Marx and Fabrication

Marx and Makers:
DIY as Political/Economic Subversion.

By Gideon W.

I have a personal crusade, and I

I get so damned tired of hearing about Gershenfeld and his stupid fab labs. The only reason that you find them in the inner city and the third world is because outside donors have funded them. He's never had a sustainable technology and frankly I doubt he ever will. All he's got is the usual MIT/Ivy League grant funding/publicity machine working overtime for him.

To throw a bunch of Marxist BS in the mix just adds insult to the injury. I did work in and with any number of communist governments and other odds-and-sods "peoples republics" when I worked for the Swedish government back in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I left university a bright-eyed idealist excited to see real socialism up close. Well, I did and discovered that when you scrape away all the nonsense a socialist/communist government is, at base, predicated on the notion that your average civil servant is the best possible choice for running any and every aspect of daily life that you could imagine.

As I've seen it Reprap is the exact antithesis of that paradigm for social ordering. Marx saw industry as a big, expensive undertaking involving macroscale facilities operated by swarms of "workers". Socialist governments liked big, expensive industrial facilities and had a lot of trouble dealing with small undertakings. They're hard to tax and they're hard to keep track of. Socialism is about control. Reprap is about individual choice and creativity.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2008 10:44AM by Forrest Higgs.

... maybe with highly sophisticated robots/omnibots in the role of the 'proletarians' it's worth to rethink - but then you eventually have to deal with sophisticated KI, evolving and revolting too?

Viktor

Can we just forget about the philosophy and improve reprap? OK?

Hear! Hear!

"A girl who designs her own dress will be favored over one who is defined by the expensive label."

This is an interesting point as I think it raises many questions as to what a practical personal fabricator might actually mean.

In case you haven't noticed, textile architecture, aka sewing your own clothes, is something that people have been able to do for, roughly, forever. It has declined in popularity in direct proportion to the availability of affordable manufactured clothing. Even today, a girl can buy all she needs to make a dozen of her own dresses for the cost of one (not particularly) expensive label. And yet, Gucci, Prada, Betsy Johnson, and Lilly Pulitzer (to name just a few) somehow manage to scrape by.

If you watch the show Project Runway, which is a "reality" show featuring fashion designers, you will find that the ones who do well are not just artists, but craftspeople who understand the mechanics of clothing: types of fabrics, shapes, cutting patterns, methods of sewing, etc. Anyone can say, "I want a dress that looks like this sketch," but making it actually look like that on a person is harder.

Tools help the craftsman, but they do not make him what he is. While any putz can make a case for an iPod, the device itself is the result of vastly more skill and knowledge. Kind of reminds me of the old joke that I would never go to a restaurant that advertises "homestyle cooking" because if I wanted that, well, I'd just eat at home

"Kind of reminds me of the old joke that I would never go to a restaurant that advertises "homestyle cooking" because if I wanted that, well, I'd just eat at home"

Unless you couldn't prepare a good hot meal if your life depended on it.

Odd and Random thoughts:

Given the current highly subsidized energy regime and the global wage disparity it is often cheaper to buy completed goods (tee shirts, tube socks) than to buy the materials ( cloth and yarn) if one is buying commodity clothes at a big box store. This is the big reason that sewing is in decline as a household skill, it is simply no longer worth your time to do it if you are interested in producing everyday clothes. The number of hobbyists however is holding steady or increasing.

Major designers like gucci etc. often buy up the entirety of limited runs of a fabric so as to prevent anyone from making copies of their work.

I wonder about the possibility of expert systems to do things like design circuits given a set of inputs and outputs or create tailoring given a 3D model of some clothing. Such a system might be descended from one which slices overly large items like bicycles into a series of parts which could be made on a standard size reprap and then assembled for use. Expert systems exist for architects and various other design professionals, doing things like automatically controlling the height and width of a beam given its length and composition. Similar programs could control the composition (stiffness or bias) of a piece of cloth based on the way it drapes. Of course, such systems would decrease the perceived value of the ability to design attractive clothes. Regardless, there is a long history of custom designed items being preferred to mass produced ones almost regardless of actual value.

Clothing may well be one of the last things reprap is able to produce because the geometry and assembly is so complicated and the material is going to be difficult to extrude or otherwise generate on the machine. Merely using a cnc machine to cut out the cloth seems to be a waste of effort as that is often the least difficult part of the entire procedure.

"Kind of reminds me of the old joke that I would never go to a restaurant that advertises "homestyle cooking" because if I wanted that, well, I'd just eat at home"

Unless you REALLY hated doing the dishes.

... i remember a tv-documetation, where a brandnew method for building extremely lightweight but rigid wings and fuselage for planes (i think for the Airbus) was presented.

There were big sheets of carbon-fabric, cut with a CNC, sewed together in the right fashion, inflated to receive the proper 3D-form and last impregnated with epoxy to get the needed rigidity ...

When the parts were hardened, the surface was covered with a special coating and finished to avoid turbulences.

Then the wings were ready to atach to the plane ...

So it's often easier to combine different technologies then do all the fabbing with only one method.

Instead of focussing only on reprapping all needed parts ist worth to evaluate in every project, which specific technologies should be adopted - CNC, moulding, welding, sewing, air-brushing, and so on ...

We already use moulding for small series, as it's much faster then reprapping them.

I'm on evaluating using dispenser-heads with different pastes to build multimaterial components out from ceramics and conducting material at room-temp.

Others try to wirewrap or extrude conducting trays on plastic-frames ...

So i think evolving our 'home-brewed' fabbing skills meant learning to apply different common technologies used in industry and commercial fabrication.

And this path leads straigthtforward to heavy conflicts with the 'market' when we achieve the same accuracies and capabilities common RP-systems are able of.

... and then imagine, we develop even further ... ><

Viktor