Hacking Design
By Avinash Rajagopal
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Copyright © 2011 by Avinash Rajagopal
All rights reserved.
To my sister Ambica
“The task of transforming is the only course through which knowledge may be obtained.”
—Enzo Mari, Industrial Designer
“I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe."
—R. Buckminster Fuller, Design Visionary
Table of Contents
1. The Almost Reproductive Robot
Introduction
What if you could press a button and have a machine build you any product you wanted? What if the knowledge that has long been the domain of engineers and industrial designers were freely available? What if all of us had the means and the know-how to modify our physical environment, to tweak and subvert the objects produced for us by designers and manufacturers?
A new generation of hardware hackers, more concerned with manipulating physical materials than cracking codes, is concerning itself with precisely these questions, and is making steady progress towards new models of production and consumption. These hackers have developed low-cost 3D printers, organized in hackerspaces, and built vibrant and creative communities, both online and offline.
Designers have not remained indifferent to this phenomenon. There are already several cases of cross-pollination where designers have experimented with open source creation and customization, trying to come to terms with the hacker’s vision of the future.
This book will examine both common histories and persisting misunderstandings between hackers and professional designers. By digging deeper into how designers have come to terms with DIY and hacking, I hope to uncover shared ground on which the two creative communities can work together.
1. The Almost Reproductive Robot
“So, we were promised flying cars,” complained Bre Pettis to an amused audience at the technology conference Gnomedex in August 2009. “We were promised space colonies! We were promised jet packs! And we were promised a machine to make anything we wanted!” An image of the Replicator machine from Star Trek: Next Generation popped up on the screen. “I can’t really do anything about the first three yet, “ Pettis went on, “but I’ve got the 3D printer part nailed. And I’ve made it so you can do it too.”1
The Star Trek Replicator was a shiny white box that used some alchemy of subatomic particles to magically materialize objects.2 The 3D printer Pettis is talking about isn’t quite as slick. The Cupcake CNC, sold by Makerbot Industries, is a dinky little wooden cube with its innards—multicolored wires, metal rods, and oversized bolts—proudly on display. A long plastic filament, also supplied by Makerbot Industries, is fed into a heated nozzle that melts the plastic and “prints” it onto a moving platform. The motion of the platform can be guided by any 3D computer model, even one made on Google’s free Sketchup software. Laying one line of molten plastic on top of another, the Cupcake CNC Makerbot converts the virtual model into a real object, all the while sounding exactly like an old dot matrix printer.
If you take the really long view, one beginning of the Makerbot story—the creation of a machine that can in turn create all the other objects that fill our lives, including, therefore, more machines like itself—is in seventeenth-century Sweden. The philosopher René Descartes, invited by Queen Christina to her court, was explaining the finer points of his latest book, The Passions of the Soul. One of his arguments was that the human body could be regarded as a machine. The skeptical Queen’s response was that a machine could never do certain things that a human body can—make babies, for instance. She famously pointed to a clock and said, “See to it that it produces offspring.”3
Thus began the 350-year-long quest for a machine that could make more of its own kind. In 2006, the challenge was taken up by Dr. Andrew Bowyer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Bath University. Bowyer had developed a “self-replicating rapid prototyper,” or RepRap for short.4 With this first version, Bowyer launched the RepRap project, using a free software license to release all the information for building his machine. RepRap has since undergone two stages of development, tellingly named “Darwin” and “Mendel,” after the evolutionary biologists.
In 2007, Bre Pettis co-founded NYC Resistor, a shared workspace in downtown Brooklyn for the new wave of young hackers, more interested in manipulating physical materials than digital code. There he met fellow hardware hackers Adam Mayer and Zach Hoeken, who shared an interest in the RepRap project. However, they decided that creating a true self-replicating machine was a chicken-and-egg problem. They decided to set their targets lower, and just build their own low-cost 3D printer. After more than a year of work, Makerbot Industries was founded on March 16, 2009, with Dr. Bowyer himself chipping in as an investor. They demonstrated their first successful prototype, the Cupcake CNC, by printing scores of shot glasses shaped like dodecahedra 5. Within a month, Makerbot had sent out its first order of Cupcake CNCs.
Each of these went out as a kit of parts, accompanied by the specifications for each part. Customers received not just instructions for assembling their own machines, but also all the information they would need to build one from scratch, in keeping with MakerBot’s commitment to the Open Source movement. A Makerbot costs upwards of $750, so with the plastic raw material and other add-ons thrown in, a basic kit could be had for as little as $1,000.
The cheapest industry standard 3D printers, which are used by manufacturers and design firms for prototyping, are sold at ten times that amount.6 It is tempting to cast the Makerbot as a revolutionary competitor that will bring on the age of desktop manufacturing. But the Makerbot can only make objects that are six inches tall. That is no match for the scale and finish of the prototypes possible on industrial 3D printers. And businesses like Shapeways now outsource production on the big expensive machines,