Making Machines that Make

Digital fabrication embodies the promise of a radically different ecosystem of production. With only changes in code, people can produce locally, on demand, just in time. However, undoing two hundred years of human consumption models cannot happen overnight. Shifting from shopping to making, from discard to reuse, and from products-in-trash-out to data-in-data-out will take not only a reshaping of human behavior, but also of the infrastructure that underlies it.

Industrial manufacturing relies on machines that are complex to set up and run. Using those machines is predicated on mass-consumption to offset start-up costs of production. Humans come to the factories to tend to the machines. Inventory is produced, shipped, and stored to be immediately available to the consumer---but it is not on-demand production. It's just-in-case production. The excess inventory is trashed.

How do we enable local, on-demand production without loss of complexity? For digital fabrication to compete with industrial manufacturing, the threshold to production needs to be lowered to the point of it being better than the alternative.

Thanks to the maker movement, some machines are now broadly accessible: e.g. 3D printers are cheap, easier to use, and more widely available than ever before. However, one type of machine cannot meet the needs of all kinds of production. Complex goods, such as computational, analytical, or personal devices require multiple processes strung together in workflows.

We cannot expect decentralized production to happen with centralized machines.