Introductory Citations

Personalized design and manufacturing machines will be an emancipating technology, creating freedom for people to work and play independently in ways that were previously restricted to an elite few.

- Factory@Home report [1]

In the near future anything heavy will become intensely local while at the same time the limits to things that are ‘light’, ideas, philosophies, information will travel even further than today—literally and figuratively. This is a new paradigm for humanity and it has huge implications for the complete reordering of society.

- Jason F. McLennan [2]

Overview

Introduction

Please read:

• Michel Bauwens: Why is Open Hardware Inherently Sustainable?
• Wouter Tebbens: Producing Industrial Goods Through the Commons

This new section is dedicated to Open Manufacturing developments, making it easier to identify interests in creating physical objects. This is a smaller subset of our much broader section on Open and Shared Design Communities.

However, this section also includes developments about 'production' and 'making' in general, including topics like the DIY revolution, the digitalization of crafts, and agricultural production.

The P2P Foundation supports the aims of the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance [3] , an initiative to foster sustainable sharing of open hardware and design.

Have a look at the following material:

1. For a directory of Open Hardware projects, see our page: Product Hacking
2. See the case study on the Glif iphone tripod for an example of integrated distributed funding, design, manufacturing, marketing, and fullfilment.

Video: Four Ways to Manufacture Open Hardware. How does open hardware get made? 1) Licensing; 2) Fulfillment; 3) Contract manufacturing; 4) DIY assembly [4]

Comparative Tables

1. Converging Forces that are Personalizing Manufacturing Technologies
2. Comparing the Industrial Revolution to the Personal Manufacturing Industrial Revolution

Must see, inspiring videos to see what is already possible:

1. Joe Justice on Rapid and Agile Industrial Development at Wikispeed
2. For an inspired lecture, watch: Marcin Jakubowski on Open Source Hardware Blueprints for Civilization

The Personal Manufacturing Industry

For details see: Personal Manufacturing Industry and Personal Manufacturing Machines

Introduction: an overview of Personal Manufacturing

Read:

1. The Long Tail of Manufacturing
2. How Personal Fabrication Will Change Manufacturing and the Economy. Hod Lipson & Melba Kurman, in Factory@Home, pp. 51+. It contributes to: Ecosystems of small manufacturers; Long tail niche markets; Economic emergence of underserved communities; Consumer-led product design; Scale up from one; Mass customization and crowdsourcing; Eco-conscious and subsistence-level manufacturing; Less market research, more toolkits

Tools

See: Personal Manufacturing Tools

Typology of Personal Manufacturing Machines (Hardware)

1. Desktop 3D Printers
2. Desktop CNC Routing and Milling Machines
3. Desktop Laser Cutters and Engravers
4. Desktop Sewing and Embroidering Machines: JoAnn Fabrics.
5. Desktop Circuit Makers

Computer-Aided Design Software

1. CAD Tools: Google SketchUp, Rhino, Silo

Players

1. Personal Manufacturing Machine Makers: MakerBot, LumenLab, Bits From Bytes
2. Personal Manufacturing Companies: eMachineShop ; Big Blue Saw; Materialise
3. Electronic Design Blueprint Aggregators: Ponoko ; Shapeways
4. Personal Manufacturing Electronic Blueprint Designers: Unfold design studios, n-e-r-v-o-u-s, Bathsheba
5. Personal Manufacturing Consortia: 100K Garages

Citations

See also our Citations on Open and Shared Design and Open and Distributed Manufacturing

• Just as the democratization of information through personal computers was a key advance of the 20th century, the democratization of production through

improvements in fabrication technologies will be a pivotal development in the 21st century.

– Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe [5]

• In the near future anything heavy will become intensely local while at the same time the limits to things that are ‘light’, ideas, philosophies, information will travel even further than today—literally and figuratively. This is a new paradigm for humanity and it has huge implications for the complete reordering of society.

- Jason F. McLennan [6]

The Inevitability of Personal Manufacturing as new Industrial Revolution

According to Marshall Burns, previous emancipating technologies in human history were the book (enabled by the invention of the printing press), cars (enabled by new roads and gas stations) and now personal fabrication (enabled by 3D design software). What this random collection of technologies has in common is that they entered the lives of everyday people in a gradual way as the technology dropped in price, became easy to use, and accumulated a critical mass of applications, fellow users, or supportive infrastructure such as roads or high speed Internet. While mainstream adoption of personal manufacturing technologies is a few decades away, the manufacturing industry will experience the same forces that brought us YouTube, laptops, mobile phones and online retailers."

- by Hod Lipson & Melba Kurman [7]

Why Localization is Inevitable in a Resource-scarce World

"It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.

At first, the increase in freight costs will be bad news for developed and developing nations alike but, as adjustments in the patterns of trade occur, the result is likely to be decreased outsourcing with more manufacturing and food production jobs in North America and the European Union. The pattern of trade will change as increasing transportation costs outweigh traditional sources of comparative advantage, such as lower wages. The new geography of trade will not result from policy or treaties but from the impact of changing environmental conditions due to the growth of the human economy. ... Many goods will be manufactured closer to where they are consumed, as supply chains become more regional and local."

- Fred Curtis, David Ehrenfeld [8]

Scale-Up From One

"Scale up from one: Regular people and small manufacturing companies that lack investment capital will be able to set up low investment, “start small and scale up as it goes” businesses. Thanks to the low-cost Internet virtual storefronts, and the low cost of small-scale manufacturing for prototypes and custom goods, new companies can get started on a shoestring budget, yet sell their wares or services to niche, global marketplaces."

- Hod Lipson & Melba Kurman [9]

Sam Rose, Erik deBruijn, Suresh Fernando on basic properties of scalable open source technology projects

basic properties of scalable open source technology projects

1. It is easy to use output of project as a building block towards building other things (both a product itself and a development platform Eric VonHippel: Things that are consumed are themselves made by the consumers. )
2. It is a modular design (designed for interoperability)
3. It is replicable, released under an open license, shareable online via a clone-able repository.
4. Milestones are co-identified, tasks are mapped to milestones (there are engageble affordances for contributors: allow people to scratch and itch)
5. Project consistently applies a local standard. (designed for interoperability)
6. For the majority of participants, access to the same parts/suppliers or have a device that can create parts for you.
7. Project is sufficiently visible in the network.
8. There is a basic co-governance structure in the project. There is a social contract with the community (this can be covered by the license, but there should also be explicit rules and terms about expectations of contribution etc).

(distilled from discussion between Erik deBruijn, Sam Rose, Suresh Fernando) - Sam Rose (Based on discussions with Erik deBruijn and Suresh Fernando via skype early 2010 http://wagn.holocene.cc/wagn/basic_properties_of_scalable_open_source_technology_projects )

So, what can we do to prevent instability? The solution isn't to formulate vague contingency plans or return to passive optimism. Obviously, that won't work. No, the solution is to improve our resilience to these systemic shocks through a social and economic transition that follows this simple formula:

Localize production. Virtualize everything else.

- John Robb [10]

"The emergence of commons-based techniques — particularly, of an open innovation platform that can incorporate farmers and local agronomists from around the world into the development and feedback process through networked collaboration platforms—promises the most likely avenue to achieve research oriented toward increased food security in the developing world. It promises a mechanism of development that will not increase the relative weight and control of a small number of commercial firms that specialize in agricultural production. It will instead release the products of innovation into a self-binding commons—one that is institutionally designed to defend itself against appropriation. It promises an iterative collaboration platform that would be able to collect environmental and local feedback in the way that a free software development project collects bug reports—through a continuous process of networked conversation among the user-innovators themselves."

- Yochai Benkler ([11], p. 22)

"The guaranteed income will, in fact, lead to the revival of "private enterprise." Once the guaranteed income is available, we can anticipate the organization of what I have called "consentives": productive groups formed by individuals who will come together on a voluntary basis simply because they wish to do so. The goods produced by these consentives will not compete with mass-produced goods available from cybernated firms. The consentive will normally produce the "custom-designed" goods that have been vanishing within the present economy. The consentive would sell in competition with firms paying wages, but its prices would normally be lower because it would need to cover only the cost of materials and other required supplies. Wages and salaries would not need to be met out of income, as the consentive members would be receiving a guaranteed income. The consentive would be market-oriented but not market-supported."

- Robert Theobald, The Guaranteed Income, 1966

Karim Lakhani on Communities driving Manufacturers out of the design phase

"for any given company - there are more people outside the company that have smarts about a particular technology or a particular use situation then all the R&D engineers combined. So a community around a product category may have more smart people working on the product then the firm it self. So in the end manufacturers may end up doing what they are supposed to - manufacture - and the design activity might move to the edge and into the community." (http://www.futureofcommunities.com/2007/03/25/communities-driving-manufacturers-out-of-the-design-space/)

Kevin Kelly and Terry Hancock on nearly-free material production

"Material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill." (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php)

Both the capital and marginal cost of making products has trended consistently and rapidly down as manufacturing tools become both cheaper and more versatile, so that the capital cost of an object is increasingly not in the capital equipment required to manufacture it, but in the effort required to design it.

- Terry Hancock [12]

Steve Bosserman outlines what is most appropriate for local distributed manufacturing

"strong candidates for a locally distributed manufacturing approach include ANYTHING that is agriculturally- based like food, feed, fiber, and biofuel production, much of housing and building construction including the manufacturing of inputs used in that industry, localized electric power generation using non-bio sources like wind, solar, and geothermal, and production / manufacturing of materials, components, and assemblies that use locally sourced raw materials and draw upon open-source, relatively easy to learn, appropriate technologies that can be applied in a wide range of situations-- not just a single product."

Eric von Hippel on Manufacturing around User Innovation Communities

"Threadless has tapped into a fundamental economic shift, a movement away from passive consumerism. One day in the not-too-distant future citizen inventors using computer design programs and three-dimensional printers will exchange physical prototypes in much the same way Nickell and cohorts played Photoshop tennis.

Eventually, Threadless-like communities could form around industries as diverse as semiconductors, auto parts, and toys. Threadless is one of the first firms to systematically mine a community for designs, but everything is moving in this direction.

He foresees research labs and product-design divisions at manufacturing companies being outstripped by an "innovation commons" made up of tinkerers, hackers, and other devout customers freely sharing their ideas. The companies that win will be the ones that listen." (quotes and paraphrased by Inc. [13])

Frank Piller on User Manufacturing

"User manufacturing is enabled by three main technologies: (1) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design. (2) Design repositories where users upload, search, and share designs with other users. This allows a community of loosely connected users to develop a large range of applications. (3) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New rapid manufacturing technologies ("fabbing") finally deliver the dream of translating any 3-D data files into physical products -- even in you living room. Combining this technology with recent web technologies can open a radical new way to provide custom products along the entire "long tail" of demand.

User manufacturing builds on the notion that users are not just able to configure a good within the given solution space (mass customization), but also to develop such a solution space by their own and utilize it by producing custom products. As a result, customers are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies." (http://mass-customization.blogs.com/mass_customization_open_i/2007/11/webinar-the-nex.html)

Jeff Bezos on User-Manufacturing Everything

"Before long, “user-generated content” won’t refer only to media, but to just about anything: user-generated jeans, user-generated sports cars, user-generated breakfast meals. This is because setting up a company that designs, makes and globally sells physical products could become almost as easy as starting a blog - and the repercussions would be earthshaking. " (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2006-11-21-amazon-user-generated-products_x.htm)

Flexible Manufacturing and the Maker Movement

"Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences— the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections." (http://iftf.org/node/1766)

Introductory Resources

Mappings and Typologies

1. The integrated open design and manufacturing process, a poster by Thomas Lommee at http://www.intrastructures.net/yes_we_re_open.pdf

Below are the guiding principles of this integrated vision:

* In a networked society, Investment is about sharing beliefs, leading towards decentralised financing platforms.

* In a networked society, Design is about sharing ideas, leading towards a common design vocabulary.

* In a networked society, Production is about sharing tools and workshops, leading towards flexible, small-scale production

* In a networked society, Retail is about sharing interests, leading towards a reconnection between makers and buyers.

* In a networked society, Consumption is about sharing experiences, leading towards customer-driven innovation.

* In a networked society, Recycling is about sharing materials, leading towards closed material cycles

2. The business cycle for the material economy [14]:

1. Incubation: Where do the basic "raw materials" come from?
2. Production: How are goods and services produced?
3. Exchange: How do goods and services move from production to use?
4. Distribution: How is the consumption and use of goods and services organized?
5. Allocation: How is surplus generated in the economic cycle used? How does surplus re-enter and reinvigorate the cycle?

3. Dam Mellis offers a typology of three Open Source Hardware Distribution Models

'4. Sam Rose and Paul Hartzog offer a typology of different Infrastructure Commons:

1. Energy Commons
2. Food Commons
3. Thing Commons
4. Cultural Commons
5. Access Commons

5. An important note on terminology: leading experts such as Frank Piller and Terry Wohlers prefer to use 3D Printing for a general public, and Additive Fabrication in technical contexts, instead of Rapid Prototyping or Rapid Manufacturing [15]

Introductory Articles

• Product-Centered Business Supply Chain Development vs People-Centered Business Network Ecosystem Development

• Report: Factory At Home: The Emerging Economy of Personal Fabrication. One of a Series of Occasional Papers in Science and Technology Policy. By Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman.

• White Paper: It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology. By Michael Weinberg. Public Knowledge, 2010 [16]: examines how intellectual property (IP) law impacts the rapidly maturing technology of 3D printing, and how incumbents who feel threatened by its growth might try to use IP law to stop it.

• Introduction to the Emerging Collaborative Economy

Key Resources

1. Open Hardware Startups
2. Who's Who in Open Hardware Manufacturing‎
3. The Makers Calendar: for publishing and being aware of new events about Open source hardware, digital fabrication, hacking, and all kind of events that could concern the makers community [17]

See also:

1. Twitter feeds on mass customization and personal fabrication
2. An DIY Bio FAQ
3. Advanced Civilisation is a site founded by Charles Collis to introduce current and developing states of Open and Distributed Manufacturing. Note in particular the overview on turning virtual designs into physical objects at [18]
4. Fab Labs on Earth, crowdsourced mapping of Fab Labs [19]
5. Tool Libraries Directory - check out this handy directory of tool libraries. [20]

Articles

• The Big Picture: Four Stages of Temporal-Spatial Organization in Human History. Jason F. McLennan. [21]

• The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century. Richard Heinberg.

• David de Ugarte: Technological Change Is Drastically Reducing the Efficient Scale Size

• Michel Bauwens: Towards economies of scope, not scale

• Essay: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. Kevin Carson. C4SS, 2009 [22]: overview of contemporary trends in distributed manufacturing

• The must-read trilogy regarding business models for open manufacturing, with an overview of the literature and experience until 2011 is from Massimo Menichelli:

1. Business Models for Open Hardware
2. Business Models for Fab Labs
3. Business Models for DIY Craft

Other essential articles/essays are:

1. Kevin Carson: Expanding Peer Production to the Physical World
2. The economics of open hardware (Liquid Antipasto blog)
3. On the Open Design of Tangible Goods. By Christina Raasch, Cornelius Herstatt and Kerstin Balka. R&D Management. Volume 39 Issue 4, Pages 382 - 393 Preprint version: detailed comparative case studies of 6 projects.
4. Dominic Muren: The Three Preconditions for Free Digital Manufacturing
5. Magius: Difference Between Shared Code for Immaterial Production and Shared Design for Material Production More on Shared Design

Also:

1. Immerse yourself in a variety of informative texts here.
2. Personal Fabrication for Dummies: 10 different techniques explained and shown in video illustrations
3. Kevin Carson: Emilia-Romagna as an example of sustainable manufacturing
4. Neil Gershenfeld on the need for a new digital maker literacy
5. Paul Fernhout: The Differences between Open Agriculture and Open Manufacturing
6. David A. Mellis: How Open Source Hardware differs from Open Source Software?
7. Horizontal Innovation Networks By and For Users. Eric von Hippel. Industrial and Corporate Change 2007 [23]: "In this article, we discuss three conditions under which user innovation networks can function entirely independently of manufacturers. We then explore related empirical evidence, and conclude that conditions favorable to horizontal user innovation networks are often present in the economy."
8. Volume 21 of Make Magazine is dedicated to Desktop Manufacturing: Features how-to articles that give individuals and small groups the know-how to make three-dimensional parts using inexpensive computer-controlled manufacturing equipment. Both additive (RepRap, CandyFab) and subtractive (Lumenlab Micro CNC) systems are covered.
9. Chris Anderson: In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits: reportage of the emerging field
10. Toward Open Source Hardware. John R. Ackermann. UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON LAW REVIEW VOLUME 34 WINTER 2009 NUMBER 2, pp. 183+ [24]: this paper on hardware licensing is too date the definitive analysis.
11. S Bradshaw, A Bowyer and P Haufe, "The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing", (2010) 7:1 SCRIPTed 5 [25]
12. Kevin Carson: Criminalizing the Informal Economy through Cost Plus Regulations

Also:

1. Many articles on Open Hardware here at http://opencollector.org/Whyfree/

Blogs

A comprehensive list of Fabrication Media is kept by the Fab Wiki [26]

A selection:

1. 3ders.org: News site about 3D printing and digital fabrication. It provides resources and latest trends of 3D printing technology.
2. openMaterials
3. Fabbaloo: tracks developments in Fabbing, 3D Printing and Desktop Manufacturing. We believe in a future where everyone can easily make any 3D objects by using inexpensive desktop equipment, much like we use inkjet printers today for two-dimensional paper objects.
4. Replicator: "This blog is about the companies and products that combine the connectivity of the internet with the physicality of products."
5. Ponoko: blog from 3D printing company
6. Thingiverse

See also:

1. Robotics Blog
2. Mass customization blog

Books

General

• Fab. Neil Gershenfeld.
• Roadmap for Additive Fabrication.Identifying the Future of Freeform Processing: An impressive work weighing in at over 100 pages it covers the industry as it exists and identifies potential market and research opportunities for the next 5-10 years. [27]
• Could 3D Printing Change the World? Technologies, Potential, and Implications of Additive Manufacturing. By Thomas Campbell, Christopher Williams, et al. Atlantic Council. Strategic foresight INITIATIVE. October 2011. [28]
• Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques: "If i had to recommend you one book about the use of digital tools in architecture, it would be this one." - Regine Debatty [29]

Technical

• Better be Running. Ronald Hollis: "the most complete intro to additive fabrication" [30]

Community and Discussion Sources

1. Open Manufacturing Mailing List: Linking Bits to Atoms for Community
2. Rapid Prototyping mailing list
3. Rapid Manufacturing Ning community: "Community for Advanced Manufacturing Technologies"
4. Global Swadeshi

See also:

• Fab Wiki [31] is dedicated to maintaining informtion on Digital Fabrication
• Hackerspaces "Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects."
• Factor E Farm "Open Source Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities." By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and "evolve to freedom."

and:

• Our Design Network