Evolving the Design Process, 3D Printing, and Fast Iterations

FELIPE CASTANEDA: I am Felipe. Good morning, as I said before. Welcome to this quick discussion of 3D printing. I'll just start by, well, I'll talk about some of the points that I will be touching on today, but I would like to know beforehand, who here has access to a 3D printer?

OK. Now who here has access, like direct access, to the printer? Now I'll explain that later. So that means not going through a technician or a service bureau, but like directly interacting with it. So less so. OK.

This talk today is going to be based on kind of understanding what are the different applications of 3D printing. How do we go beyond this general idea that printers can print anything, right? You no longer need to go to Amazon and things like that.

But, well, I'm a Design and Marketing Manager for MakerBot. I've been working with them for about a year now. Before that I worked with Steelcase in furniture, also an architecture firm before that, also a design firm, and then also some social work beforehand. A couple of good projects that I had before.

Yeah, the talk is going to be about 45 minutes long, I hope. So a quick intro then talking about how this additive manufacturing compares to prototyping or using it as a prototyping tool.

What are the implications when you integrate 3D printing into your design practice or your development process? And finally, what are the best practices that you can have when doing so? We'll have some time for you guys to have questions if you have any at the end.

But yeah, we'll start by just saying, you know, what is 3D printing and going beyond just the general description, what I was saying before, on this idea that 3D printing is a method or a manufacturing process that can give us anything, right?

You can basically just select a spoon and print it out. Download a file and print it out and have it working for us.

I think that it was partially our fault as MakerBot initially to elevate that idea and to, I guess, create the idea that everybody could print anything, whatever they wanted at their houses, which is sort of true to a degree.

But I would say that most printers, and where the real value of 3D printing is not necessarily looking at it as a manufacturing process, right. So it's trying to understand what that difference between using 3D printer as a manufacturing process, versus using it as a prototyping tool.

And what I mean by that is when you're using it as a manufacturing process, it means that you're using a 3D printer to actually give you end results, right, end products that the customer, yourself, whomever, is going to be using them for an inventive purpose.

Whereas with prototyping, what you're trying to do is not necessarily generate the end result, but rather, iterate faster in order to get to that end result that will probably use a different manufacturing method.

It's not going to be just right out of the printer usable for you or ready to resolve. But rather it's just something that you're using to breach your ideas to actually get your ideas out of your head and to interact with those ideas in a physical way.

Overall, you know when looking at 3D printing as a manufacturing process, I would say that it's going to be more focused on really short production runs, maybe really highly technical components or very unique applications.

Let's think about medical applications, right. So if you're printing a hip replacement, if you are printing like a skull replacement, it's just going to be a one-off. You're not going to be printing many of them, which is why it really makes sense to have these really accurate processes that will generate the one-off.

Whereas if you're using it as a development tool well you'll be using it to do concept iterations. You'll want to do like form-fit studies. You'll probably want to move fast and keep iterating and revving on those ideas that you may have, in order to, at some point, get to the actual manufacturing method.

But you're kind of a step before the manufacturing method.

And also it's important to understand that there's kind of a whole, different tiers of printers, right, from hobbyist printers that are basically just bare-bone machines that will print, you know, Pokemons and interesting things like that, prototyping tools that actually enable you to go ahead do these iterative cycle design processes, and then industrial machines that can actually generate these one-off geometries that I was talking about, that will actually give you specific material performances, specific geometries that you might get out of those machines.

So having said that, you know the question now is how do we integrate a 3D printer into our design process? What are the implications of using it not as a manufacturing tool, but rather as a prototyping tool. I would say that I really like this, it's called a squiggle. It's not mine.

It's [? Damon ?] [? Newman, ?] who first designed it. I think it's a really interesting way of showing how the development process happens. it's never, it's somewhat linear, but it starts in these kind of very gray areas where you are just trying to find your way around the questions that define the problem, trying to really understand what the problem is about, trying to find out what are the actual constraints for the project?

Because when you start, let's say, just thinking about I'm going to design a shoe, or I'm going to design a bicycle saddle, well, it's going to be really hard for you to know all of the possible limitations of the project in order to fully understand what the answer is going to be.

If I was to say, well, I'm designing a bicycle saddle, this is it, and print it out. That's more behaving like an artist than an actual design professional, engineering professional, who's actually going to want to test the idea, get a little bit more revs.

And this is exactly where, you know, early on in that process, using a 3D printer as a prototyping tool is really useful. It's right when you need to have a lot of ideas, a lot of wide explorations, this kind of motion thinking process that will enable you to better define what is it that you are trying to do.

So if we think about the design process being, overall, kind of having a problem, coming up with an idea, and then testing it out, and then coming up with a new set of problems, new ideas, and then testing them out.

So going back to that kind of flow, you'll want to go through those cycles continuously. We want to start off with the idea, iterate on it, have a new set of questions, have a new set of answers to those questions.

Maybe slowly, but surely increase the level of definition of the project, increase the understanding that you have of a project, but the important thing here is that I think-- I'm a believer in what's called constructivist learning. So learning by doing.

So trying to answer that question just on a piece of paper is going to be really hard. So you want to do all of this cycle and iteration process as close as possible to a physical object without keeping things abstract or just looking at it as a CAD object.

And also thinking about if we associate the development process with the new options and opportunities that parametric design or generative design gives us, where we have infinite options for solving the same problem.

This is an example where I was working with the architecture firm. We were just trying to create this roof, ceiling, of a cinema complex. But the thing was, the definition in Grasshopper, I don't know if you guys are familiar with it or not.

Basically, it's parametric design, where you are able to define, you know, how many holes do you want, how are you going to distribute them. And ultimately, you don't know the answers to which one, or you don't know how to pick the best one unless you actually go ahead and test it out.

You prototype it out. You print it out. You do it yourself, some sort of more advanced analysis by having the object physically with you.

OK, sorry about that.

And going back to the 3D-printed objects, any one of these objects-- so this is an example of just, like a shoe sole development. Any one of them is nothing more than a paperweight, right. Going back to that Pokemon example before.

Any one of these is just nothing more than those Pokemons. They only makes sense when using it as a prototyping tool as you are revving and as you show, show to yourself even, how is your thinking process evolving.

How's your idea evolving? How's your understanding of that problem evolving? And the other thing that I think is really valuable is that if an image is worth a thousand words, I would say a printed object is worth a thousand images.

And that's easy to say, because you think about looking at an object, even if you look at it in a CAD tool, in the CAD 3D environment, you're still looking at a 2D representation of a 3D object. And we, as design-engineer professionals, we are trained to interpret those data points, you know coming out of a flat screen and have a grasp of how that object is going to behave in a physical world.

But it's not until I really have it in my hands and I'm actually able to sketch on it, draw on it, kind of challenge the shape, and see how it's going to be-- or how can I make it evolve, what's working, and what's not that I really get the full picture of the object, that I really get to completely interact with the object.

And then go ahead and say, OK, for the next one, I'll want to core it out. This is like a bicycle saddle. I want to core it out and have it, yeah, be better performance as it's lighter, or more aero, whatever it might be.

Any questions so far? Cool.

So now touching on some of the best practices and how do we iterate faster. How do we actually go into the weeds and try to find out the best applications-- sorry, kind of trying to find the best way to get our ideas out by using our printers with us.

This is where I would go back to the initial question that I was asking you guys about how accessible is it, you know, the printers that you have around you. Is it going through a technician, through a service bureau, or does it look more like a graphic-analytic [INAUDIBLE] like MakerBot, or does it look more like this, where you actually have the printers right by you?

You can actually directly engage with them, directly send a print out. Test the idea, get it out, react to it, sketch on it. And also another important thing to note is that just by having it right by you and by being able to iterate on them continuously, you kind of diminish the weight that each of the prints have.

Meaning, if this print was a super expensive industrial-printed object, I would probably not be as comfortable as I am sketching on it. I would probably were treated with more respect than I need to, especially in those early stages, when I just want to test the idea.

I want to break it a little bit. I want to challenge a little bit, and I want to iterate on it.

So I'll run a quick comparison of what would two different cycles of a single print would look like having an in-house replicator-- naturally, I work for MakerBot, but I also am a big fan of replicating this way, but having it in house versus going out at a service bureau.

The price difference, I mean, especially when talking about professional development, it's not that much. $100 is not going to break your project. However, the time difference, that's what, at least, is more interesting for me.

If you need to do an overnight delivery, you're taking on a seven-day turnaround. And in those seven days, I could have been iterating on the part. I could have been reacting to the physical information that I'm getting from the object.

That's what I actually get when I have the printer in-house. So those seven hours are probably going to be seven hours that I spend, or that the print spends working while I'm not at the office.

So let's say I develop the first concept on Monday. Monday night, I print it out, and then by Tuesday morning, I already have a rev to look at and to iterate upon.

And because of that, within that same week, with a single in-house printer, you will have probably have five or six prints that are fairly inexpensive, as opposed to waiting the whole week to iterate on them.

You can always say that it might be possible to keep on iterating on the CAD model, and kind of on the abstract view of it. But the thing is, ultimately, the information that you're getting out of the physical object is not going to be the same as information that you getting out of the CAD object.

So here just comparing like two scenarios. In one, we have access to both, the fast iterations with the in-house printer and then also an industrial printer. And in the other one, we only have the industrial printer available for us.

And what happens is that, say, in week one, here, I iterate it two times. On week two, I iterate it three times, so it's not a lot of iterations, but I do get a lot of physical objects.

And as I'm iterating, slowly, but surely I'm kind of informing the new geometries that I'm generating. And as you can see here with one, what happened is, let's say, I had some extra time on the printer. So now I'm going to print it, and I just want to quickly test what would happen if I cored out the object that I was working with.

And I ultimately came back to that same idea in week four, and I said, you know what, it actually works, because whatever, it reduces the weight, it gives you me performance.

But on the industrial side, where I kept a more linear process, I wasn't able to actually go ahead and extend a little bit that process and go beyond the immediate print that I was getting.

So just by getting a few more options, the implications are not necessarily just being faster at the iteration process, but also getting more information out. And getting more information out of the computer and interacting with them in a physical way.

So how does that look like just by having that extra amount of printing time, you're able to test out more ideas and to get them out of the computer. Because when you interact with your ideas in the computer, I would say that it's, more often than not, the case is a very isolated experience.

You are just working yourself and the computer. It's going to be really hard to share those ideas out with a third party and have them react to it.

Granted you can share a screenshot, you can share a render even, but it's not the same as having the object and going with what a holder and saying, You know this is actually what we're thinking about what you think and reacting to it in a physical way. And the other think that is really important to consider is the way that you interact with the printer itself, so the software that we're using.

I personally love MakerBot, and that's not because I work with them, but I do. It's more because it's really easy, and I don't have to think about what I'm doing. I just want an experience that's seamless, that enables me to go ahead and focus on testing the idea.

I don't want to have a million variables that I can change when I'm printing. I just want to know, well, am I printing at a draft mode? Am I printing at a high resolution, am I printing with a specific material, and that's it.

I just need something that's streamlined enough that doesn't require going through a technician, doesn't require me to go to a service bureau in order to get my idea out.

And again, so how does this-- I would say this is a question for you guys, how does your process look like? How does it compare, having the opportunity of printing a bunch of prints in a single week versus just waiting for the one-off, and then, well, OK, I'll wait again.

This is another example that I brought today. It's basically showing the difference between concept and incremental iterations. This was a project-- it was, well, obviously a glasses project, but what we were trying to do is just find the best glasses and worst glasses for kids.

So what we see here is, overall, in the top, you have like iterating families, or what I would say concepts, so very different options for your project. And then going up on the y-axis is kind of those incremental iterations.

So once you select a family, you are actually able to test. That's the idea on that single family and just having little incremental changes that maybe at some point can have these non-linear jumps or non-linear influences that I showed you before, where these parents are actually starting to influence each other.

But again, it's not my focus or my main goal today is not necessarily to talk about the volume of the prints that you might have. But it's about not constraining your idea flow. How do you get to put your ideas out, interact with them in a physical way, which I would say is the best way to interact with them, and ultimately, get the idea out faster. Get out in the market faster.

And also considering the fact that, well, how are you going to mix the representation tools, right? At least as a designer, you have sketches, CAD renders, and prints, and they all take different amount of times, but they also have different amount of resolution.

A printed object, even if it's a draft one, even if it's like a low-resolution one with a desktop 3D printer, it's still giving you a lot more information than a CAD would.

Just because, no matter how good I am at sketching, no matter how good I am at creating renders, it's still just a static image of that 3D object. It's still something that I cannot interact with, orbit around, understand the implications of, well, how is this overhang going to work when I actually manufacture it?

How are the draft angles going to work? And so another fun example that happened as we were playing. This was kind of like just a thought exercise. But we were looking at this idea for the saddle, like simulating the process for the saddle. And we wanted to create just a texture, right. Let's say that you wanted a texture so that the rider wouldn't slip further back.

And as obvious as it might seem, when I printed it out, I found out that because of the way that I was placing the texture in the print, it basically didn't make any difference for me when trying to slide against it, because it was cored out. So I was just basically creating something that looked interesting.

But by flipping it over, I was able-- then you actually get the resistance or the added traction in the object. So that's one thing that I wasn't able to realize until I it printed. Sometimes you will be able to catch that mistake in the CAD, but it's so much easier to get ahead of the curve and kind of find where is your mistake. What could be the next iteration of the product just by having the object in your hands?

And then, here also another thing that is great with the MakerBot ecosystem is the fact that you have access to a range of print modes. What that means is that, as I was saying before, early on in the process, you just want to focus on these quick iterations. You're just trying to understand the volume, the shape, the ergonomic component of the thing that you're printing.

And you want you want it to get out really fast. Then as you progress, maybe something like Minfill, which is-- it's a new algorithm that we developed that helps you have a high-resolution object, really detailed, but it saves a lot of material inside of the part.

You guys are welcome at the end of the talk to interact with these two, but basically, what it means is instead of having a regular four or five pound object, I end up having one pound object that's going to be printing really fast but still giving me all of the high resolution detail on the outside that I need to interact with that shape.

And finally, well, if I wanted to test out more specific ideas around, kind of, CMF, so Color, Material, and Finishes, I could also use the experimental modes, where we offer a bunch of different, more specific finishes for the prints.

Another thing that is really important, at least for me, to understand is what's the size that I'm using to print. Am I printing just scale objects for smaller things, like a Mini could be used, or am I printing one-to-one objects where our Replicator is going to be good. Or maybe even printing like large objects, like more voluminous ones, that are better suited by a printer like the z18 that will offer you a larger build volume.

And more important than that, so when I started thinking about it beyond the single designer, beyond the single engineer, what are the implications of the ratio that you have of users versus the amount of printers. I think that this also correlates to the access that we have to the printers.

How often do you have to wait in line to actually get a part printed? And how is that hindering your development process? How does that stop you from getting that new idea out, from interacting with the printer? And what's the best way to actually manage your studio, your facility, in order to give as many people access to the printers as possible.

I'll give you now just a couple of examples, and after that I'll open the floor to see if we can have a discussion on it. But this is the first. A couple of years ago, I was working in the architecture firm. We were doing these really complex, but interesting kiosks for a market.

And the challenge was we wanted them to be made out of steel plate. But those geometries, as you can see, they were unique, organic, and convoluted. And as much information as we could create through blueprints and plans, it wasn't the same as to actually having those prints out in the field and being able to explain to the welders and the iron workers, OK, this is actually how we want those transitions to work.

This is actually how these conical sections can be solved. This is actually how those tapered angles are going to be to be seen in the part. So again, it's having that extra level of understanding, that full set of 3D information, that enabled us to explain and go ahead and manufacture those things.

This one, a little bit more recent, just last year, I was working with Steelcase and just trying to understand, OK, this project was based on-- it's kind of a little cocoon platform for the open plan where we wanted to let people know whether the cocoon was being occupied or not.

And again, something that we could test out in a render, like just having the light shining out of the object, but it wasn't until we actually printed the part, embedded the LEDs on the part, and were able to show off whether or not that signal, which is right now barely visible, but whether or not that signal was going to be visible, that we really understood what were the implications of placing the signal on the top, placing it on the side, on the bottom, and so on and so forth.

And finally, also with Steelcase, we were doing a fairly simple project. It was basically a movement sensor that allowed us to track the movements in the office. And for that we had a very, very straightforward kind of set of constraints.

We had a battery. We had an infrared transfer, a little chipset that would enable us to beam whether or not that sensor was being triggered or not. But again, having the opportunity of being able to lay out the batteries in different places. Having the opportunity of understanding how are we going to put those sensors out in the field.

And we ultimately ran a small alpha and beta runs where we printed a small one, like maybe 50 or 100 prints of these sensors, and we actually made them work and integrated the chipset on them.

It wasn't until we actually printed it out that we were able to understand what were the implications of the break? How could we better lay out the electronics inside of the housing and ultimately get to a better answer once we were ready to move forward with the manufacturing process, so, in this case, injection molding.

So, to sum up, I would say that we have three big stages of the development process, them being the draft stage, the concept stage, and the high resolution stage. And for each of them, you'll want to have different tools.

Understanding the fact that there's a place for industrial printing machines, there's a place for really high-end, the object printers, the ten thousands or, well, the 1,000 or 2000 objects that you're going to be printing out, those are probably at a later stage in the process.

When you're early on, when you're just trying to really rev on those ideas and really get an understanding of what you're doing, that's when you will want to have something much more accessible, something that actually enables you to take those ideas out of the computer and into your hands and iterate with them.

So with that, thank you guys for coming. And, yeah, if you have any questions, I would be glad to answer them.

[APPLAUSE]

Oh. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I know, well, you're from MakerBot, so Fused Deposition Modeling is obviously your main focus. With all the of the different 3D printers that are coming out, carving, et cetera, and all the other technologies, where do you see MakerBot going in the future? Are you staying with FDM, or are you looking at other opportunities?

What do you think will be the-- I personally, I think FDM is great, because it's fast, and it's very easy to use. Do you think there's going to be an evolution in the next few years?

FELIPE CASTANEDA: No, I think that for us, for MakerBot the focus right now is definitely FDM. I think it's definitely-- we are doing better at supporting our main target markets, education and professionals.

And for them, as I was saying, unless you're actually printing an end-use part, which requires a much more higher-end machine, I would challenge some of those entry level metal machines and carving machines, just because they won't give you the resolution or the accuracy that you look for and print parts.

And if that's not what you're getting out of the printer, I think that you're better off with a prototyping machine that will enable you to understand the requirements and then move on to the actual high end part. So for MakerBot, the answer is FDM, because as you said, I think it's a really powerful tool still. And I think that there's a lot to be explored with it.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I definitely agree your the philosophy that, especially having the printer in house enables the designer to not hesitate.

FELIPE CASTANEDA: Exactly.

AUDIENCE: That you can click print and even if you chuck it away, it doesn't matter. You devalue the object. It makes you add revs sort of.

FELIPE CASTANEDA: And that's really valuable, right. So that's what I was touching on with all of these examples. It's really good and healthy, I would say, that I don't treat these as pristine objects, right. They are not something that was $1,000 or even $500 to print. And even in the timescale, I'm not looking at them as something that took me two weeks to get out of the machine.

So I can go ahead and see, OK, how much does it bend and break it, and I don't care for it, because this was like an eight hour print. It was probably not even $5 in materials. And that's really good, because I'm actually enabling myself to interact with the printer, sorry, with the part on a whole new level.

It's not disrespecting the print, but being able to really engage with it that will enable me to understand or to get the most information out of the part. Yes.

AUDIENCE: So expanding on that, using the desktop printers as an aspect in iteration, depending upon the size of the design room, would you find it better to have designers have direct access to the printers and actually setting up and creating their own prints, but then also in charge of care for the printers and changing out materials, stuff like that, or do you see it a time when there gets to kind of a spill-over point where there's too many designers trying to get their prints on, and you'd have to bring on, or someone would have to be designated as a technician for the machines?

FELIPE CASTANEDA: Well, you know, I would say there's two answers to that question. First of all, I think it's good to have the responsibility to care for the machine. But you don't want a machine, you don't want a hobbyist machine that is going to be breaking every single print, right.

I don't want a machine that I'll have to spend two hours every time that I need to print an 8 hour print. Ultimately, that's not useful for the company. I'm just wasting money. So you want a system that's robust enough for you to have that experience of directly printing to the machine, having that super open access.

And then the question is also how does that correlate to the headcount that you're supporting? How many prints do you usually send out in a week, in a month, and how does that correlate to the number of printers? And more often than not, the case is that if you're buying an industrial printer, you'll probably be able to buy one, and that's it.

So the question is what's more valuable, to have a couple of them in your space and then whenever you need that industrial printer, you go out to a service bureau, and you actually just print that one-off with a very specific purpose in mind, or do you just have a single high-end printer and constrain yourself to that bottleneck where you'll add that technician, you'll add some time to the development process and so on.

Any more questions? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Before you clear off, Felipe, I'm also big [INAUDIBLE]. We're here at the show. We have a booth. We'll be there all week if you guys wanna stop by if you have any specific questions--

FELIPE CASTANEDA: Oh yeah, if you guys have like any specific projects or ideas in mind that you want to test out, we'll be out there. You're more than welcome to come and see us. And we'll have some more examples of these development processes. Yes.

AUDIENCE: I actually had a question, but I came in a little late, so maybe you covered it. Let's take a scenario where they have three or four printers for the office and trying to get everyone engaged, is there any materials that are potentially hazardous in the office? Is there an air quality issue?

FELIPE CASTANEDA: Yeah, we didn't touch that much on the material side, and I think that's also because at MakerBot, we offer one material right now. It's PLA. Well, PLA and Tough PLA. It's corn-based. It's biodegradable, and it's OK to use in the office environment. So that's also an important consideration.

When printing ABS, it's not-- well, first of all, it's a little bit thermally unstable. What that means is that basically once you print it out, it tends to shrink more than PLA does. Old-school engineers really like it, because that's kind of the material that you're actually using in the manufacturing processes, and they want to feel that they are as close as possible to the final manufacturing tool.

But again if you're just developing the shape that will help you understand the question at hand, you probably don't need to have that specific material. And that being said, well, if you're having a desktop printer, you'll probably want one that actually offers you material that's healthy enough for you to have it right by your desk.

At MakerBot, I'm lucky enough to have my own printer right by me, so I have my computer and my printer, and it's just amazing. And it smells like pancakes, or I think it does.

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah, any more questions?

FELIPE CASTANEDA: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Going back to the materials, are you looking at any custom materials at MakerBot?

FELIPE CASTANEDA: So the nice thing about being the designer and working not just as a designer, but as a marketing person that I get to both sell the product, but also develop it. Although I am actively working on the new printers, I cannot discuss entirely the range of options.

We will have additional capabilities, that's for sure, yeah.

AUDIENCE: Expermiental extruder.

Oh, yeah, so we actually just introduced the experimental extruder. That's basically, it's kind of a new platform that enables you to use outside materials with our printers. So for now, we partner with colorFabb, and now you can use all their materials, so quartz, steel, wood, copper, and even flexible one.

I'm really excited for the flexible one, because it actually lets you kind of prototype different durometers, which is great. I would say that's great. Again, if I'm saying I just want to get the shape out of the printer, but the durometer is also really important, I'm not focusing on the finished material, but rather the performance and how compliant is the part going to be.

So that's another thing that we've recently launched on the materials side. Any more? OK, well, thank you guys all for coming. We hope to see you guys at the show and, yeah, thanks again.

[APPLAUSE]