Tectonic shifts in technology are not without their growing pains. 3D printing seems to have made it through its childhood, growing at an impressive rate and giving everyone sky high hopes for its potential, but its awkward pre-teen years are making it more difficult to remember the beauty that we have seen in its future.
In a June interview with de zeen magazine, Francis Bitonti warned:
“The industry is choking off its own revolution. They’ve got to open up. It’s not that they need to open up all of their IP, but it’s a lot of things. [You’re] seeing a lot of tinker toys because they are treating it like a copy machine. I think they need to change their mind and understand that it’s a manufacturing technology…It’s like let’s just stop people from doing the best thing that this thing can do, and in a lot of ways that’s happening.”
“I don’t want to call it the next industrial revolution,” he said. “We should be talking about how we’re creating design tools for the information age…The key thing is that these tools are changing the way we think about form. The objects we create are a way of negotiating our traditional ideas bout production, and finding completely new kinds of structures.”
Bitonti firmly believes that the key to such re-visioning lies in making changes to design education, so as to incorporate a greater disciplinary freedom with less focus on the re-creation of specific outcomes and more on the process of bringing together new ideas. This is not unlike the paradigm shift outlined by Thomas Kuhn in his History of Scientific Revolutions.
Design doesn’t build the bridge to the future, it is the future. And it’s about time we start moving forward. Discuss this story in the Bitonti Forum thread on 3DPB.com.
[Source/Images: Wired]