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.

Let me know about the closed beta

Email(required)

Submit

Δ

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?

Product Life Cycle and the Limitations of Frameworks

So I’m going to start with something I got from a class I took on product development 5 weeks ago. It’s taken me this long to get around to posting about it because I’ve been turning this idea over in my head. I guess most people are aware (conciously or subconsciously) of the idea of a product lifecycle. It’s been around since the 60’s and the basic premise is that products, most often thought of as an item, like a piece of clothing, have a lifecycle and at any given point in time, the product will be in somewhere on that lifecycle timeline.

Intially, Products are introduced and whoever is selling them is focused on creating awareness in the marketplace (in Australia recently: cider as an alternative to beer & wine). Assuming you’ve got a good product and a willing market you should experience growth, you’re trying to expand your distribution, competitors enter the marketplace, you start to focus on why your product is better, to differentiate from the other offerings. Then comes maturity, you’re a recognised brand in the marketplace, you have your niche or segment and you’re trying to defend your market share and remind people why they should be buying your product (they’re already aware of the product category and they know what your point of difference is) and eventually you fall into decline. Competitors turn your points of differentiation into points of parity, the markets shrinks because the trend has moved on (ie: basketball in Australia now, as opposed to the early 90’s) and you start looking for ways to invigorate your product or find a new product.

In pretty much all cases, companies are selling a product to make a profit and the model allows for that as well, showing that during the introduction phase you’re making a loss while you try and build awareness. During the growth phase you start to make a profit but at a lower rate as you reinvest to build your market and then you hit high profitability during maturity which peters out as it becomes unprofitable to manufacture and service your declining market. One way companies deal with this is releasing new products which then may make the model a self fulfilling prophecy because the new product superseeds the old and so you see that product go into decline.

But there’s something else, right now you’re probably looking at the diagram above and wondering why it just doesn’t look quite right. As a whole, the idea makes sense but as soon as you actually start to apply it in practice, things go wrong. For starters, there’s other factors affecting the sale of a product such as how your Brand is perceived and the timing of the product entering the market.  If the product you are launching is a brand new concept then you need to educate the marketplace about what it does (ie: the original iPad) or you might be trying to emphasize the differences in the functionality of your product where the product is understood (ie: car manufacturers)

The model above shows four relatively equal periods of time for each of the phases but that will almost certainly not be the case. Some products live really successfully in the maturity phase for a long time, others never get there (fashion clothing for example: grows and is gone).

Then there’s the industry factors: maybe you work in tech where the turnover cycle for a product (say a mobile phone) is a sales cycle of 12 months (3 months growing and being the latest tech, 6 months as the “Free on a $59 plan” phone and eventually in decline a pre-paid handset). Or you might have a business based around getting the product up and running, creating the niche, and then selling it off to a bigger player in the marketplace (a pretty common model for tech start-ups). Some people even create businesses around supporting the products that other people have dropped because of this idea that a product in decline is not worth it. For instance, SAAB closed it’s doors earlier this year which has a flow on effect to a bunch of secondary industries including auto mechanics. Now that SAAB owners can’t get their cars serviced through the manufacturer there’s a whole new market opening up, for a product that’s on the decline, but that still needs to be serviced and probably can be quite profitably. I guess the smart mechanics got out there and setup an agreement with the local SAAB dealership that went along the line of “you love the cars, your customers love the cars, give us the details of your servicing list and we’ll keep them happy.” Chris Anderson covers it pretty comprehensively in his now lightly defunct blog ‘The Long Tail’ which has a bunch of fascinating related examples like netflix where as their library of titles grew, they saw significant shift in consumption patterns away from the top 50 releases into less popular titles, servicing the long tail of the declining market.

These models and frameworks are designed for people like me, may not have experience in the area but need to apply some sort of structure to make sense of what they are seeing, the model is not much more than a pretty picture but credit where it’s due, it introduces the concept simply. I guess my observation for studies so far is that MBA students are always looking for a model or a framework to apply, the key points that you can take away from a lecture and the rule of thumb but these things only work if you check that things make sense in the context of the situation. Worse, in applying an ill-fitting model you actually limit your opportunities because you rule out servicing the declining market of SAAB’s or you go in with the mindset that a product is designed to be replaced every 18 months to keep consumers purchasing. Frameworks don’t replace the process of thinking and sometimes that gets lost in a formal education system.