This course will help you understand how 3D printing is being applied across a number of domains, including design, manufacturing, and retailing. It will also demonstrate the special capabilities of 3D printing such as customization, self-assembly, and the ability to print complex objects. In addition to business applications, this course will also examine how individuals, including those in developing countries, are using this technology to create solutions to the problems they face. This course will also provide an overview of design thinking and how you can use this framework to develop ideas that can be turned into objects. Learners who complete this course will obtain a rich understanding of the capabilities of 3D printing and how to think about designing objects for this new technology.
3D4D with TechforTrade
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Del curso dictado por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
3D Printing Applications
315 calificaciones
De la lección
Module 3: 3D Printing for Development and Education
In this module, we will consider the role of 3D printing in revolutionizing education and the role it can play in development in underserved communities in both developing and developed countries.
Conoce a los instructores
Vishal SachdevClinical Assistant Professor , Director, Illinois MakerLab
Business Administration
[MUSIC]
So in this video, we are chatting with William Hoyle who
is the CEO of TechforTrade, a UK-based nonprofit.
That whose mission is to enable entrepreneurs or people who
are like-minded to find solutions to their problems, leveraging technology.
So join us for a chat with him on how 3D printing
can be leveraged for development in the global south, as he calls it.
So TechforTrade really I guess, builds on my kind of interest in the role
that technology can play in terms of improving social outcomes for people.
And the vision really, behind TechforTrade is that we see ourselves
working towards a time when technology innovation re-enables full and
fair payment for work and trade.
In a way that will lift, hopefully millions of the world's out of poverty,
so very much for us technology is at the heart of what we do.
And it's central to our idea that, technology is an enabler.
That provides the opportunity to create systemic changes in the traditional
ways in which a systemic changes that are pro-poor in the sense that they
benefit the poorest in the society not only those at the top of the value chain.
[SOUND] I was fortunate enough to be able to persuade my board to
allow me to run a competition at the 3D4D Challenge.
Which really was simply to try and
find groundbreaking opportunities that could have a transformational
impact on the lives of some of the poorest people in the world.
And then applying 3D printing technology at the center of those transformational
ideas and that was the competition that is what we launched.
I will be really honest with you, when we launched the competition I had
no idea whether we would receive even five applications and to that end.
I did spend about three months doing a bit of a roadshow,
visiting universities in Kenya, in South Africa,
in Chennai in India, maker spaces in Romania, a trip to Brooklyn.
To try and plant the seed of the idea of the competition the result,
as you know, was we received 80 entries from across the world,
from Chile, to Senegal, to the Gaza Strip.
A wide range of ideas, many of which we dismissed as being too fanciful.
Many of which have gone on to be some of the leading players in the Treaty printing
industry, so it just shows we don't always back Windows.
And we very quickly found through the news that spread around the competition
that we were moving closer and closer to the center of an emerging sort of
spiders web of people who shared a similar vision.
When the competition ran, I was amazed by the level of interest.
You may recall that the competition received a full page of coverage in
the economist.
We were on the BBC and on NBC, and it seemed that the idea that
the technology might have a part to play In [INAUDIBLE] relief,
really resonated with a wide community.
Not only of technically minded people, but those people that were generally
interested in the enabling power of technology for development.
So, I think that was Was really where we started that really was the trigger for
the work that we're now involved in.
And George, to come back to your question about what did we see and
what do we see in the technology?
Well, if you think about the context of the developing world, if you think about.
What I've described earlier on, poor infrastructure.
If you think about growing populations that are hungry to consume,
to embrace new technology.
A growing population of young people in education
that need to get access to educational tools.
The challenges of carrying stock in inventory when you're operating at
the base of the pyramid, intermittent energy supplies.
When you think about the characteristics of 3D printing,
it's almost perfectly suited to tackling some of those issues.
For me, that was the most fundamental revelation.
That here is a technology that is low energy,
it's additive rather than subtractive.
It reduces carrying costs for
inventory machines can be powered using solar technology.
It has all those characteristics, and yet
nobody seemed to be exploring the potential.
Manufacturing Today is a product of the Industrial Revolution,
our means of production and our division of labor model.
The way in which we've broken down, manufactured an assembly into
many low skilled steps are all products of the Industrial Revolution.
And they fundamentally influenced how we think about manufacturing and
yet when you look at 3D printing technology.
We look at the ecosystem, the power of bringing together the internet,
mobile phone, design And software and the hardware.
You're really bringing back all of those things together to put the power
to invent, create, and distribute in the hands of one person.
That's an enormously exciting possibility.
I think the other thing for me is we talk a lot about two words, development and
positate.
And actually, when you pries open what we mean by development,
and what we mean by politic.
I honestly believe that our traditional view of development,
is what we in the global north do for people in the global south.
It's the transfer of knowledge, know how, power, advice,
however you want to look at it.
And yet, 3D printing is a democratizing technology,
it's an enabling technology that enables from the bottom up.
So it changes the nature of that development discourse and when we talk
about poverty, obviously, often we measure poverty in terms of ability to consume.
And we measure consumption, often, in terms of our perception of consumption,
the products we would consume or we would need to consume.
And of course, if you've ever visited a farmer's house
in Sub-Saharan Africa, you will know that poverty
in terms of consumption It's framed by the situation of the individual.
Of what we might discount as being, if you like unfit for consumption,
could be enormously beneficial for somebody that has very little.
So, I think those tenants for
me are really important when one considers the role that 3D printing can play,
I think uncertainty often is a factor of lack of control.
A very current example of that is the situation in Tanzania,
a place where we're working at the moment, where there are literally thousands of
people who make a living from collecting waste, plastic waste.
And with the fall in the global oil price the market for
recycled plastic has virtually disappeared.
The two largest recycling businesses in Dar es Salaam have closed.
So you have a market there that's defined by the collection of waste for
export, mostly to China for reprocessing.
And yet the potential to relieve poverty and reduce uncertainty
by looking at waste to value opportunities that turn waste into products is enormous.
You can reduce uncertainty by bringing more control into the hands
of those people that need it.
There is a project which is based in Malawi,
a project being run by the University of Galway,
where 3D printing technology is being used to enable a redesign
of agricultural tools used by women smallholder farmers.
The role that 3D technology plays is that it enables
participatory design approaches that encourage women to think about
how improvements in tool design would improve peak time tool usage.
It enables those approaches to be translated into rapid prototyping so
that the women involved can very quickly see how their
design improvements turn into a prototype that they can play with and
test before the actual tools are produced.
More often than not, not using 3D printing technology.
The technology itself enables that rapid prototyping which very quickly brings
to life the ideas that the farmers have.
So I think that's, for me, a really smart way of using The technology.
The other example that I would cite is the work that's being done with
enable to create the prosthetic hand, the customized prosthetic hand.
We're just testing some of their designs at the moment in Nairobi.
But I think what they've created is a really, really useful toolkit that can be
adapted in a local context and rapidly deploy at very low cost.
For many people in developing countries, a prosthetic hand for
example, often in is something they simply cannot obtain.
As an aside, one of the things that came after the 3D footage challenge
was an amazing technology.
That has developed a technique for creating soft tissues prostheses from
a silicon gel, on to which can be printed the pigmentation of the skin.
Now facial prosthetics are a whole different area and
in most developing countries, the technology simply does not exist.
To provide all but the most wealthy with any form of facial prosthesis.
So that is a truly transformational
approach which reduces the cost of facial prosthetics to a few hundred dollars.
Our start point really is the learning from the competition.
And from the competition back in 2012 it was clear that we needed to think about
the development of 3D printing technology in the ecosystem as a kind of journey.
It feels to me that we are today where we were with the Internet in the 1990s.
It's very difficult to look at an FDM machine printing PLA and
ABS, and say, well that's where the state of the industry.
So, we're on a journey, and I think there are a few people that could
predict where that journey will take us but I think there are more and
more people that believe.
That 3D printing technology could be as transformational
in the context of development as the mobile phone.
So the big question for me is if we believe that that transformational
potential is there how do we make sure that that journey is an inclusive journey.
So that we don't see the developing economies of this world miss out on
this next industrial revolution in the way they perhaps missed out on the last.
And when you consider what the barriers are to inclusive adoption,
It sort of gives some clues, as to where I think we need to apply our focus.
So we believe that there are four areas that we think we need to focus on,
in terms of insuring that those areas to inclusion are minimized.
We call them the four e's, and they are equipment which is obvious.
Access to the machines, the materials that it needed to
make this technology affordable and accessible.
The second really then is education.
How do we make sure that from school level upwards, the ability to embrace and
use these emerging technologies is present in the curriculum.
Young people gain the confidence and
experience to understand the possibility that the technology creates.
The third is, what we call, enabling innovation.
By that we mean that as this technology starts to disrupt
traditional supply chains, new value models will be created and
though the value that's created, we believe.
Should be distributed in such a way that is much of that value as possible is able
to be captured In the countries in which we're working.
So the analogy I always use is, if you could imagine that a company like FedEx,
some years from now decides that rather than shipping the part from a Land Rover
from one part of the globe to another.
It simply transfers the digital file to a small
manufacturing hub in a place like Mombasa.
The way in which that new value chain distributes the value can be influenced
by the capability of the actors on the ground to meet the needs of that industry.
So we need to make sure that those actors are prepared for
those changes and those innovation models.
And then the fourth is really about enabling local entrepreneurship.
I really believe that there's an emerging mechatronics market in
countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Where you've got hundreds of millions of consumers that are able to
spend small amounts of money on products designed for their market.
You may have read about a product called Brick designed by an organization called.
It's one of the first modems, come routers,
come cache storage devices designed for a base of the pyramid market.
I believe you'll see more of those.
But to enable that development, you need entrepreneurs to be able to
embrace technologies like 3D printing to create prototypes for us,
the enabling components.
And they come together for
us in this concept that we call the Digital Blacksmith.
So our digital blacksmith is a maker business of the future.
A business that's capable of supporting local entrepreneurs,
developing value added products for local markets.
Building machines for users, for schools,
supporting curriculum development, and creatively enabling environment.
For the use of the technology.
So we believe that this concept of the digital backsmith is the solid cornerstone
of how we want to see 3D printing and
indeed other small sky or digital fabrication technologies enlarged.
These are commercial businesses that respond to the needs,
we're not defining the needs, the communities and defining the needs, but
defining the needs of the local market.
So we have two business at the moment that we're supporting, one in Nairobi and
another in Dar es Salaam.
Both of these businesses are owned by
young engineering graduates from local universities.
Would be entrepreneurs that see the potential for this technology.
We're supporting them with small amounts of seed funding, technical advice and
know-how, and business mentoring and support.
We've developed a 3D printer called Retread,
which these businesses are building.
We starting to produce filament from locally recycled plastic,
which these businesses can use.
And we're working on the creation of small portfolio of high value products.
The first of which will be a research microscope,
which these businesses will make for sale in their local markets.
By working with these businesses we're creating
what we call a replication handbook.
A model that will inform us on how we will replicate these businesses.
Perhaps in the form of a franchise to enable the idea to be
recreated by other entrepreneurs in other markets.
Later this year we'll be developing a third venture in garner
where we will test our application model and refine it.
By the end of this year we aim to have a full business in play
using our application model and going into next year.
We plan to work on scaling up that franchise model and
looking at how we grow it and scale it further.
Alongside that, as I say,
we'll be working on the product portfolio beyond the microscope.
We'd like to broaden the product range.
We would love to work with innovators and idea creators who have ideas for
other high value products that could be of utility in developing countries.
We would love to work with people who are interested in taking our
3D printer design forward It's an open source design, it's available online.
And so over the course of next year, we will look to grum out that replication
model for our digital blacksmiths, and seek wider corporation with the community.
You need to broaden the range of materials the machines can print with.
The other area I would mention is educational curriculum.
I suspect that many of your burners will have ideas about
innovative ways in which 3D printing can be embedded into the curriculum.
It can't be adjacent to the curriculum, it needs to be central to the curriculum, so
we are open to any ideas that people who watch this film have.
And who knows, maybe next year we could run a mini 3D [INAUDIBLE] challenge to
find the next transformational product for
development that could come out of this community.
I would love that to happen.
[MUSIC]
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