The rise of 3D printing – what I want, when I want it

3D printing via Wired ‘Found – Artifacts from the future’ Dec 2006

One of the scanning hits I am currently on the look out for is the rise of 3D printing. This has been an emerging technology which is well along the adoption curve now, you can get a latte with your printing in Tokyo. The first real image I used of this possible future was in Wired’s Found series in 2006 and is reproduced here. I used this image in my Masters classes and also with clients to ask people about how disruptive they thought this technology could be. This particular technology is one which generates many interesting conversations about urban infrastructure, manufacturing policy and consumption based industries. The world looks quite different when I am choosing the product, buying the raw materials and printing on demand. Already, I can design my own doll via Makies which means I could manage my children’s access to commodified images of women, and I could design a copy my own body to keep them company when I am not around.

There are already 3D printing vending machines in a University in Virginia and plans to build a room full of plastic furniture (thanks to Emerging Futures). What is interesting to me is how this emerging technology intersects with the values shift to collaborative consumption, the movement from ownership to stewardship.

Could the rise of closed loop manufacturing aligned to 3D printing seed new industries in recycling, garbage mining and regional warehousing of raw materials?  Given the link between fossil fuel use and climate change, this is a shift we have to become much better at making do with what we already have access to.

These trends also intersect the internet of things along the way making the rise of internet enabled, home manufactured recycled goods a very interesting industry sector. What do urban areas look like when stuff isn’t being moved around? What do transport systems look like? How is economic confidence measured if we aren’t out buying all the time? What will people do with their need for retail therapy? Under these conditions what has value in terms of work and skills? What will we buy when we have choice over how it looks, how it fits and the materials it is made from?

Are you considering the future impacts of these issues in your planning? How do you have conversations about these things in your executive team?

Actionable Foresight and Forecasting

Actionable Foresight operates from the premise that in order to usefully use foresight we need to:

1. Understand as best we can what is the fundamental issue we face;
2. Find new pathways of thinking about the situation, the circumstances and ourselves in order to expand the future option space;
3. Generate working models of those future options – including what happens to the fundamental issue, what happens to the circumstances, what else emerges and, very importantly, what is the pathway to that option; and finally
4. We need to choose an option and then commit to its future pathway.

This approach is consistent with our understanding of how people utilise ‘hope’ in order to transcend difficult circumstances and to find purpose. It is also a process that creates the favourable conditions for also ‘finding’ hope and purpose. So our approach bootstraps itself onto our innate capacities and also develops those capacities. Yet this approach is quite different to what most people would understand as the most useful way to use the future – making a forecast and then acting on the basis of what the forecast says. Does this mean that we don’t think forecasting is useful?

To answer this it is best that we ensure what it is we mean when we use the term forecast.  A forecast does attempt to make use of the future (like foresight does). A forecast:

1. Starts with a question or problem about the future – “will it rain tomorrow?” “how many people are going to need a hospital bed in ten years time?” “how much food are we going to need to produce on the planet to feed the estimated population a hundred years from now?”
2. Next you collect data that you think is relevant to the question you are asking;
3. Then you build a model of how the future will work itself out based on the data you are using. This model can be as simple as how you think the world works (“Give people more education and they will become more responsible citizens”) or as complex as a detailed computer simulation (The World3 simulation used in the Limits to Growth, the Climate Change models used by the IPCC or the Meteorological models used to forecast tomorrows weather);
4. Next you test your model on the only hard data you have of how the world really works – the past. You run your computer simulations time and time again, changing variables and weightings to reduce your forecast error or you use your memories of what happened in the past in order to test your ideas about how the future works;
5. Now you reach the big decision point – “Is my model valid based on all my testing against the past?”  If you answer “yes” then your answer to your initial question is what your model tells you the future will be based on the most current data you have. You have faith in your model – faith in your judgement of the past, faith in the past as a reliable predictor of the future – and so you act accordingly. If you say “No” then you doubt your model – you doubt your judgement or you doubt the past as a reliable predictor of the future – and so you need to do something else. Build a new model or try something different.

So, do we think forecasting is useful?

Employing a forecasting approach to the future gets you to a clear decision point. It closes down the potential future option space to a single point – “this will probably happen, so you should do this”. For issues that employ solutions that have very long development times – (the new Hong Kong International airport took 17 years to be fully built) a forecast is very useful otherwise how does it every get started. For issues that do not have a huge consequence effect if they are wrong (it will be fine tomorrow so I won’t take an umbrella) then a forecast is good enough. The most useful point about forecasts is that they are deeply compatible with conventional thinking. You don’t need to explain to most people how to use a forecast. Give a person a forecast then if they have faith in it (and you) then they may well act accordingly.

So forecasts are useful. Sometimes, but we believe they are also fraught. Everything up to step 5 in a forecast is a mechanical, logical process that is as good as the person doing it and the process being used. But the 5^th step is the critical one. “Do you have faith in your model – faith in your judgement of the past, faith in the past as a reliable predictor of the future?” If you have faith, then forecasts will be useful. If you have doubt, however, then we would suggest that Actionable Foresight might be useful. We do not say that Actionable Foresight will necessarily cause you to rediscover faith in your judgement or faith in the past as a reliable predictor of the future. But you might discover hope or purpose and we think they are very useful.

Are we afraid of down?

As I sat through another remarkable week where more national governments throw almost unimaginably sized lumps of money at so called ‘crises’ (e.g. 10 May 2010 -European Central Banks create a 962 billion Euros to fix the ‘sovereign debt’ problem), I began to wonder what is it that is going on at the level of Present Need that these remarkable examples of Pathway Thinking are being employed?

One way we can stop ourselves falling into our traditional patterns of thought and hence missing emerging opportunities (and risks) is to not always start out by trying to work out what the ‘problem’ is. Once we think we understand a problem then we often simultaneously create the pathways where we will find the solutions. Instead we can look at the pathways that people are employing in order to find the problem they are seeing; using a medical metaphor instead of diagnosing from symptoms (Present Need) and then choosing the best treatment (Pathways Thinking) we could  look at treatments chosen to establish the probably diagnosis reached and to then think about that.

So back to my ruminations. Clearly it is a widely accepted pathway of thinking that the value of sovereign debt securities should not be allowed to go down in value. Likewise it is also clearly accepted that the value of bank stocks, housing prices, (name your asset here) should also not go down and so the accepted pathway of thought is to find ways to make them go back up again.

Why? Surely lots of things go down … don’t they? Or is down thought bad and is up thought good? Maybe we are happier with up and down makes us sad? I started to think about this some more and tried to look for examples of pathways that chose actions to promote down as good or at least not bad. And my results? Well there are lots of examples of down in the physical world – gravity is a good example – no point choosing pathways that want to fight gravity is there? (Note: Ignore flight and skyscrapers here). And friction which makes speed reduce – there is no point trying to find pathways towards increasing speed is there? (Note: ignore the boys on Top Gear here). I mean friction is not a problem is it? And heat which goes one way – well a pathway to make thermonuclear dynamics go the other way is about as silly as well – printing money out of nothing to replace the value of something that has gone down in value isn’t it (note: ignore quantitative easing here).  No, it’s quite clear that the physical world is full of down and that is perfectly natural (sic) thing and down isn’t thought bad there or doesn’t make us unhappy – does it?

Next I looked in the natural world, of living matter and down is everywhere there too. True things in the natural world do go up but then they tend to come back down again and then the pattern repeats. Organic matter tends to increase in complexity for a while (goes up) and then eventually it breaks down, decays, dies and returns to its simple organic form again only to rinse and repeat. And that process isn’t one that we feel necessary to choose pathways of thought to prevent is it? We are not bothered by down in the natural world are we (note: ignore Botox and Extropians here)? I quickly moved on.

Finally I got to our manufactured world, the world that we create from our dreams, plans and actions. Surely down is an accepted part of that world isn’t it? History teaches us that empires rise and fall so we down is clearly accepted as a normal part of cultural processes – isn’t it? And economic systems go up and down and so we don’t only choose pathways that promote up and refuse to admit down – do we (note: don’t go there)? My observation of technology was that it does seem to like up a lot (e.g. Moores Law) and whenever something went down (size) then it lets something else go up faster (e.g. enjoyment, functionality).

And then I remembered what Lewis Mumford wrote back in 1970 in his magisterial book “The Myth of the Machine”. His view was that our view of the world and our part in it were based upon some unchallenged beliefs.

“There is only one efficient speed: faster; only one attractive destination: farther away; only one desirable size: bigger; only one rational quantitative goal: bigger.” (p170)

There it was, as reiterated by the magisterial music combo Yazz – the Only way is Up.

If our Present Need is suggesting down then we must choose pathways that get us going back up again.  Now 982 Billion Euros made sense as a Pathway choice. Yazz must be on the playlist all the world’s politicians.

Pointing out the elephants

We think of problems or challenges as issues that are presently impacting on us or on our organisations.  In our opinion something is not as it should be, we cannot achieve something that we wish or we need to do something to prepare or prevent a likely future event.  If we think we know what to do about the problem then we call that a solution. When we don’t have a solution or the solutions we have all tried don’t work then we are stuck. Foresight can help here – we have a process called Actionable Foresight that can lead to breakthroughs in thinking by individuals and organisations facing problems when they are stuck.  Here I want to elaborate on one of the elements in that process – Present Need.

Actionable Foresight employs the idea of the future in useful ways that discovers opportunities and new options. Present Need is our starting point for employing foresight and it is pretty important because where you start will significantly shape where you finish up. Sometimes our perception of the problem or challenge we face is faulty. If we start with the wrong idea of what our Present Need is then, not surprisingly, even foresight is not going to help much. The true or fundamental Present Need is always there, we may just not be aware of it. Sadly it is common for well intended groups to employ time, effort and resources in trying to address the Present Need they are aware of while the true Present Need is like the elephant in the room. That is why it is heartening to see one of those well intention groups actually point out the elephant that is our fundamental Present Need. The 27^th Edition of the Worldwatch State of the World 2010 is one of the best examples of elephant pointing I have seen for a long while.

The title of the 27^th edition is “Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability”. The Foreword to this edition is by Muhammad Yunis (Founder of the Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Prize winner) and in it he makes the observation that “culturally rooted fallacies are difficult to slay”. I would go a bit further and say that we cannot slay what we cannot see.  The invisible elephant in the room is these fallacies and the act of pointing them out is the necessary first step in dealing with them. These fallacies are actually our fundamental Present Need, if only we knew it.  Yunis goes on to say:

I am excited about State of the World 2010. It calls for one of the greatest cultural shifts imaginable: from culture of consumerism to culture of sustainability. The book goes well beyond standard prescriptions of clean technologies and enlightened policies. It advocates rethinking the foundations of modern consumerism – the practices and values regarded as “natural” which paradoxically undermine nature and jeopardise human prosperity.

Yunis goes straight to the point about this book, it points out where the elephants are in the room and it says loudly and clearly “that is the Present Need you have to deal with”. And what an impressive collection of elephants the State of the World 2010 points out to us.

The first elephant it starts with are the world’s religions. Despite the ‘greening of religion’ of the past two decades the report says that “the world’s religious traditions seem to hold a paradoxical position on consumerism…religious warnings about excess and about excessive attachment to the material world are legion and date back millennia…[and yet] religious intervention on this topic is sporadic and rhetorical”. It calls the message that the purpose of humans is to consume a “false god” and demands that the world’s religions tackle this heresy. A good start.

Next it points out the population elephant in the room and calls for Environmentally Sustainable Childbearing. The report sets out the mess that is reproductive rights, the social standing of women, the use women’s bodies for sex and advertising, political manipulation of societal attitudes to fertility and the importance of the child as consumer and points out the necessity of discussion and not avoidance of this particular elephant.

Hopefully you now have a sense of why I rate this report highly as an elephant spotting text.  Later elephants address the need to reduce working hours (to reduce consumption and promote equity), for governments to implement choice ‘editing ‘ policies to ultimately eliminate unsustainable consumer choices  (most tourism,  packaging etc), to redesign urban areas that don’t promote motor vehicles, to reform health care from disease consumerism for the few to equitable health for all and so on.

So get a copy and try and see the pachyderms all around us.