Bringing 3-D Power to the People
Video|2:54
Reshaping Design With 3-D Printing
Industrial 3-D printing facilities, like Shapeways in Long Island City, are revolutionizing product design and manufacture.
The
first thing Duann Scott does when he arrives at the Shapeways factory
in Long Island City, Queens, is check the bins. They are yellow and
stacked in an all-white room that resembles the interior of a spaceship,
and they contain the latest prints to come out of the machines, which
can really stack up.
Shapeways,
a 3-D printing service and online marketplace, has been described as
the Amazon of 3-D printing for its on-demand model, if not its outsize
volume: The machines spit out about 120,000 objects a month, a tidal
flow of design that runs from the mundane to the astonishing.
On
a recent day, a quick search through the bins revealed a pair of
pliable black-frame eyeglasses, a scale model of a biplane, an
intricately detailed brass ring, enough plastic train cars to form a
miniature railroad and a figurine of two tiny purple women on tiny
purple trapezes. To what use any of these things will be put, Mr. Scott
usually has not a clue. But that doesn’t diminish the Christmas-morning
grin he gets while he is fishing through them.
Dream Factory
Credit Randy Harris for The New York Times
Mr.
Scott, a tall, bearded man of 39 who was born in Australia, holds the
title of designer evangelist at Shapeways. He judges 3-D design
competitions, gives talks at schools and businesses, and attends events
like South by Southwest
Interactive, in Austin, Tex., where earlier this month he and his
co-workers took a 3-D scanner to parties. (Willing guests were scanned
and could order a figurine of themselves printed by Shapeways.)
Mr.
Scott also spends a good portion of his day searching not just the
bins, but all the designs uploaded to the Shapeways website, for the
3-D-modeled equivalent of a gold nugget. Impressed by a designer’s work,
he will call and offer the use of company resources, or feature the
designer on the Shapeways blog, or extend an invitation to a party — or,
as he did with Bradley Rothenberg, a Manhattan-based architect and
designer, recommend the person in question to brands with an interest in
3-D printing.
After
seeing Mr. Rothenberg give a talk about a year ago, Mr. Scott suggested
him to representatives from Victoria’s Secret. The designer modeled snowflake angel wings
and other pieces based on sketches by the Victoria’s Secret design
team, which were then worn by the models in the Victoria’s Secret
fashion show late last year, garnering attention for Shapeways, which
printed the nylon plastic pieces, and for Mr. Rothenberg.
“I
keep my eye on talent,” Mr. Scott said. “I’ve always got this group of
amazing designers in the back of my mind if someone needs to connect
with them.”
Other
3-D printing services exist, including Sculpteo and Materialise, but
most of them are based in Europe. Kraftwurx, a Houston company, provides
on-demand printing and a venue for designers to sell their work, but it
doesn’t yet have the robust public presence of Shapeways, which
sponsors design contests, courts talented designers and partners with
museums.
In
his role as a Pied Piper for on-demand 3-D printing, Mr. Scott has been
instrumental in developing that relationship with the design community.
Some designers, like Mr. Rothenberg, use the company’s sophisticated,
highly accurate printers to make prototypes or produce their work.
Others, though, are treating the company as an everything-in-one
platform: manufacturer, e-retailer and venue for propelling their
careers.
Susan Taing, who started a 3-D design studio called bhold,
is one of those who has developed a close partnership with Shapeways.
Ms. Taing, 33, first experimented with 3-D printing and modeling as a
hobby, designing simple things like an earbud cord winder. Last year,
she used Shapeways to print the device, which she called the bsnug wrap,
and began selling the tool through the Shapeways website.
“Every
few days I got more ideas as to what I could do with 3-D printing,”
said Ms. Taing, whose offerings now include the bholdable espresso
tumbler ($69) and the bheard sound pod ($39.50), an acoustic amplifier
for smartphones. “I’d been thinking about starting a company, and once
the concept came, it felt right.”
It
was the Shapeways “lower risk, lower barrier” model, Ms. Taing said,
that made it possible for her to start her own business. Because
Shapeways prints on demand, there were no discouraging upfront
manufacturing costs; Shapeways also handled time-consuming back-end
processes like billing, shipping and customer service. Ms. Taing simply
uploaded a printable design, set a price above the cost Shapeways
charged her to print and paid the 3.5 percent processing fee out of her
profit. And she was assured that supply would exactly meet demand. “You
don’t have to manage inventory for something that may or may not be
needed,” she said. “It’s much less wasteful.”
Evan
Gant, an industrial designer in Massachusetts, said if not for
Shapeways, many of the ideas he comes up with in his spare time would
never make it out of his notebook. “To develop a product takes a
tremendous amount of time,” he said. “There’s not only initial
conception and design, but beyond that there’s a massive amount of
funding, you have to find the right manufacturer, you have to understand
retail.”
It’s
unlikely that Mr. Gant or any outside investors would have devoted
significant resources to manufacturing Button 2.0, a shirt button with a
clip that he designed to secure an earbud cord. (Stray earbud cords, it
seems, are one of the trials of modern life.) But after uploading a
computer-aided design (CAD) model to Shapeways, he received an instant
production quote and ordered a few to test. And once he refined his
design, he sold them. Total R&D: about $15.
“I think Shapeways charged $2.50 to make that button, and I added $1.50,” Mr. Gant said, for his own profit.
With
Shapeways handling the manufacturing and back end, “what you’re left
with is conceptualizing the design,” he said. “And documenting it to get
your story out there.”
Although
Shapeways promotes designers and tries to “surface,” from the tens of
thousands of items for sale on its site, what it thinks are the best
goods, marketing is largely left to the designers, as are patent issues.
Mr. Scott’s favorite designers to work with, he said, are the ones who
grasp form and 3-D printing technology, but can also produce a good
video or photography.
“Once
we see someone can do that well, we’ll promote them and help them to
improve as much as we can,” he said. “Because the more successful they
are, the more successful we are.”
And
users like Mr. Gant have accepted and even embraced those
self-promotional duties. Mr. Gant currently offers eight products for
sale in his Shapeways shop
(not including Button 2.0, which he stopped selling after someone
claimed an existing patent). They range from a modular flower-planter
system ($75) to a liquid-siphoning toy for children ($12). To promote
them, he posts professional-looking photos or videos, and often reaches
out to design blogs.
A calm female voice narrates all the videos. Could that be Mr. Gant’s wife?
“Yes,” he said, laughing. “It gets very low-budget.”
Still,
that sense of play and experimentation, in both the design and the
marketing, is part of the appeal. “With Shapeways, the risk is so
little,” Mr. Gant said. “It’s not like I’m going to China and producing
10,000 of them.”
The
other big attraction for designers is the company’s printers. Boxy,
refrigerator-size machines that glow orange when working, they can print
objects of greater size and complexity than desktop 3-D printers can.
And through partners, Shapeways offers access to materials like
gold-plated and polished brass, stainless steel and ceramics. The
objects have the professional-looking finish that the marketplace or the
art gallery demands.
Ashley
Zelinskie, 26, a sculptor who works with 3-D printing, tried using a
desktop machine to print a full-size chair whose structure was embedded
with hexadecimal code readable by a computer. Influenced by “One and
Three Chairs,” a conceptual art piece by Joseph Kosuth, the project was
an exercise in high-tech frustration.
“It
took me two years of printing every day, and then I lost my mind,” Ms.
Zelinskie said. She bought a nanny cam to keep tabs on the glitchy
machine in her studio and later moved it to her apartment. “I got to the
point where I could be asleep and hear it messing up,” she said.
Last
December, Ms. Zelinskie contacted Shapeways to print her chair. When
the nylon plastic pieces arrived at her house a few days later, she
said, “the chair was built within minutes. The parts snapped together
easily. It was clean, professional. It looked like it belonged in a
gallery.”
Ms. Zelinskie’s “One and One Chair”
now sits on the second floor of the Museum of Art and Design in
Manhattan. Shapeways has an interactive space there as part of “Out of
Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” an exhibition on computer-assisted
methods of production. It was Mr. Scott, in his evangelist role, who
invited Ms. Zelinskie to become a Shapeways artist-in-residence at the
museum.
“Shapeways
has really backed me,” Ms. Zelinskie said. “They point me in the
direction of new materials. They did a blog post on me. If you’re with
them, you’re in.”
Dhemerae Ford, half of a design duo called the Laser Girls,
has been similarly fostered by the company. She and her partner, Sarah
C. Awad, worked at the 3-D printing lab at New York University, where
they began making fake fingernails in wild designs. They used N.Y.U.’s
printers for prototypes, but as Ms. Awad said, “Shapeways has printers
that N.Y.U. doesn’t have,” offering materials like nylon and metal. And
“we could more easily produce and send out nails to buyers.”
Around
the same time, Mr. Scott noticed that an acrylic that Shapeways makes
is similar to the material used for fake nails, and he looked for
designers willing to experiment. “I’d been contacting women on Instagram
who are into nails,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I know that sounds
bad.”
The
Laser Girls met representatives from Shapeways at a tech event last
fall, and have since begun selling their nails through the company’s
site, printing them in standard materials like nylon plastic, but also
bronze-infused stainless steel. “They’ve helped us a lot from a business
sense,” Ms. Ford said. “In terms of design, they’ve given us ideas for
ways we can push the technology.”
Of
the Laser Girls, who are in their early 20s, Mr. Scott said: “It’s not
always established designers who are doing some of the best work. It’s
kids coming out of school and really kicking it.” And that, he said, is
part of the joy of discovery.
New York designers, Shapeways also offers the advantage of proximity.
Ms. Taing, for instance, runs her design studio from a tiny office in
Long Island City, where on a recent afternoon a MakerBot desktop printer
was humming away in a corner, producing a prototype that may eventually
be sent to Shapeways, if it proved functional. The office is just one
block from the factory, and Ms. Taing has visited several times, to
resolve production issues and to speed the delivery by picking up
finished prints.
One
of the few complaints about Shapeways, it seems, is its turnaround
time. It can take a week or longer, depending on the material, to
fulfill an order. (“The two weeks is rough,” Ms. Ford said.) And the
company doesn’t ship partial orders.
Also,
as Ms. Taing pointed out, Sculpteo, a rival on-demand printing service
in France, has much wider color options, while Materialise, a firm in
Belgium, offers titanium, a material Ms. Ford wants to try.
Nevertheless,
Ms. Taing and Ms. Ford said they use Shapeways for much of their
printing because the company is local and consistent in its quality, and
it supports the 3-D design community.
Ms.
Ford said: “I’ve been to their factory. It’s very homey. I was welcomed
less as a customer than as someone who is interested in the technology.
We all geeked-out over the printers for 30 minutes.”
The
manufacturing process for nylon plastic, the most common material,
could be described as a blend of high-tech and high-school art class.
Engineers approve the uploaded design files and assign them to a
“build,” in which as many objects as possible, perhaps 1,000, are
virtually fitted together, as if in a game of 3-D Tetris. The build
comes out of the 3-D printers in a square cake of nylon powder. The
cakes are cooled and the powder brushed off to reveal the objects
inside, a process Raheel Valiani, the director of operations for the
Queens factory, likened to an archaeological dig.
Young,
hip-looking factory workers then sort the objects, hand-color some of
them using boiled fabric dyes (white is the default shade for nylon
plastic) and package and place them in the yellow bins to be shipped
out.
Shapeways,
which started in the Netherlands in 2007, as part of an incubator run
by Philips, the electronics maker, initially outsourced its 3-D
printing. Now there are two factories, one in Queens and the other in
Eindhoven in the Netherlands; the one here is adding four printers to
its fleet of 12, at a cost of $500,000 or more each. The hope is that
the new machines will increase capacity, speed up work flow and bring
Shapeways closer to its long-term goal of overnight fulfillment.
Of
the thousands of objects printed each week, iPhone accessories and
hobbyist parts like model railroad cars are the most common, Mr. Scott
said, as is jewelry. “Drone parts are currently very popular, too,” he
added.
Still,
despite the production volume, and a few breakout objects that have
sold in the thousands of units, most designers aren’t getting rich
selling their products through Shapeways. The company declined to
disclose combined earnings for its 15,000 shop owners.
Mr.
Gant estimates that he has made about $800 so far through his Shapeways
shop, but has spent about $300 on prototypes and printing his designs.
As Mr. Scott noted, however, once a product has been designed and
uploaded, there is potential for its designer to earn royalty-driven
passive income, something Mr. Gant has experienced. “I will still,
weekly, get a couple sales,” he said. “It still slowly trickles in. As I
do more products, the trickle gets a little bigger.”
Mr.
Scott said he is looking forward to the first Shapeways millionaire.
Perhaps it will be him. In addition to promoting all the designers who
use Shapeways, he is a designer himself. Bits to Atoms, a digital
fabrication studio and consultancy he founded, has a Shapeways shop
where you can buy the bronze skull ring that he wears on his right hand.
That
ring was the second design Mr. Scott uploaded, and it inspired his
first act of evangelism. He photographed it and sent the photos to
jewelry blogs. He earned a few thousand dollars from sales.
“For
months afterwards, I would sell a few more rings and make more money,”
Mr. Scott said. “I started documenting what I did and shouting to the
world: ‘This is the future of design.’ ”
