmaking literally shaped our hands, something Darwin was the first to suspect. It shaped our brains, too. In a sense, it is the 10,000 hour rule writ over millennia, with accelerating change the only constant. It took hundreds of thousands of years to go from crude flints to well-crafted stone tools, but almost everything my kitchen was invented in just the last hundred years. In the last 10 years, smartphones and touchscreen tablets have changed how we learn, collaborate and communicate, providing platforms for tools and products we never knew we needed…until we had them. 

Software/Hardware Everywhere? I can’t wait to see what’s next. 

—J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

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• When China became the world’s workshop, it inherited the world’s air pollution, too  / Heather Smith / Grist

I stared at the small glass bottle in the exhibit case for quite a while. Somehow it had survived millennia. Taken out of the case at the Museo del Vetro—the Museum of Glass—on the Italian island of Murano, its specialness would have been obscured by an utterly unremarkable appearance. Spectacular glasswork is part of the Venetian sparkle, its seductive shimmer. Such a small plain bottle. Who made it? What did it hold? How had it managed to navigate the centuries intact? 

It was late winter and the tourist rush was still off in the distance, so I had the Museum mostly to myself. Murano, too, for that matter. I strolled narrow streets festooned with colorful laundry hung to dry overhead, nibbled on the most delicious cookies from a local bakery, listened to seabirds and felt  the warmth the fast-approaching spring. It was easy to slip back in time—maybe not millennia, but certainly a few centuries into the past—to a time when even the plainest of glass jars was still something to treasure. In a pre-plastic world, glass provided secure, transparent storage. In Italy, of course, form and function are incomplete without beauty. The little bottle was a light translucent lavender. 

Last fall, I made a glass bowl of my own at a workshop given by Chicago’s Ignite Glass Studio (a particularly popular offering through the Chicago Ideas Week festival). Glass, it turns out, is neither a liquid or a solid, but an amorphous solid, which means it has properties of both. The basic recipe is simple—silica (sand), soda ash and lime—but it can be chemically manipulated in the most remarkable ways, adding color, thermal properties and resilience (the newest version of Corning’s Gorilla glass for smartphones and tablets can be bent without breaking). Glass can be molded in a kiln, “floated” on tin sheets to make windows, rolled, spun and even 3D printed. 

Blowing glass, though, has an almost alchemical magic to it. The glassblower literally breathes life into the form by providing a bubble of air and must keep the form alive by constantly spinning a heavy metal rod. What starts as an unpromising molten blob attached at one end slowly transforms into something delicate, translucent, ethereal. It takes brute strength and a delicate touch, neither of which I possess, but my master teacher deftly filled in the gaps. 

The video below is a demonstration from the Corning Glass Museum. Watch  all the way through and you’ll be joining in with the videographer exclaiming early and often, “Wow!”

My little bowl was nowhere near as elaborate, but still fills me with wonder. It turns out it doesn’t matter whether the glass is half-filled or half-empty. The point is there is a glass. 

GLASS AND TECH: FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO SILICON VALLEY

No one material has been at the center of more disruptive innovation than glass. Edison’s lightbulb, the archetypal symbol of innovation, required a glassblower to blow the bulb. 

Centuries earlier, Galileo, who ground his own lenses, pointed his telescope toward the heavens, boldly looked where no one had looked so clearly before, and profoundly altered our view of the cosmos and our place in it. The Space Age had begun. Similarly, microscopes made the invisible visible, leading to new theories of disease and a much deeper understanding of how bodily systems worked. These tools of superhuman sight led to insights that changed the world.

Eyeglasses, which date back as far as 13th century, did not bestow  superhuman powers, but vastly improved countless lives by bringing the day-to-day into focus. Eight centuries later, a project to make affordable glasses in Africa just won a prestigious award from the Siemens Foundation for empowering technologies. A single eyeglass machine carted from village to village by a trained operator can churn out thousands of pairs at a cost of less than one dollar per to manufacture That’s not just life-changing, but potentially society-changing.

Back to the 19th century, Edison’s lightbulb almost literally lit the way for a revolution in electronics that would define much of the 20th century. Vacuum tubes, which made radio, television and sound recording possible, also required glassblowers in their development. Even today, many university and corporate labs have a glassblowing studios on premises to fabricate equipment and components. 

The story of Steve Jobs’ discovery of a failed glass product developed by Corning in the early 1950s is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. In a mind-boggling six weeks, the company manufactured enough of its super-tough Gorilla glass to launch Apple’s first iPhone, ushering in the era of the touchscreen. Tablets and smart phones are just the beginning. Thin bendable glass is the next gadget frontier: 

"…it also means an entire galaxy of new types of gadgets that haven’t even been conceived of yet. Imagine an in-car display that ripples and wraps itself across your dashboard, or some sort of super-charged Magic Eightball that is simply a sphere with a 360-degree display. These gadgets are still a ways off, but the likes of Corning, Apple, Samsung, and LG are skating to where the puck is going. In 20 years, you won’t be able to believe that the world of gadgets was once so boxy.

—John Brownlee / Fast Company Design

SKYLINES AND POWER PLAYS

Modern cities glisten with glass. Buildings soar ever taller, reflecting the sun, the weather, each other. But there is much more to a building’s glass surface than an elegant shimmer. Glass can let in light, add color and provide thermal insulation. Now, with integrated solar panels, a building’s skin can also generate electricity.  

Imagine:  a city full of elegant buildings that double as power plants. Let’s raise a glass to that. From ancient perfume bottles and stargazing telescopes to the lights of Broadway and a clean energy future, glass just seems to have a way of bringing out the best civilization has to offer. 

RELATED: 

• For the Files: Glass, Tech and Civilization bibliography

The “check engine” light is the the most insidious light on a car’s dashboard. Mine began to glow an acid yellow-green during a cold, rainy rush hour last week in bumper to bumper traffic on Chicago’s Western Avenue. “Service car soon,” it admonished in an ominous yet distinctly unhelpful way. I patted the steering wheel reassuringly. “What’s wrong, baby?” I asked, willing my usually reliable gas-guzzling steed to hang on long enough to make it home. 

It was too late to go the dealer that night, which left plenty of time to surf the web and worry. A check engine light can mean anything from a cracked fuel cap to a cracked engine block—a few dollars to a few thousand dollars—and the only way to know for sure is to hook the car up to a computer. There is an app for that. Actually several. But they all  require a bit of rooting around in the alien world beneath the dashboard to plug in a cable or dongle. Having neither cable nor dongle, nor the ability to fix whatever the problem might have turned out to be, I headed straight to the dealer at dawn.

Car repair roulette is the worst. My spin landed on “vent valve,” a three inch piece of plastic pipe vital for regulating the mix of oxygen and fuel. After 60,000 miles of trusty service, it was coated with carbon, stuck in the open position. Apparently, a vent valve is not something that can be cleaned, but rather must be replaced. A few hours and several hundred dollars later, the car was fixed and I had a bonus souvenir. 

I stared at the small hunk of plumbing the mechanic had fished out of the garbage for me, appalled that something so doohickey-looking had the potential to wreck my car. Then I was appalled that countless millions of cars and trucks on the road are similarly vulnerable, some more than others according to a quick Google scan. How could this be designed so poorly that it could not be cleaned? It was plasticwith a little bit of metal inside—why did it take so long and cost so much to fix? 

Chalk up one more reason to cheer on Tesla: electric cars don’t have vent valves. Still, until batteries replace gas tanks in the global fleet, the $2 trillion auto parts market will be churning out a near infinite number of pricey parts designed for a truly dizzying variety of petroleum powered makes and models. The carbon footprint of a car goes beyond fuel efficiency and manufacturing supply chains. It also includes all the spare parts required for years of maintenance and repair.  Each one of those parts has its own long meandering supply chain, many traveling by ship from Asia, then by freight train and truck to a mechanic near you. 

It is an industry easy to game. This past September, nine Japanese auto parts suppliers pled guilty to an ongoing global antitrust investigation spearheaded by the US Justice department:

"…More than a dozen separate conspiracies involving more than 30 kinds of parts affected sales to Chrysler, Ford and General Motors, as well as the American subsidiaries of Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota.

“These international price-fixing conspiracies affected more than $5 billion in automobile parts sold to U.S. car manufacturers,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. “In total, more than 25 million cars purchased by American consumers were affected by the illegal conduct….” 
— New York Times

In other words, it is a racket, just as every grumbling car owner hit with a pricey repair job involving a small cheap-looking part has long suspected. Although the fines against the car part conspirators tallied nearly three quarter of a billion dollars, that may not be enough to deter others from trying to find sneakier ways to pad pockets. It is just that tempting. 

In the meantime, the average lifespan of a car in the US now tops 11 years. The average car owner shells out thousands upon thousands of dollars for repairs and maintenance. It is like buying another half car, one part at a time. 

GAME CHANGER IN 3D

3D printing could help change the equation, obliterating long supply chains, slashing carbon footprints, cutting costs, frustrating fraudsters and affecting the way cars and their parts are designed in the first place. The technology is already popular with car designers. It is both a faster way to prototype designs and also dramatically cheaper. Creating a prototype  engine with 3D printing, for example, can reduce costs from a million dollars to a few thousand. That’s money that drops straight to the bottom line. 

It will still be a few years before my mechanic has a 3D printer fabricating parts out in the garage that might translate to savings to my bottom line. Antique car collectors such as Jay Leno, however, have already embraced the technology. 

"…If you went to a machinist and asked him to make this (part) for you…it would take weeks to do. Here you design it on a computer and the same day you have a replacement part. There are no lost motors any more. There are no lost pieces you can’t reproduce.." 
— Jay Leno

In the video below, watch how easily Gonzalo Martinez, Director of Strategic Research at 3D software-maker Autodesk, is able to improve the design an antique engine part on a computer. Within hours, a new part—far better than the original—is ready to be installed.

Mass production excels at economy, quantity and uniformity but at the expense of agility: It is hard to make the kinds of small quick changes that Martinez was able to make. Like a pebble in a pond, even a tiny change can cause ripples throughout the process. Mediocre designs can persist because they are good enough to last a while, like my vent valve, rather than as good as they might be. 

A NEW APPROACH

Local Motors, a six year-old automaker based in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, aims to change the paradigm, reinventing the car business from the ground up, beginning with design. Cars are “co-created” incorporating ideas and feedback submitted by thousands of LM members from around the world. In turn, specs for LM-designed car parts are open-sourced to the community (most parts, however, are sourced from outside suppliers generally less keen to share intellectual property). 3D printers are used extensively for prototyping and production. 

"The last 100 years attributed to Henry Ford was the last industrial revolution. The next industrial revolution is the ability to take data, digital plans, and print something without having to spend a lot of money on tooling, and that’s what’s so exciting about our community," said Justin Fishkin, Local Motors chief strategy officer. "The ability to collaborate on digital designs and then share them with a machine that will make whatever the data tells it to make, in batches as small as one unit, is changing the game."
-- from “Can the 3-D printer help ‘green’ the auto industry?” by Julia Piper / E & E publishing

So far Local Motors has produced one car model (the Rally Fighter) and two motorcycles (the Racer and the Cruiser), each available in limited runs. Buyers are encouraged to be involved directly in the building process at one of the company’s micro factories--a second just opened in Las Vegas. They can even bring a few friends along for what is more of an assembly party than an assembly line. 

The company has more than doubled in size in the three years since founder and CEO Jay Rogers gave a talk at TEDxPhoenix (embedded below). Though dated, it is still a good overall backgrounder on the Local Motors vision: 

Local Motors may forever be a niche player, but it has already had impact well beyond its size. Its track record for rapidly prototyping and producing working vehicles caught the attention of the US military. In 2011, LM helped DARPA, the military’s R&D arm, launch an online competition to design a combat support vehicle. Now LM is working with the US Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF) on a new website to create “a community of soldier-focused innovators” to design a range of combat gear: ArmyCoCreate.com. 

BY THE NUMBERS

At every turn, 3D printing is bringing big changes to the auto industry. In a recent blog post, John Hauer, chief marketing officer at online design marketplace 3DLT, crunched the numbers. 

• US auto aftermarket (parts and services) is worth $300 billion+ 
• Amazon dominates online sales
• eBay Motors moves a half million parts per week
• Brick and mortar stores such as Pep Boys and Autozone carry as many 20,000 different parts at each location, with as many 500,000 different ski’s company-wide

Yet most parts are designed using CAD (computer assisted design), which means they also exist digitally, which means they can be printed.

"…3D printing squashes the supply chain. How? 3D printable files can be stored in an online database. 3D designs can be retrieved, manufactured and packaged, when and where they’re needed, on demand. The effort, technology, and costs associated with mass manufacturing whither away. There’s no consolidation, shipping, receiving, sorting, repacking, warehousing or delivery of finished goods. There’s also less redundancy at thousands of retail locations. At Advance Auto Parts for instance, the average store does about $1.7 million in sales. It also carries about $600,000 in inventory. Assume 70% is redundant, multiply it across 4,000 stores, and it equates to $1.7 billion worth of inefficiency.

If 3D printing could eliminate even one percent (pardon the cliche,) it could save the company $17 million per year – roughly the sales volume of 10 stores and at an operating margin of 10%, the gross profit of 100 stores…”
— “3D Printing In The Automotive Aftermarket” 

It is only a matter of time—probably sooner rather than later—before 3D printers are good enough, fast enough and cheap enough to be worth installing in auto parts stores, garages  and in regional auto parts supply hubs. 

Independent designers and hobbyists are already forging the path, 

"…One of 3DLT’s designers, Ray Pierson, is a great example. He works as an engineer in the defense industry by day, but creates 3D printable car parts in his spare time. It started when Ray identified an opportunity with his own car. He drives a Volkswagen Touareg and didn’t like the way the cup-holders held his drinks. So, he designed a plastic tray to fit over the opening. He bought his own 3D printer and used it to print the tray. Others saw it and liked the way it worked. He started getting orders from other VW owners. Soon people with other makes of cars saw Ray’s tray and asked if he could design one for their model. He got to the point where he couldn’t keep up with production and joined 3DLT so he could focus on designing great products. Crowd-sourced designs like these could be a profitable source of content for an auto parts supplier with 3D printing capabilities…"
—”3D Printing In The Automotive Aftermarket”

Brilliant.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT

My car is a necessity, but I would like to need it less. In the not too distant future, I can imagine a mix of commuter trains, biking and walking getting me where I need to go most of the time. Still, a car is often the best option, especially when the weather is bad (this is Chicago after all), there are things to schlep, it is late or it is the most efficient way to get where I need to go. 

My next car will likely be electric—perhaps even a Tesla—a car that most definitely will not need a vent valve. That is still a few years off,  but my current car, theoretically in the prime of its mechanical life, can still benefit from automotive innovation. 

Imagine cheaper, better designed parts that make repairs simpler, faster and cheaper. Imagine supply chains radically shortened and carbon footprints shrunk. With some good 3D printers, my existing car can become at least a little eco-friendlier, improving its big picture life-cycle efficiency and economy. Yes, please. 

RELATED: 

• 3D print precise prototypes and tooling that can take abuse: case studies and more from 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys 

• 3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production / by Alexander George, Wired magazine

• Kor Ecologic / 3D printed car project website

• 5 reasons 3-D printing isn’t quite ready for prime time / by Clay Dilllow, Fortune magazine