3D Printing for Development in the Global South: The 3D4D Challenge PDF
Preview 3D Printing for Development in the Global South: The 3D4D Challenge
3D Printing for Development in the Global South DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0001 Other Palgrave Pivot Titles David Fitzgerald and David Ryan: Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention Lars Elleström: Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media Claudio Povolo: The Novelist and the Archivist: Fiction and History in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed Gerbrand Tholen: The Changing Nature of the Graduate Labour Market: Media, Policy and Political Discourses in the UK Aaron Stoller: Knowing and Learning as Creative Action: A Reexamination of the Epistemological Foundations of Education Carl Packman: Payday Lending: Global Growth of the High-Cost Credit Market Lisa Lau and Om Prakash Dwivedi: Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English Chapman Rackaway: Communicating Politics Online G. Douglas Atkins: T.S. 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Hackett: Facet Theory and the Mapping Sentence: Evolving Philosophy, Use and Application Irwin Wall: France Votes: The Election of François Hollande David J. Staley: Brain, Mind and Internet: A Deep History and Future Georgiy Voloshin: The European Union’s Normative Power in Central Asia: Promoting Values and Defending Interests Shane McCorristine: William Corder and the Red Barn Murder: Journeys of the Criminal Body DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0001 3D Printing for Development in the Global South: The 3D4D Challenge Thomas Birtchnell Lecturer, University of Wollongong, Australia and William Hoyle Chief Executive, techfortrade, UK DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0001 © Thomas Birtchnell and William Hoyle 2014 Foreword © Adrian Bowyer Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 201(cid:21) ISBN 978–1–137–36565–1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN (cid:26)(cid:24)(cid:25)(cid:14)(cid:18)(cid:14)(cid:20)(cid:21)(cid:26)(cid:14)(cid:21)(cid:24)(cid:20)(cid:25)(cid:18)(cid:14)(cid:23) ISBN 978-1-137-36566-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137365668 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot Contents Foreword vii Adrian Bowyer List of Abbreviations x Introduction 1 3DP in the developing world 3 Development at the press of a button 5 Disruptive innovations 7 The 3DP ecosystem 8 The argument of 3D4D 10 1 The 3D4D Challenge 13 Beginnings 14 Spreading the word 18 Building momentum and ideas 22 The competition 25 The final and the fallout 31 2 What is 3D Printing? 36 Wealth without money 37 3D printing evangelism 38 The next Spinning Jenny 39 The next print revolution 40 The 3D4D Goldilocks Zone 42 Benchmarking 3DP 45 3 What Does 3D Printing Change? 49 How the other half makes 50 The division of labour 50 Global production networks 52 DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0001 v vi Contents Post-Fordism 55 Prosumerism 58 First world problems 62 4 What Does 3D Printing Change about Development? 67 Top-down development 68 The inclusivity challenge 70 Bottom-up grassroots innovation 73 A 3D4D wishlist 76 5 The 3D4D Elements 81 Scoping 3D4D 82 Community printers 84 Open repositories 86 Recycled materials 88 3DP infrastructure 91 6 3D4D Indicators and Forerunners 96 The 3DP ‘go-to-guy’ 97 Turning grit into gold 99 Demystifying design 102 Rabodé: making it work 105 From landfill to filament 107 3DP dreams 109 Conclusion 113 Bibliography 116 Index 129 DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0001 Foreword I once asked an eminent colleague, a university professor, what he thought was the most fundamental distinction between things in the Universe. ‘The distinction between fermions and bosons’, he said. I could see his point: that is the distinction that makes everything from starlight to consciousness work. But I consider that the most fundamental distinction in the Universe is the one between things like pebbles and things like mice, that is, the distinction between things that exist for a while and things that exist for a while and – during that while – copy themselves. Self-copying gives near-immortality (the DNA in every cell of your body goes back in an unbroken temporal chain nearly four billion years long); it gives intent (every self-copier has evolved either in an unconscious or a conscious desire to repro- duce) and exponential growth (when I was born there were three billion people; now there are seven billion). Not all of these properties are without problems, of course, but they are most definitely everything that makes everything interesting. Self-replication is the most powerful phenomenon on the face of the Earth. Indeed, it made the face of the Earth. And yet, apart from farming and ourselves, we don’t make use of it. All of engineering is not like birds making more birds, it is like birds making nests. Nests can be intricate, complicated and beautiful things, but that intricacy, beauty and complexity fade to nothing when compared to the birds themselves. And birds, like all self-replicators, increase in number exponentially given the resources to do so. DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0002 vii viii Foreword Self-replication as a means of engineering production is not a new idea. Queen Christina of Sweden asked René Descartes how a machine might reproduce. And the concept of an artificial self-replicating machine runs through the work of Samuel Butler in the nineteenth century and John von Neumann in the middle of the twentieth century. But it was not until the end of the twentieth century that we had a manufacturing technology so sophisticated that it might stand a chance of replicating itself. That manufacturing technology is 3D printing. That is the reason why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I started a project to make a self-replicating 3D printer – the RepRap Project. Owing not so much to me but much more to a worldwide group of thousands of volunteer engineers, the RepRap Project has become a success and there are tens – possibly hundreds – of thousands of RepRap machines in the world. (Nobody knows exactly how many.) The volun- teers volunteered and RepRap has self-replicated itself so successfully1 because the RepRap Project is free and an open-source. Anyone can download all the designs for a RepRap and make another one, perhaps using a friend’s RepRap machine to do so. * * * There are big agricultural companies in the world. But none can hold a candle to the likes of Volkswagen and Wal-mart, despite the fact that agriculture is – literally – our only vital industry. The reason for this is that manufacturing and distribution both currently benefit from economies of scale. In contrast, agriculture is scal- able. Anyone with a little land can grow something. Growing something from scratch is a lot easier than making a VW Golf from scratch, even though the thing grown is immeasurably more subtle and complicated than a mere car. However, 3D printing may remove those economies of scale, making manufacturing, like agriculture, scalable and eliminating the need for distribution almost completely. A self-replicating 3D printer starts to make manufacturing much more like farming. And 3D printing means that material goods can effectively be sent down the wires. So 3D printers may start to do for distribution what the Internet has already done for information. (Who reads their news on folded sheets of paper these days?) Marx pointed out that the rich get richer because they have the capital to invest – directly or indirectly – in manufacturing plants. Whereas the DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0002 Foreword ix poor stay poor because the only thing they have to sell is their labour – a renewable, but not expanding, resource. This is as true for communities and nations as it is for individuals, and Marxist revolutions (inevitably disastrous for all concerned) made the transition from a stable agrarian life to an industrial manufacturing one with much greater inequality. Yet the most comfortable nations (relatively unequal though their citi- zens are) are the ones that embraced the Industrial Revolution without a subsequent Marxist revolution. And the poorest and least comfortable nations are the ones that have failed to do that owing, in part, to their not having the capital to invest both in manufacturing and the necessary education that must precede it. But now, even the poorest people have telephones that give them access to the sum total of human knowledge. And low-cost 3D printers (and the cheapest cost about two phones’ worth) are starting to allow anyone anywhere to put a foot on the first rung of the manufacturing ladder. Adrian Bowyer RepRapPro Ltd and Bath University, UK Note In the morning of 29 May 2008 there was only one RepRap. In the afternoon there were two. DOI: 10.1057/9781137365668.0002
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