It's entirely possible that one of the most important technological innovations of the 20th century will turn out to have been the lowly ink-jet printer. As it happens, the technology that makes it possible to squirt minute quantities of ink in precise patterns onto a sheet of paper is perfect for spraying out other materials (such as resin, plastic and even biological tissues), assembling them into solid objects. In some cases, the only significant difference between an experimental fabricator and the cheap printer that came free with a box of cereal is the content of the "ink" cartridge.
We're rapidly approaching a time when useful objects can be printed out as easily as a photo. Related breakthroughs are happening regularly. The Material Science group at Northwestern University published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, describing a new, very low voltage thin-film organic transistor material which will allow both inexpensive production and significantly lower power-consumption for plastic electronics.
"This means having plastic electronics the size of a pen battery -- rather than an automobile battery -- power your cell phone," said [Northwestern Professor of Chemistry Tobin] Marks. "And, instead of being carved out of silicon, transistor structures would be printed in a fashion similar to that of newspapers, but with organic molecules as the ink and plastic as the paper. Much as the New York Times prints a different edition of the newspaper every day, we could flexibly print a wide variety of electronic devices quickly, easily and cheaply."
We talk about fabbing (aka "3-D printing" and "stereolithography") with alarming frequency here for a few reasons: the necessary technologies are coming together very quickly; it has a significant "open source" potential; and, for both the developed world and the developing world, it has the potential to be seriously worldchanging. Material fabrication using ink-jet technology will be something we'll be dealing with far sooner than many might expect; of the various near-term and medium-term technological and social changes we talk about here, this will be one of the first to hit big. All the more critical, then, that we start thinking now about what we're going to want and need from the ink-jet future.
So thought-experiment time: what would be required to make a 3-D printing world sustainable? What does "cradle-to-cradle" fabbing look like? What does the capability to print electronics & photovoltaics make possible that we couldn't do before?
