Dowloading Designs: The Desktop Factory

"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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