Meta-Moderism: A Design Methodology for the 3rd Industrial Revlolution - Autodesk REAL2015

Editor's Notes

1. The revolution in distributed manufacturing is not what you think it is.
2. Who here thinks that a wave of mass personalization is about to hit that will affect everything from cars to fashion?   That what we’re calling reality computing, could be the start of a new era of human communication?  One where our traditional notions of the boundaries between digital and physical space start to blur. Where we can wield big data and biomimicry to simulate and optimise products... Where we say the hell with great products, let’s make perfect products!!! for every individual and for every use.  It’s a future where products become second skins.  Second skins that help us sleep easier, run faster, play harder, and be safer. Second skins that are as valuable to us as our own. But there’s a catch...  Without a major disruption in how we think about designing, engineering, and making products, none of these things are going to happen.  You see, the thing is, the perfect products we’re dreaming of cannot be designed by humans. They can only be designed by algorithms... and that means dramatic changes to how we do things.                       
3. Jeff Kowalski at the Inside 3D Printing conference last summer told us that 3D printing pretty much sucks right now. That we’re in the Gartner trough of disillusionment, and that 3D printers are in danger of not living up to the hype because they are not useful for most people.   As a 3D entrepreneur, it was a painful thing to hear. But I had to admit that Jeff was spot on. His talk was a wake up call; we can’t pin our hopes on incremental improvements: what we need is a collective philosophical shift to get us over the hump. That shift is called Meta-modernism, and I’m here to talk to you about what it looks like, how it affects your business, and the potential that it brings to the 3D landscape. Those of us who love 3D printing right now are for the most part enthusiasts and geeks, willing to put up with the bad-tempered machines and all of their flaws.  We look past the failed builds and difficult software, because we’re captivated by the possibilities of personalization, products on demand, and the rise of the distributed factory.
4. We know that printers are hard to use, and that CAD software is too. The technology is too intimidating for the non-designer or engineer who's still trying to figure out if it can do anything useful for them...   People keep talking about this mythical killer app that’s supposed to come and ignite the industry; to bring the technology to consumers in a way that they want and can use... But where is it? Autodesk has taken some important initiative in easing adoption and bringing new people into the 3D fold with their 123D apps, but we all know that there is still a major 3D content problem, because access to the tech is limited to, well... us.
5. Anyone else starting to feel like we’re reminiscent of the homebrew computer club?  That we are getting so buried in our engineering silos,  geeking out on the latest incremental improvement or price drop in printing, CAD, or scanning, that we’re losing sight of the forest through the trees? Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as enthusiastic about emerging technologies as anyone else here… In fact, originally I’d planned to focus my talk on a deep dive with you on the latest, greatest, and cheapest innovations in scanning, printing, and CAD.
6. I was going to wax poetic about printing everything from electronics to sugar....  To point out that sub $1000 3D scanners today are outperforming $30K ones of 5 years ago. To mention that by years’ end Intel will be putting its REALSense chip on almost all new tablets and laptops.  To gush that holograms, mixed reality, and VR are here and they are amazing and getting better... but everyone who’s here already knows this... And if you don’t, take a lap or two around this conference and prepare to be inspired. The thing is, focusing on the tech would make me guilty of the exact problem I’m trying to address.
7. It’s a familiar one: The Siloing Problem. Let’s look at the way businesses in our 2nd industrial revolution economy tend to function: A problem gets observed by the design/marketing silo. They come up with a concept; they kick it over the wall to the engineering silo. Those guys apply whatever tech they happen to be most excited about; then the C-levels tell them to get it made, and the product gets tossed to the supply chain and manufacturing silo...  At that point it’s pretty much out of the hands of design and engineering, who’ll be lucky if they get to influence the product again… and if there’s a shift in demand, warehouses of obsolete product will have to be emptied before it is addressed. These walls have grown out of our mass produced, long lead time, long development cycle, high tooling cost past.  Many of us here like to focus on what printing will mean when it disrupts supply chains. We dream of on-demand products spewing forth from automated manufacturing systems. We contemplate what it will mean when a product’s design is disintermediated from its physical existence.   But we seldom think about what those changes will mean for design and engineering.  What happens when we start automating those?   
8. To frame the problem in a different way: If you look back to the desktop publishing revolution; which many of us considered the birth of ‘modern tech’, it started with three enabling pieces of hardware - fax machines, pcs, and laser printers… For the millennials in the room, there a was a time when making all those things work together was a real pain in the ass, like you wouldn’t even know. But the revolution didn’t come until there was software to tie them together.  It was Word, it was Excel, it was Photoshop - it was giving people tools that made creating content easy.  It was software that integrated and curated the process - that “just works” - allowing people to focus on the content they wanted to make, and not the tools for making the content. The ideological movement we’re calling Meta-Modernism boils down to a curation of integration similar to what we saw in those early days of personal computing.   Whether you call it Fax, Edit, Publish; or Capture, Compute, Create... or, as we do at my startup Metamason, Scan, Fit, Print... its fundamentally an issue of integrating and automating the actions of creation. On a philosophical level, we can understand these actions as the three pillars of Meta-Modernism: Input, Interface, Instantiate. 
9. At a high level, we take data in, we manipulate that data by applying it and giving it purpose, then we push it back out into the world. The real power is in automating that process.  That means creating pipelines that make the tech just work.  The user isn’t thinking about the tech, they’re thinking about what they want it to do. The practice of integrating digital technology into design originated with post-postmodern architects... They revolutionized design in ways that are a powerful preview for the future of 3D manufacturing. These early design innovations can be described in terms of ‘Exploration’, ‘Parameterization’, and ‘CNC Fabrication’. Perhaps you’ll recognize some of the forebears who blazed the trail:
10. Frank Gehry was a man known for being comfortable in his own disruptive skin.  (pull out piece of paper, ball it up) - Gehry said he wanted to make buildings with complex shapes like this one. Now, I’m a pretty good 3D modeler, but could I model this from scratch? How long would it take me? By digitizing sheets of paper, Gehry was able to explore forms beyond our imagination.
11. Zaha Hadid, the pioneer of generative design.  Her exquisite mastery of parametric design techniques showed us all that using algorithms to produce design doesn’t lead to the stale monotony one might expect... Instead she demonstrated that the results can be alluring, natural, and organic. 
12. In contrast, Anish Kapoor’s work worships the simplicity of perfect geometry only possible through digital tools... I designed robots for PSI, a fabrication company across the bridge in Oakland that produces Anish’s stainless steel works.   To produce each sculpture at aerospace levels of precision, we had to build custom CNC machines. Then constantly move back and forth between digital and physical space, scanning, manipulating and re-scanning until we reached geometric perfection. This integrated creation process is the lens from which I see the 3D ecosystem. The automated, integrated design principles and methods that were pioneered by architects like these, are now starting to shape how design and manufacturing is done in many other fields, and the Meta-Modernists have begun to emerge. They are today’s leaders at the frontier of integrated 3D technology, creating meta-designs that are fluid and data-sensitive. Here are a few inspiring contemporary examples of Meta-Modernism at work: 
13. First, exemplifying functional employment of scanning technology is Kegan Showenburg, and her company Sols... Who’s created a curated process for personalized orthotics from an app that utilizes smartphone and tablet cameras.  
14. Then I’d say the most impressive example of a customization platform for generating user created 3D content are the GUIs developed by N-E-R-V-O-U-S System.  Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Rosenberg have created a brilliant and elegant tool which have given non-designers an intuitive and fun-to-use UX for creating interesting printable jewelry. 
15. And when it comes to understanding the material science of 3D printed parts, and creating software tools to take advantage of them; Saiavash Mahdavi and his team at Within Technologies are in a league unto themselves.  They’ve created powerful geometric computation and optimization tools for functional purpose built use cases, like the printed heat-exchanger shown here. But gathering data, designing and fabricating don’t have to be 3 separate steps anymore.  Integrating them into a simultaneous experience...THAT is the point of Meta-modernism. Integrate and automate! Make something that “just works!” It’s only then that we can generate truly useful products that solve real-world problems effectively, efficiently and creatively.    
16. The siloing issue I mentioned earlier has led to a proliferation of beautifully useless 3D printed products. As the technology evolves, we are producing ever smoother, more refined thermoplastic chotch-skis to crowd our geeked-out mantles.  So where can we focus customization to provide more value?
17. Medical devices are an obvious starting point for the customization revolution...  Mass production of generic product shapes is the direct cause of discomfort, pain, and problematized user experience that leads patients to quit their prescribed therapies. Personalized, on-demand solutions can be more than beautiful- they can be genuinely life changing. And the immediate popularity of custom fit hearing aids and Invisalign braces, two of the best selling products which have come from our industry, demonstrate the potential for personalized medical devices to succeed in unprecedented ways.   So clearly medicine is a place where personalized solutions can create value - along with the margins to justify a one off approach.  The human face is the most sensitive and perhaps the most unique from person to person, and as such, most in need of customization. From an economic standpoint, it’s also where the products are the smallest, and therefore cheapest to print.  And, given that the ears and mouth were already taken, my company Metamason went for the nose.  
18. We saw an opportunity to create a meaningful solution to a very serious medical problem: sleep apnea - or more specifically, its treatment, the effective but wildly unpopular darth vader snuffalupagus mask that is CPAP.  With 1 in 4 men and 1 in 9 women suffering from apnea and a therapy quit rate of nearly 50%, CPAP is the perfect target for a Metamodernist overhaul.
19. We’re working with a number of cutting-edge partners, building an integrated platform which starts with a 3D scan of the patient’s face.  Then we apply a parametric product design algorithm to create a completely conformal mask.  To enable our integrated solution, Metamason has developed a technique for 3D printing medical grade silicone; something we call Investment Molding.  The result is a radical departure from conventional CPAP: a soft, comfortable mask that is designed intelligently and fits perfectly. 
20. At Metamason, we’re pretty enthused about the near future that’s being enabled by emerging technology: we’re looking forward to to optimizing the pneumatic flow of each mask for it’s patient, to optimizing its fit by doing finite element analysis from thermal scans of our patients’ face.  To dial in the elasticity of our materials to match our patients, so the masks fit gently; but never leak.  What we’re doing is on-demand engineering for every user, for every product, to make the product as perfect as we can. But there’s so much more to explore. We’re in the process of developing a Scan-Fit-Print app that puts our integrated design process directly in the hands of doctors and patients. And that second skin thing I mentioned? Here’s where the future comes in: as printers get bigger and cheaper, the scale and complexity of what we can all print will grow.
21. I’m here to say that the perfect product future means automating design and engineering along with automating manufacturing.  Maybe it scares you, surrendering control to algorithms and software...but by doing so, we can enable something that’s never been done before: true personalization.  Not just something that’s customized for you, but something that is on-demand designed for you, engineered for you, simulated and optimized for you - based on how you are, on what you do, and what you want… Something you create yourself. And that’s what I want: for all of you to become Meta-Modernists, harnessing a robust ideology of integrated customization to make perfect printed products that improve people’s lives. 3D printing has too long been guilty of promising more than it has delivered. So let’s un-silo. Let’s integrate and automate our disparate components into beautiful and useful machines that empower everyday people. Let’s make the future arrive - let’s bring everything together in a way that “just works”... that more than works; that creates itself.