I was making model railways and Airfix kits, you're
kind of like making stuff all the time.
You know it comes from somewhere.
It was interesting to find out how an Airfix kit was made and stuff like that.
And I've just been fascinated
by the amazing engineering feats that we did
back in the Industrial Revolution. It was
always my favourite bit of history at school,
was understanding how in a very short period
of time we went from a largely agrarian society
to a really industrialised society. But I'd
always been interested in, you know loco works
because of my interest in railways. So I guess,
you know, that's always a fascination.
I'm kind of interested in the set of techniques
to make things on-demand effectively, and
reduce wastage, and stuff like that.
But in particular there's
one property around 3D printing which I find
quite amazing, which is that the same file
can make something that size (tiny) or something
that size (large). And that's something you
can't do with injection moulding without making
lots and lots of tools. Whereas actually with
a 3D file you can just resize it and hit print
again. As long as you don't hit the limitations
of the printer. So I think that's, that for
me is its key property. Everybody talks about
personalisation and customisation but for
me it's just about that teeny tiny or really
really large. And that feels quite amazing
because it's the difference between doing
things at different sizes or not.
I think we all need to just pester government, that's
the thing. I think for too long it's just
been felt that that's just the way we do things
and I think that's a really defeatist attitude.
I think we need to, as citizens, go and challenge government
about that sort of stuff and say 'actually no.
We used to make things here.
Why don't we make things here?'
You know youth unemployment is a really terrible blight
and I think actually we could do something
to bring manufacturing back, teach ourselves
new skills, whatever, we can actually work
our way out of this. But I think making physical
things is it. There are only so many web businesses
you can make and they only employ a certain
number of people.
I mean I don't think I'm
going to stop making websites at all. I don't
think it's that sort of binary switch. There's
something really interesting in there and
you can see that it's got some sort of
transformational properties, like the web has.
And in the past few years and especially
since I've become a father you start to really
think a lot about the future. About the environment
your children are going to be in and it struck
me that we've become really wasteful.
And that the way we manufacture things isn't necessarily the best way forward,
And there might be other ways.
And so this is in some ways, the stuff
to do with 3D printing is a way of exploring
some of that. But the key thing for me is
a lot about the intergenerational stuff. Because
the knowledge, like the centuries of knowledge
effectively from the industrial revolution
up to the point where sort of the big manufacturing
business closed was all about accumulating
knowledge, about how to make things. And that knowledge is going to die pretty soon, like literally die.
And if it's not passed on to the younger
generation for them to mash it up with all
of the new stuff around digital and around
3D printing, 3D scanning, and whatever else
comes up in the next few years, then we've
just lost our opportunity. And it's you know,
it'll be very hard to get it back.
