Forget Online or High Street Shopping with 3D Printing Technology

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

The unexpectedly heavy snow and freezing temperatures, which disrupted transport networks and brought much of Europe and the UK to a halt in December (2010), will also have affected the busy pre-Christmas shopping season.

This was hardly good news for high street retailers at a traditionally busy time of year. When the figures come in after the festive season it will be interesting to see what has happened to the balance between high street and online shopping especially as more and more people have in any case been shifting to shopping online.

It will not be too long, however, before affordable technology moves on another stage and makes even online shopping seem a little old-fashioned. It may sound like science fiction, but already the technology exists to allow people to design and make objects using 3-D printers. 3-D printers have been used to some degree since about 2003 in a range of industries including jewellery-making, footwear manufacture, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), as well as in the automotive, aerospace, dental and medical industries.

But imagine being able to sit down at a home computer and create your own clothes to your unique design or replace your child's school shoes at the touch of a button or keyboard as they grow and be sure it all fits perfectly because the computer has already measured the size in 3-D.

There would no longer be a wait for goods bought online to be delivered and the experience of looking at, touching, trying on and choosing products that comes with high street shopping would be possible without moving outside the house.

It would all depend, of course, on making the printing machine easy for non-technologists to use and small and affordable enough for home use, both of which are already beginning to happen.

3-D printing works by building up successive layers to create an object. The printer takes a 3D computer file makes a series of cross-sectional slices. Each slice is printed on top of the previous one to create the object.

The materials used are either a powder or a liquid polymer and the printing method ranges from melting or softening material to produce the layers or laying liquid materials that are cured with different technologies.

Once the object is no longer required the materials from which it has been made can also be shredded and re-used, which would also have the environmentally friendly advantage of cutting down on waste.

Already manufacturers are producing desk-top 3-D printers based on an ink-jet system and there is another technique, called Digital Light Processing, in which a vat of liquid polymer is exposed to light from a projector. The polymer exposed to light hardens, building up in layers to make the object and the remaining liquid polymer is then drained off to leave the finished 3-D object.

Christmas shopping may no longer be a choice between online shopping or hiking to the high street whatever the weather once the 3-D printing technology becomes affordable. It will be possible to create unique gifts tailored to the person receiving them without actually leaving home!

Or more likely, perhaps, it could lead to the development of small-scale, local industries where you could perhaps describe what you want, provide the sizes and colour choices and work with the maker to produce exactly what you want, whether it is clothing, artefacts for the home, or gifts for a loved one.