Nmm08_golan
leaves
posted 2008-09-19 by David Kjelkerud

NMM 08 - First day

The first day of New Media Meeting is over and now awaits a night of music, vj:ing and party. Golan Levin started of the day by showing projects from 10 years of exploring new interaction modalities. His projects aim to be playful in order to let the user discover something about themselves when interacting with them. While moving away from the mouse he has explored voice, hand and most recently eye recognition as alternative ways of interacting. His eye tracking projects Double-Taker and Opto-Isolator are interesting, because even though they are very simple in their design the fact that they keep eye contact makes them project a personality to the user.

Kristina Törnblom from K3, Malmö Högskola showed wearable technology projects and talked about how wearables can extend the body and amplifying cultural expression from a fashion perspective. Carolyn Strauss from SlowLab also had a nice showreel of products from which many would fit into the critical design category.

Adrian Bowyer spoke about his replicating RepRap machine. The RepRap is essentially a 3D-printer that can create the parts to build another 3D-printer, in other words making children. Since every system that can duplicate itself is capable of exponential growth the spread of the RepRap machine can be really fast, given that materials are available. The machine cannot yet produce all parts, but Bowyer explained that he was not striving for "pure" replication, the important thing is that the machine can replicate and do so cheaply. So you have to buy the bolts and screws, but those are abundant at most places in the world anyway. The electronics also has to be brought in, but it seems like in the near future the machine will be able to produce the electronics aswell.

The current version of the RepRap makes its parts out of plastic but Bowyer and his research team are looking into getting the machine to work with polyactic acid. Polyactic acid can be made from different kinds of plant cells like corn, which means that people could themselves grow the material needed to manufacture products. Not only that, polyactic acid is biodegradable so when you get tired of a product, just put it on the compost and six months later its molecules are ready to become a new version. By also being cheap to build (the parts cost around $500) and having low energy consumption the machine is made for being used in developing areas. The construction are licenced under GPL which hopefully ensures a good evolution of the technology.

This project is fascinating in so many ways. First of all the idea of a machine that can produce copies of itself is very appealling from a purely technological standpoint. But it also shows a vision on how manufacturing could change in the future. It might not be long before the term "user generated products" will be something we all talk about. What would the effects be if people could make their own products? Obviously it would cut substantial amounts of the environmental and economical costs of transporting products around the world. If everybody has their own 3D-printer and can create another one for their neighbour, the price will converge towards the cost of the materials. We would probably get alot of interesting special products for special needs, just like we in the long tail of digital distribution have special content for niche markets. Imagine buying a pair of shoes from the website of some independent designer and being able to print them on your future version of RepRap instantly. I'm also looking forward to seeing what the user generated products equivalent of lolcats will be.

New Media Meeting 3 has really had a great start. I'm looking forward to the next set of talks and performances. Check back for updates.

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