3D printing story transcript Lauren Suto

3D printing story transcript

Lauren Suto:

Three dimensional technology is changing the lives of Australian designers – taking their ideas from the computer screen and turning them into reality. And the possibilities are endless – from the creation of small spare parts, to customised electric guitars – even human skin and cells – additive manufacturing machines can print just about anything.

Dr Jennifer Loy:

3D printing technology works by creating products in layers.

PhD Candidate, Samuel Canning:

These layers can be as thin as 0.1mm thick so ten layers to a millimetre. Gradually parts are grown.

Dr Jennifer Loy:

So in the past we would have to generally create a mould and put material in it, the cost of that mould was quite high so if you designed something you had to create a lot of them in order to justify the cost of the mould. Additive manufacturing is where we can individually create each product one at a time – so it changes the game in terms of mass production moving it towards mass customisation.

Professor Olaf Diegel:

I did this just for fun, I wanted to see is it possible to make a real electric guitar. In the traditional machining of wood you couldn’t make the shapes, the aesthetics that you can achieve with 3D printing and that’s what’s amazing – you can do stuff that almost seems impossible but with this technology you can make it.

PhD Candidate, Samuel Canning:

I think we’ve only really just begun to see with this sort of collection here what’s possible and how far that can go. On a really low-cost printer probably less than $1500 I printed parts that I’m using in my garden and they’re working perfectly. Probably in ten or twenty years time we wouldn’t recognise the kind of world we’ll be in. That we’ll be surrounded by objects that will make our world of today probably look as primitive as the age of steam engines and traction engines honestly.

Lauren Suto:

The Queensland College of Art is implementing this technology from day one of the Bachelor of Digital Media degree – making it the first institution in the country to do so.

Dr Jennifer Loy:

At the QCA we’ve taken the very radical move of moving 3D printing into the first year – it is the first process that our students learn and as far as I’m aware that’s the first country around the world to do that. In fact most people leave it to the postgrads. We feel we need to re-write the rulebook of manufacturing and in order to do that we need to get the digital natives at it. We’re bringing back computer science, digital fabrication and human interaction so students on this course will be on the forefront of that new market that’s emerging.