Reviewed: 2D Design to 3D Product Process at Ponoko
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 10.17.07
TreeHugger first spied Ponoko a few months back, and was intrigued by the idea that you could submit a design online and have the pieces for said design show up at your house a few days later. It combines several of our favorite models for a greener world: flat pack, downloadable designs and efficient production, creating on demand rather than en masse. Sounds good, but does it really work?
The good people over at MAKE: Blog have answered the question for us, and the verdict is "Yep." They designed and published an iPhone stand at Ponoko, and ordered some for production. The pieces arrived, handily flat-packed, just as designed, and the piece came out exactly as designed -- cool! For both designers who need ready access to rapid prototyping and consumers who want to change the paradigm for the way we procure stuff, Ponoko looks tough to beat. See the whole process, from start to finish over at ::MAKE: Blog
It would be nice if the waste was reduced. The example in the video is producing 4 stands with enough waste for about 4 more. I am sure the laser cutter can cut closer to the edge then that.
I've already signed up on the ponoko site. And there are a few things that annoy me.
1.) YOU design the layout. YOU control how much waste there is in your final product. So to the commenter above, it's the fault of the designer.
2.) They must have a very small laser cutter, because their maximum material size is 31"x15". The smaller your stock material, the larger the amount of overall waste.
2a.) You are also stuck with only 3 material area choices. You can't just ship them off a design and they incorporate it into a larger (greener) batch cutting process with other designs on the same materials. This also encourages waste.
3.) Very tiny choice of overall materials. They have every color of acrylic you can imagine, but very few materials outside of that. And thicknesses are very limited as well.
This place is an alright place for inexpensively prototyping your own design, but after prototyping it, take it to a REAL fab shop with a larger materials inventory and larger table size on their cutter.
If they start making more and more money on this, maybe they can get a bigger materials list (thicker materials, AND more variety), and increase your choices when it comes to actual cutting quantity.
Their current model encourages lots of waste. That's not green last I checked.
The item designer is responsible for the layout of items on the sheet, so reducing the amount of wastage per item is the designers perogative.
I was under the impression that the production process and efficiencies would improve as more fabrication companies linked up to the site. Distributed fabrication of each item at a site closest to the consumer would be an ideal solution to drastically cutting delivery milage, storage costs and waste due to over production.
In my opinion this is a great model for design production that needs a little time to grow and mature.
Keep on cycling, and stay green!