Avinash Rajagopal - Hacking Design

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1. The Almost Reproductive Robot

So, we were promised flying cars, complained Bre Pettis to an amused audience at the technology conference

The Star Trek Replicator was a shiny white box that used some alchemy of subatomic particles to magically materialize objects. The 3D printer Pettis is talking about isnt quite as slick. The Cupcake CNC, sold by Makerbot Industries, is a dinky little wooden cube with its innardsmulticolored wires, metal rods, and oversized boltsproudly on display. A long plastic filament, also supplied by Makerbot Industries, is fed into a heated nozzle that melts the plastic and prints it onto a moving platform. The motion of the platform can be guided by any 3D computer model, even one made on Googles free Sketchup software. Laying one line of molten plastic on top of another, the Cupcake CNC Makerbot converts the virtual model into a real object, all the while sounding exactly like an old dot matrix printer.

If you take the really long view, one beginning of the Makerbot storythe creation of a machine that can in turn create all the other objects that fill our lives, including, therefore, more machines like itselfis in seventeenth-century Sweden. The philosopher Ren Descartes, invited by Queen Christina to her court, was explaining the finer points of his latest book, The Passions of the Soul. One of his arguments was that the human body could be regarded as a machine. The skeptical Queens response was that a machine could never do certain things that a human body canmake babies, for instance. She famously pointed to a clock and said, See to it that it produces offspring.

Thus began the 350-year-long quest for a machine that could make more of its own kind. In 2006, the challenge was taken up by Dr. Andrew Bowyer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Bath University. Bowyer had developed a self-replicating rapid prototyper, or RepRap for short. With this first version, Bowyer launched the RepRap project, using a free software license to release all the information for building his machine. RepRap has since undergone two stages of development, tellingly named Darwin and Mendel, after the evolutionary biologists.

In 2007, Bre Pettis co-founded NYC Resistor, a shared workspace in downtown Brooklyn for the new wave of young hackers, more interested in manipulating physical materials than digital code. There he met fellow hardware hackers Adam Mayer and Zach Hoeken, who shared an interest in the RepRap project. However, they decided that creating a true self-replicating machine was a chicken-and-egg problem. They decided to set their targets lower, and just build their own low-cost 3D printer. After more than a year of work, Makerbot Industries was founded on March 16, 2009, with Dr. Bowyer himself chipping in as an investor. They demonstrated their first successful prototype, the Cupcake CNC, by printing scores of shot glasses shaped like dodecahedra . Within a month, Makerbot had sent out its first order of Cupcake CNCs.

Each of these went out as a kit of parts, accompanied by the specifications for each part. Customers received not just instructions for assembling their own machines, but also all the information they would need to build one from scratch, in keeping with MakerBots commitment to the Open Source movement. A Makerbot costs upwards of $750, so with the plastic raw material and other add-ons thrown in, a basic kit could be had for as little as $1,000.

The cheapest industry standard 3D printers, which are used by manufacturers and design firms for prototyping, are sold at ten times that amount.

But Makerbot has another dimension that the other initiatives dont. When they launched Makerbot, Mayer, Pettis, and Hoeken also created a website called Thingiverse.com. Here, Makerbot users share all the information about the things they have designed and made with their 3D printers. Along with photographs, they upload the actual computer model files for such inventions as a Tube Squeezera slotted plastic sleeve designed to get out that last bit of toothpaste. Then other users comment, recommend modifications, and upload their own files. Through this process of critique and development, the community slowly pushes the boundaries of what is possible with the Makerbot. Currently, there are about 4,000 designs available for download on the site.

Given that the spirit of open source and the hackers love of taking things apart are built into the Makerbots DNA, it was only a matter of time before the Thingiverse community turned its attention to the machine itself. Because of its naked components, the machine already had an aura of being unfinished. Now hackers began to graft on additions and enlargements, turning the Makerbot into a mechanical Frankenstein. A user who calls himself Zydac came up with a simple, bright red prop to lift up the roof of the Makerbot and make it taller. His Z-Axis Extender Kit means that theres no longer a real height restriction on objects that can be printed on the Cupcake CNC.

It became clear that several components of the Cupcake CNC Makerbot could be made on the machine itself and that there were people willing to do this, and do it better. So although they had rented a factory space in Brooklyn, Makerbot Industries also began farming out the manufacturing of Cupcake CNC componentsto their own customers. Bre Pettis is right in calling the Cupcake CNC the first truly crowd-sourced product in the world.

As a result, the Cupcake CNC has changed quite a bit in its short life. Many components are now available in two or three versions. The tenth batch of 3D printers, which shipped out in February 2010, was different enough from the first batch to warrant a fresh set of assembly instructions. Another major overhaul seems to be planned for early next year: A new forum has been set up on Thingiverse for community members to pool ideas for the next Makerbot. The machines nakedness begins to make sense: At this rate of growth, it would only keep outgrowing its clothing.

In the midst of all this messy rhizomatic developmentwith multiple improvements and models being co-developed and manufacturedsomething wonderful happened. In June 2010, a hacker called Webca uploaded all the files and instructions required to print 150 components of a Makerbot on a Makerbot. The RepRap is not the only 3d printer that can replicate itself; now the Makerbot can too, he claimed. Several enthusiastic commenters jumped in with glee, posting photographs as evidence that they had successfully replicated Webcas achievement. Inevitably, the conversation slowly turned to modifications. Is there any reason why you couldnt use it to make bigger versions of itself? asked a hacker called Oopster. After all, the electronics will all be the same size regardless, so what else would need to be bigger?

Technically speaking, however, the aforementioned electronics are the undoing of Webcas claim because they have to be manufactured on another machine. So the Makerbot hasnt quite satisfied Queen Christinas demand. But given that the electronics can be sourced quite easily (as so many of Webcas followers have done), the Makerbot can, in a sense, give birth to more Makerbots. And more importantly, it can give birth to better Makerbots. Within a year of showing that slide at the Gnomedex conference, Bre Pettis and his noisy little machine have already left Star Trek behind.

But it is still very hard to imagine a Makerbot in every household, and all of us actively engaged in manufacturing of some kind. Makerbots vision of democratic desktop manufacturing is still only a revolution-in-the-making, if that. Within their own world, however, a dedicated community of hackers seems to be outgrowing our future before we can even conceive of it.