I'd like to give a round of applause to the Fax machine. Despite being over 40 years old and effectively obsolete in terms of other technologies being able to supplement the service, you still will find a- Fax: - line on most business cards and identification forms. Unlike cassette and VHS tapes, fax has withstood the onslaught of digital technologies and not gone the way of the Dodo. And while I do not think the fax machine is long for this world, its continued existence is interesting. We've been sprinting as a society to digitize everything; storing information as 1's and 0's in an invisible cloud, recording family memories as organized pixels of increasingly higher counts, eliminating hand sketches for computed precision, and the list goes on and on. Honestly, we can create some amazing things with computing power and I think it's a true testament to the Digital Age that out of all the math and science we still found art and design, but we have hit the moment where rubber is hitting the road. Following the lead of the paper printer and fax machine before it, 3-D printing is once again proving that some things don't have true value until they are tangible.
As a 30+ year old idea 3-D printing may be past it's infancy but it is certainly still in those awkward pre-teen years having just become a realistic household item 5 years or so ago due to improved technology and lowered prices. The application of a 3-D printer is exactly how it sounds, it makes a digital 3-dimensional model a real world object. This ability redefines how one might interact with their digital space, a tangible object can be withdrawn from a digital representation and leave behind the 2-D limitations that paper and screens create. Some applications of this technology are already incredible to think about and truly meaningful to many lives.
My inspiration to ramble about 3-D printing came from an article in Popular Science about 3-D printing leading the way for low cost rapid prototyping for prosthesis in particular. A low cost prosthetic is specifically of interest for children as they rapidly grow into the need for a larger one, and due to a 3-D printers accessibility, modification and production is simple. The most impressive aspect to me though is the idea that a design like that of a prosthetic can be made available to anyone by the sharing of a digital file. A 3-D printer creates a new dynamic of technology that enables self reliance. At it's core the internet is about communicating and while god knows we can buy next to anything on it, we are still just communicating with someone else to make or send an item. 3-D printing enables a sense of immediacy but also a restored sense of tangible creation that I think humans have been clamoring for from digital technology. There is a reason computer graphics keep trying to look more and more realistic, or the concept of virtual reality has been around as long as the first desktop; humans don't want things to remain in a digital world.
Just this past December, NASA did what I would consider the closest thing yet to beaming (think Star Trek) an object to the International Space Station (ISS). They designed and tested a socket wrench down on earth, emailed the plans to ISS at which point they proceeded to print it with their 3-D printer. This is the purest proof that while we continue to build a dependence on digital interactions, we still live our lives in a very physical world, and the line between digital and physical is slowly being blurred. With any luck we'll see the day when business cards lack the laundry list of contact information they do now but rather one name or number, completely acceptable in a digital and physical context.
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