Dematerialized Designs: Make Your Own Watch

In the future we may make things locally with neighbourhood CNC or 3D printing to eliminate shipping costs and CO2 emissions. Frederic Hakoune gives us an early demonstration of this with his printed watch.

We don't know what kind of fabber he used; it could be something like idealab's new desktop printer; Perhaps it is a home-made Evil Mad Scientist version, although the watch does not look like it is made of granulated sugar. It might be Hod Lipson's design that you can build yourself, or a commercial unit.

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3D printer working on the watch

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After 50 minutes of printing

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place inside the watch in the printed case

Now obviously he is using a mechanism for the watch and has only printed the case, but there has been lots of discussion about inkjet printing of electronics; that will come. Besides, one can walk into a Swatch or Fossil store and see thousands of watches in inventory, all using basically the same mechanism so there are still economies to be had by printing the case only, especially when big honking watches are all the rage.

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