Dowloading Designs: The Desktop Factory
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 05.19.07
"Roboticist Hod Lipson wants you to stop shopping and use his portable 3-D printer to make your own stuff"
We have mentioned the work of Hod Lipson of Cornell University in an earlier post on home 3D printing; Popular Science has done a great interview of him about the future of fabbing. Questions include:
Q: What sort of things are people printing with your fabber?
A: Watchbands, squirt bottles, batteries, artificial muscles, even fancy chocolates. What you print is really up to you.
Q: Wouldn’t it be cheaper, faster and easier to just go buy a new piece?
A: The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture. ::Popular Science
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"Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture."
How is that? It seems likely that instead we will have hundreds of millions of half-used tubes of silicon lying around after we have all fabbed our own watchbands. Don't get me wrong, I love micro-factories, i love rapid prototyping, but it seems a bit of a leap to actually reducing consumption.
Another project working on rapid prototyping is RepRap (http://reprap.org/) which is short for Replicating Rapid Prototyper. The idea being that not only can you make "stuff" but you can make more repraps so everyone can have one. They are about to release version 1.0 (Darwin). It's all open source so anyone can join in.
also keep in mind the similarities with the early desktop publishing/printing revolution... how many prints do you actually make to get that one, really great copy of a photo? I've read some claims of up to 2 wasted sheets of paper for every 1 good print when inkjets first came to market.
Yeah, I just wish they were working as hard on the other half of this. We really need the ability to cleanly break down things in our house into raw components. Some sort of of uber-recycler. Then you could just take your old pair of shoes, put them into the recycler, take the compenents over to your 3-d printer and print out a new pair of shoes. I think the recyler project is more complex and not as fun though.
I can't understand manufacturer's idea.
Nowadays, most of products are not made of a simple component but, coplex materials.
but, with this technology, we should fill the raw material, like plastic, in the 3D pinter. so someome could copy a shoes composed of 'just' a plastic.
Ofcourse He can walk, but it will hurt his foot.