3D Printing 2.0 – Democratizing Design

So this was not the blog I imagined I’d be writing post-MBA. That’s right, it’s all done, graduation has been and gone and I’m currently reflecting on the experience and trying to write down some insights that aren’t obvious so I can share them with you and close out that chapter but… I’ve gotten side-tracked, in a good way, but it’s consuming processing power like cookie clicker when you hit the trillion cookies/sec mark in v1.035 (incidentally, if you’re OCD best you stay away from that one. It’s awesome but it’s been running on my desktop for ~20 days now and I dream of golden cookies)

I briefly mentioned it in a couple of previous posts; a new start-up idea around 3D printing (additive manufacturing is the pro term here but I like 3D printing because most people, by which I mean my parents, have an intrinsic understanding of what that is and if my parents understand it then it’s being explained right) but the more time I spent on it, the better it got. It’s ended up with me enrolling friends and family, meeting new people who love the idea or want to work in the same space and the idea has evolved so I thought now was a good time to share it a little further and get some feedback.

I’m going to go high level to start with and address the headlining topic, 3D printing is awesome, it allows you to print anything you want, out of a ton of materials (flexible and rigid plastics, metals like titanium, aluminium and gold, human cells, wood, sand), truly amazing stuff. But like any tech, there are some catches. Firstly, you’ve got to have some skills. You need to be able to CAD stuff (or at least model it in 3DS or blender or something), you also need to have access to a printer and with that you need access to some time and patience because it’s still trial and error for a lot of things. You design something, you hit the print button, you go over to the machine, you watch it build the first 3mm and then it starts drooping because your overhang is too large or your layer thickness is too fine or any number of issues. So you throw that one out, go back to your model, change the design and you try again.

This is fine for enthusiasts and tinkerers (the vast majority of the market who currently own a printer) because that’s part of the experience and you’re doing it because you love it and you’re excited about it. But for the market outside of that select group, it needs to be simpler. This is where professional groups come in who can take your model and print it for you and further to the skills requirement above, if you can’t CAD then you can contract someone who can or license prints of things that they have designed.

So this is where the market is right now, sites like shapeways, sculpteo and cubify all have these online stores where you can buy objects designed by someone else and either print them yourself or get the site to print them for you.

I like to think of these guys as 3D Printing 1.0. They’re using the technology and trying to make it available for others but they’re kind of missing the point: buying cool stuff is awesome, buying customized cool stuff is even better but the end-game here to be able to make it yourself so that what you see in your imagination is what you (or some third party fulfillment group) print.

To do this we need to talk about tools, specifically CAD. I don’t have a lot of experience with modeling tools like blender so I’m not going to say a whole lot about them but if that’s your area of expertise, tell me if it’s the same experience for you. CAD is a tool, designed for a specific job, initially allowing for the digitization of 2D drawings and then and over the years it’s evolved to become a tool for development of 3D models. It’s incredibly powerful and you can’t be an engineer without being able to CAD your ideas because that’s how people expect you to communicate them. But that really only works for us engineers. We’ve been taught to think in a particular way to make it easy for us to create 3D models using the existing system. But there’s a pretty significant barrier to entry here in terms of learning to use the software proficiently and this is a problem because that barrier is what’s stopping people outside of that early adopter/engineer/tinkerer community from adopting 3D printing.

The problem is recognized, people and companies are taking steps to try and fix it. Products like DesignSpark, Google Sketchup, TinkerCAD and AutoCAD’s 123D suite make some stuff easier or cheaper to do but we’re boxed in by who we are and the way we think. We’re engineers so we’re trying to make a better CAD program without thinking about whether it’s the right tool for the job and I’d like to argue that its not.

It comes down to a fundamental understanding of the differences between the way an engineer designs things and the way everyone else does:

1. Complexity: if you’ve got a tool that can make anything then it’s probably going to be pretty complex. For anyone but advanced users, complexity is scary, not only because there’s all this stuff there and what the hell does it do but you also create a sense of “dammit, one of these buttons probably does what I want to do with a click if only I could figure out which button to push” for the user which causes all sorts of cognitive dissonance. Don’t make the user feel stupid.
2.  The Paradox of Choice: unless you, the user, know exactly what you want then you’ll end up paralyzed by choice, both technical and design based, because the software you have will let you do everything. There’s a really interesting book called The Paradox of Choice (great overview via this TED talk) that I read recently (finishing the MBA = start working on the book backlog!) which I would highly recommend as it talks exactly about this problem and how it’s going to affect your users.
3. Attention: all of this stuff takes time and if you’re not an expert the temptation of “I wonder if someone’s already done it somewhere else?” is massive. Now your user is off to hunt through forums or 3D Warehouse for ready-made components and bam, they’re gone and so is the experience.

Advanced CAD packages are important, some people need access to that functionality because that’s what they do for a living. They need that. But the mass market doesn’t. I’m going to make another completely unsubstantiated prediction here and say that the people that are using CAD already are most of the people that are ever going to use it. You’re not going to convert the mass market to those sorts of tools because they’re not interested. They need a different tool.

So here’s where I think the 2.0 will go; web-based tools that help you build a specific product. Let’s say you’re a Dungeons and Dragons player (I know it’s a bit of a stretch but if you’re having trouble, just imagine you’re me, but shorter and less verbose) and you’re about to start a new game. There’s 5-6 of you playing, one person is the dungeon master running the campaign and the rest are players with characters. A lot of time and effort goes into creating those characters, you need to chose a race, and a class then skills and feats and equipment etc. You probably want to spend some time on the backstory too, right, so that your character has some motivation and intention behind what they are doing. So you, the young dwarven miner-warrior are the sole survivor of an orc raid on your isolated mountain quarry that left you badly wounded (I don’t know, you lost your hand or something) and you’ve sworn a blood oath to destroy the leader of the orc clan. Now in your head you can probably picture what your dwarf looks like, he’s short and bald (or maybe he has a mohawk) and he’s missing a hand and his weapon is a mining pick salvaged from the collapsed mine. Sweet.

At this point you’ve invested at least an hour, probably more. Over the course of the next 18 months you’ll play one night a week with your dwarf and he’ll become something special to you. He’ll have character flaws and adventures and will the basis for the engagement you have with the party and the game. He will be important, specifically he’ll be important to you (and to a lesser extent, to those people you play with).

But there’s one last piece before you start playing, most table top games these days use miniatures to represent characters and monsters and also include some sort of terrain around them. So off to the local gaming store you go with the picture in your head of what you dwarf (“Grum’zak”?) looks like. And you get to the store and there are all these blister packs with dwarves in them, and every friggin’ dwarf has an axe or a crossbow. There’s 20 or the little bastards and all of them are in the same stoic pose and every one is kitted out in platemail. And inside, your imagination and engagement die a little. Because you have to make do.

Now agreed the story here is pretty specific but although the details and product might change, the underlying need won’t. Whether it’s model trains, dungeons and dragons figurines or toy army men, we have a tool here, in a 3D printer, that can create exactly what we imagined. The hardware is there, all that’s needed is the software, something that’s easy enough to use that anyone can make a character in 10 minutes that looks just like they see it in their head. Computer games have been doing this for years, you can change the hair color and style but you don’t have to have spent 4 years at an engineering or design school to do it. These guys have hit the nail on the head, customizable but within limits. There’s enough variety to be unique but this is balanced against overwhelming the user with choice, hell I know guys who have bought games just for the character creation process (eg: City of Heroes).

So this is what 3D Printing 2.0 will be; giving users the ability to design and hold their product so that it’s what they imagined. As many of you will know, this is what I’ve been spending my time doing over the last couple of months, specifically for people who want to make their own characters for dungeons and dragons. If you’re interested, we’ll be starting a closed beta sometime soon so if you’re interested in participating, drop me a line.

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Authors Note: I’ve used some fairly broad strokes of the brush to describe what’s going on here. There are exceptions to the 1.0 movement I’ve laid out. For example 3D Systems bought MyRobotNation who allow you to build awesome custom robots and then there’s sites like Zazzy.me and Sandboxr who are already playing the the user created design space but in terms of where the market currently sits, I think this is a reasonably fair assessment. If that doesn’t sit well with you, let me know why in the comments.

Planning for the Next Step

So I’m rapidly approaching the end of the MBA and that’s pushed a whole new challenge to the fore; the job-hunt.

Ideally I’d like to do a start-up (second only to a private equity buyout of Dungeons and Dragons from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro but that seems… unlikely, at least by me, at this point). The issue is, after 18 months of self-funded study I’m getting to the stage where I can’t even afford the big boxes of Mi-Goreng noodles anymore (check them out, terrible but amazing!) so I need to find another funding source if I’m going to do this. There are plenty of places out there that do this (packages that include: some seed funding to keep you in noodles and internet; sometimes physical resources like storefronts or workstations and; mentoring) but two worth checking out are:

• Y-combinator: the biggest and the best out of the States
• Sketchbook Ventures: a local incubator that’s just opened funded by the guys from Catch-of-the-Day

Y-Combinator is the grand-daddy of the incubator/VC scene, located in Silicon Valley in the States and having spawned a host of startups including some really successful ones like Dropbox, reddit and AirBnB. Sketchbook has just started up in Melbourne and just divested Vinomofo which was bought out earlier this year and has been the test case for their incubator.

So I’ve got together with a couple of people (if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 3G Engineering it’s: “everything is better in a team”) and we’re putting together some pitches for the incubators. I haven’t sat on the other side of the table so I can only imagine the huge principal agent problem that these guys face. Y-combinator gets a couple thousand entries for each batch (they run their program twice a year) and end up taking around 60 teams on. 10 guys, 200 hundred pitches to review each and then after the first cut, probably re-reading and sharing a bunch for discussion. And in every one, each team is convinced that their idea is going make everyone rich (or happy, or environmentally responsible, take your pick).

So there are two parts to this, firstly we need to work out what idea (or ideas) we want think are our best. The second part is communicating our idea to the judges; demonstrating competence without isolating people with too much detail. There are a lot of good tools out there for doing both of these things (one I really like is the business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder) but because it’s trying to cover a lot of ground, it doesn’t focus on some of the stuff we think is pretty important. So we’ve decided to split up the ideas phase from the pitch phase using our own model:

Ideation Filtering Model: criteria for determining the best idea to pitch to incubators

In reality, nothing in any of the pie-sections is new, it’s just a different way of combining it and presenting the information but I guess that’s the secret to a good idea; looking at a bunch of information a different way and figuring out what’s important to you so that when you put it back together it tells the story we want.

So we’ll see how it goes. Right now I’m heads down on a new project in the 3D printing space, where the aim is to:  give the user the ability to make their board game character look exactly like it appears in their imagination. It’s fun, I get to combine my passion for dungeons and dragons with the exploration of a new technology and make a cool contribution to the community at the same time.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your feedback on the model, when you’re thinking of ideas, what other bits are important?

What an MBA can teach you about managing people

So I’m going to start off-topic and go back to a question that I faced when I was deciding whether to do an MBA; why do an MBA in the first place? For me, one of the big reasons was that what I was doing in my job role wasn’t really what I studied. That will be a problem for some people (like me) who feel like if they aren’t formally trained in the area, they don’t really have a handle on what’s going on. For other people, picking it up on the job is fine so one of the first things to ask is which one are you? One of the big things an MBA can offer is an introduction to and basic proficiency with a range of management functions that you need to be effective. One of the areas that I felt my technical degree really didn’t prepare me for was managing people.

For the first few years after you graduate your role as an engineer is mostly technical, you draft,  you go to internal planning meetings and design reviews and as your competence grows you get your own piece of the project to work with, first as a designer with drafting support then taking on more and more responsibility until you’re the lead engineer doing process and conceptual stuff, general assemblies and layouts and supporting the team of designers under you. This transition is gradual and takes place over a decade or more (your mileage may vary) but all of a sudden your in your 30’s and you’re no longer “engineering”, instead you’re managing an engineering team.

There are a lot of things that go into being a good manager of a technical team and I’ve been fortunate enough to work under some really good technical managers. Which is a really interesting thing to say because what makes a “good” technical manager? This was one of the things that I puzzled over pre-MBA, I could identify specific instances where they handled things really well or behaviors that were really effective but I had no idea how they all tied together. For example, one manager was always able to deliver on-time regardless of the resources he was given (although that did impact quality). Watching him work, he’d do a lap in the morning, sit at each team members desk for a couple of minutes (took about an hour and a half which meant he got the early ones early and the late ones when they came in too) and asked about tasks for the day and if there were any roadblocks, when he’d get out of the way. You didn’t see him until lunchtime, he worked in his office which was at the entrance to the teams work area and anyone from outside the team, wandering down the hall, got called into his office.

The reason it was so effective was because he understood what motivated those guys, they wanted to do a good job and being engineers and designers, they needed a couple of solid, uninterrupted hours to get into it. He asked his guys what they needed, then went and (to the best of his ability) did it. Meanwhile he ran interference, both up the ladder protecting the guys from other division that would poach and down the ladder from those one-thousand-and-one little attention grabbers that crop up during the day. His teams productivity was higher than anyone else’s in the company, by a lot. Engineers fought to get in his team so he got the best talent and it became a self reinforcing cycle.

The moral of the story here is pretty clear but when I was watching, the cause and effect was as far as I got, once I got into the MBA I understood that it ran deeper that that, the insight being that he understood what motivated his guys. Some of them wanted to do their best because the environment he created allowed them to get their best work done, some saw a winning team and wanted a piece, some appreciated being left alone to do what they knew needed to be done but the common thread was that he understood what motivated all of them and gave it to them. During the MBA I came across this model which was developed by Vroom and expanded on by Porter and Lawler (called the expectancy theory model) explaining how feedback on performance via the rewards system drives motivation.

A lot of time we see the word reward and we think compensation but it’s so much more than that. When you’ve got to turn up to work every day for the next 40 years, having somewhere you can turn up to and have a working environment you enjoy vs. having a working environment that causes you to develop a nervous twitch is worth a lot of money. This notion of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards also has to be equitable. When I compare my rewards with others I need to feel good about them, otherwise I don’t value them. In the same vein, Lawler and Porter did some pretty interesting research around how we value rewards and when a reward isn’t a reward. eg: a $20k bonus doesn’t mean as much to the CEO as it does to a drafty in fact it might demotivate a CEO because they look around and see the other people at their level getting a whole lot more in terms of bonus.

Having a framework like this is really useful for someone like me. When I’m looking at a teams performance I can use a model like the one above to analyze the components that can be tweaked to increase performance. When you want to be good at something you practice, you learn about it and you try and improve what you’re doing. An MBA is one way to do this, it helps you organize your management strategies and apply a system to what you do. If you’re struggling because your current job role has migrated from technical to managerial ask yourself whether that’s what you want, if it is then maybe an MBA can help.

How we learn

One of the questions that is asked in the introductory unit at Melbourne Business School is ‘How do you learn?’

On the surface it seems like a pretty simple question. You have an experience, observe what happens, reflect, adjust your approach and then try it. This is the basis of a model called ‘The Learning Cycle’ which was defined by David Kolb in the 70’s.

This both intrigued and bothered me a bit. I would consider myself an experiential learner, I don’t do particularly well with theory alone. For example when I was learning matrices in highschool it didn’t make any sense because I couldn’t see an application for it. As soon as I started having to plot things in 3D space and move them around (probably the most useful thing I got out of my 3D modelling subject!) it all fell into place.

But after thinking about it for a while, it wasn’t the model that was bothering me, it was my learning cycle. I agree with the general principal of the 4 steps but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I don’t do the second step most of the time. Sure, when something goes wrong you take the time (or others take the time on your behalf) to analyze what went wrong and feed it back into the system but when things are going well, who really reflects… especially if you’re stressed or busy, it’s just one less thing to think about which is a bit of a relief. But in doing so we rob ourselves of 2 things:

1. The positive reinforcement of getting stuff right. At the most basic level, if you only reflect on things when you fail then you can end up in a pattern where all you can see is your failures because they’re the only thing you’ve trained yourself to observe. Setting up a system where you can recognize your achievements in private and reward yourself for what you’ve done is a key component of building a robust self image.

2. The chance to reflect and maybe do stuff even a little better. This one is sort of a ‘maybe it applies, maybe it doesn’t’ type scenario but when was the last time you looked at something that you do all the time and actually thought: is there something I could be doing to make this easier/quicker etc. For stuff we do routinely, maybe the routine is preventing us from optimizing that task. I was talking about this with a friend and he mentioned brushing his teeth. Every night he has a shower, then brushes his teeth, recently he started brushing his teeth in the shower. Saves him 2 minutes in the morning, 2 minutes at night, he just gained half an hour to do other stuff. We laughed about it at the time (and the obsessive-compulsive nature of engineers to optimize) but there’s a some sense in what he’s saying.

Maybe it’s time to start looking around and see what kind of feedback you’re giving yourself and what you’re learning (or not learning) from it.