I recently took part in the iRealize conference and workshop in Turin. The workshop was indeed an intense brainstorming session about what is refereed to as “post-industrial design”. It was facilitated by Massimo Menichinelli from Open Peer-to-Peer Design and Giorgio Olivero from ToDo. Stephen Williams from Fluid Forms was there as well.

What is post-industrial design? Ponoko was until very recently based only in New Zealand. Yet on 5th of July 2009 they have announced the opening of a second manufacturing hub, located in San Francisco. This way they can ship to clients in US and nearby for a lot less. Is this the beggining of a new phenomena which can be refereed to as “distributed manufacturing”? One day perhaps we will again be able to produce locally, especially if the buzz about desktop 3d printing will eventually become common place. Desktop Factory is having some financial problems at the moment, but I believe “micromanufacturing” is only a question of time. Micromanufacturing combined with the potential of generative design, mass customization, social networking and web 2.0 in general all together constitute a new design paradigm, where needs of a single individuals may be met by a personalized approach and not reduced or approximated to a mass produced offer. In this new paradigm a digital instance of the product indeed becomes more important than it’s physical instance, so one of the features of a “spime” envisioned by Bruce Sterling is slowly becoming a feature of commercially available products.

It was proposed during the discussion in Turin that distributed digital fabrication, generative processes, mass customization, social networking and web 2.0 all contribute to the new, emerging paradigm of post-industrial design. Our aim during the workshop was to sketch a road map of possibilities and potential disruptive solutions related to this new paradigm. Those maps will soon be published on-line under CC.

Speaking about web 2.0, Twitter recently made it to the cover of the Time. Will Maker Bot, Desktop Factory or the term post-industrial design itself make it there any time soon?

Many thanks to Massimo Menichinelli and Todo for the invitation and hospitality.