says Greg Brew of Designworks/USA.
"It creates an intense desire in people for new stuff. We're responsible for making products that people feel a great need to own, maybe for just a short period of time. And then they pitch 'em. Let's face it: Our standard of living is based on the demise of the planet."
Ensconced in Designworks' chrome-and-glass digs on Corporate Center Drive in Newbury Park, California, Brew, the director of transportation design, and Marc Tappeiner, the director of product design, seem the unlikeliest of subversives. The pair leads a team that spends its days dreaming up new gear for Nokia (from the classic 232 model through the sleek 8110) and BMW, of which Designworks is a subsidiary. And yet here they are scheming to wrest the means of design from the polluting mitts of corporate America.
"The amount of waste and energy that goes into an item as small as a PalmPilot is just horrifying," Tappeiner complains, describing the life cycle of a product - from design to manufacturing, packaging, and shipping. "Then you drive it home, take it out of the box, and throw all the packing material in the trash. It's killing us."
Inspired by a deep sense of guilt stemming from their contribution to the problem, and seizing on an idea circulating in the scientific community for years, Brew and Tappeiner have developed a concept study with the fervor of a manifesto. The two designers envision a production facility on every desktop.
In the Designworks scenario, you could log on to the Web site of a company or an entrepreneur (think shareware for product design), download the relevant blueprints, customize them, and send them to your personal fabricator - a machine capable of "printing" silicon circuit boards, electromagnetic ink displays, and even three-dimensional objects. All the necessary materials could be bought at a regional center, something like a next-generation RadioShack. Assembly would be a cut-out and snap-together affair.
After several rounds of brainstorming, Tappeiner and Brew discovered that researchers in the MIT Media Lab's Personal Fabrication project were already developing the necessary technologies. A team led by Professor Joseph Jacobson has produced simple logic boards and micromachines using an off-the-shelf inkjet printer. When printed, their semiconductor ink self-assembles into atomic-sized machines. Although the researchers are focused on nano- and microfabrication, the concept scales up. The PF - described in Professor Neil Gershenfeld's 1999 book When Things Start to Think as "the missing mate to the PC" - would contain a micromill that spits out machine parts and jets that spray epoxy, copper ink, and other substances.
However, while engineers concentrate on the technical guts of the personal fabricator, Tappeiner and Brew are looking past the machine itself, imagining its implications for infinitely customizable design and waste reduction. As Tappeiner puts it (with apologies to Allen Ginsberg): "Minimum amount of packaging, maximum amount of design."
The project pushes high tech design beyond the aisles of the local computer superstore. Blueprints of an amulet, a juju, and a talisman - developed by designers Holger Hampf and Aris Garabedian - cover the bulletin board in Hampf's office, which is a few doors down from Tappeiner's. On the desk sit crude physical models, or at least the flat pieces of medium-weight Mylar that will form these gadgets.
Folded together like a paper doll's wardrobe, the talisman takes the shape of a cell phone complete with thumb and finger grips on each side. A set of palm-sized circles forms the shell of a PDA amulet. The pièce de résistance, however, is a wearable juju - a round device with a wrist strap the designers conceived as a GPS watch. Even in this unpolished, unassembled state, the objects are beautiful, both for their elegant, ergonomic lines and for their improbability: It's a thrill to imagine the guts of a high tech device embedded in such lapidarian totems.
Fantastic as the scenario may sound, personal fabricators are not only feasible, but inevitable, according to developers. The MIT researchers predict the technology will be here in 2009, but Brew and Tappeiner are confident that the PF could be on desks in just a couple of years. To skeptics who doubt that it will ever be an affordable consumer product, the Designworks team has a simple answer: That's what they said about the PC.
