Foundation And Development of 3D Printing

Introduction

With the development of society and the needs of people, for many businesses, innovation has become an indispensable key to success. As a group, we are asked to create an innovative product by using the 3D printer for our assignment. The purpose of this assignment is to maintain a creative atmosphere to gather our different ideas and come up with an innovative product that can propose solutions to solve problems or opportunities. Moreover, to identify trends, challenges and best practices for business innovation.

3D Printing

A 3D printing is a printer that use digital files to make three dimensional solid objects. It began in 1981, a functional rapid-prototyping system using photopolymers was published by Hideo Kodama, it is a solid print model build by layers, each of which corresponded to a cross-sectional slice in the model. In 1984, Charles Hull invented stereolithography that allows designers to create 3D models by using digital data. It is used to create a tangible object. In 2005, Dr. Adrian Bowyer's RepRap project launched an open source project with the goal of creating a 3D printer that can build on its own. Three years later, 2008 a self-replicating printer was release and called Darwin (Dana Goldberg, 2018). Today, almost all the business industry is using 3D printing such as health care, services, industrial goods, consumer goods, and high tech (3D Printing.com, 2018).

The 3D printing has just stepped into the consumer market because of price, sizes, and difficulty of use. First of all, when the 3D printer was released, it was a very advanced product, so the cost was prohibitive, and many consumers could not afford it. Second, size, the earliest 3D printer does not have different size, some consumers are not suitable for the product because the scale is too large to occupy the position. Moreover, some consumer might want to print a small object that doesn't cost much for a 3D printer. Finally, for the consumer that wants to print their design has to have a digital file which means they have to have the technical skill to use the software. Not everyone knows how to use software, but with the development of technology, the software of the design drawing has become more comfortable to use and easily operated. Moreover, some design drawings can be completed on the website, such as TinkerCad. The lowest cost of a 3D printer is around $200, and an average price of $700. Moreover, for an industrial 3D printer, cost several thousand dollars (3DInsider, 2018). However, it might be slightly different because every company has a different quality and price.

Overall, this product can be purchased at Amazon, or in stores such as Best Buy and Staples. Industry Implications In Fashion industry, 3D printing has been empowered small businesses and corroboration for creativity and shortened supply chains. Fashion is one of the industry using 3D printing and leading the change compare with medicine and some DIY art and crafts sectors have been slow to adapt 3D printing. 3D printing is making visualization and prototyping faster for a new fashion designs collection and has been potential to replace physical samples altogether. The competitive advantage in retail is allow customers create or customized personalize products. The traditional molds for producing sunglasses, handbags, and many fashion accessories are expensive and hardly to adopting the shape of the molds. 3D printing can make the mold cheaper, faster and easier to shape.

Additional, 3D printing technology can print objects in layers based on digital designs. Nike is one of first sportswear company that used 3D printed football boots, custom-made to individual feet. Now, 3D printing can create objects with the kind of smooth, polished surfaces more suitable to luxury brands. (Roberson, 3D printing and the future of personalized fashion, 2018) 3D printing technology is changing fashion business from manufactures to shippers to retailers. The manufacture that have 3D equipment is likely to have lower cost in design and development, also increase more sales as the technology is changing the product and development, it is making the process shorter which means getting products to the market faster. The designs can be customized to anything and it doesn’t cost for re-tooling. These could save lot of money for a company that uses 3D printing technology. (Business, 2018)

Predictions

3D Printing technology enters the fashion industry for a long time. In 2015, Dior used 3D printing to design a fashionable head-wearing virtual reality glasses, Called Dior Eyes. 3D printing has a significant benefit in the design and manufacture of customizing small items. In 2016, Sydney's famous shopping mall opened a 3-D printing LV flash store (notjustalabel.com, 2014). 3D printing is no longer limited to the object‘s size. With the development of technology, the cost and price of production will also be reduced. The future will focus on continuous improvement of wearability. 3D printing technology has slowly been able to produce materials similar to fabrics, using ring structures to simulate the feel of knitting. When more and more fashion designers interested in 3D printing technology, it will promote 3D printing companies to produce materials with better permeability and penetration. At present, much designer is using 3D printing in combination with natural materials, like the structure of the handbags printed in 3D and covered with leather. 3D printing needs to be cheaper if it is to change the fashion industry with the large-scale production process. Customization services, small batch production, strong capital chain, personalized design and other elements, are particularly suitable for 3D printing applications, there is still much space for them to expand in the fashion industry. Luxury brands use 3D printing technology to accelerate this trend into the mainstream in the future (Hanson, 2018).

3D printing overcomes the dilemma of traditional design, but the problem is that it is tough for the production of ready to wear. For customized clothing, 3D technology helps clothing show special visual effect, saves the cost of labour and time. However, the price of 3D Printing clothing is comparable to that of customized uniforms. Not a big market of customers can afford it. Another aspect is that clothes printed in 3D cannot be changed after the product is finished. Which means when a customer changes his or her body shape, like becoming fat or thin, the clothes will be useless. Clothing is a kind of commodity that depends on human body's feeling besides its shape. When the comfort of clothes printed in 3D is inferior to that of natural clothes, consumers' acceptance determines their survival rate in the market (Welson, 2018). 3D printing will change the current situation of the fashion industry and sustainable development. The fact that garment production as a permanent consumer machine makes the problem more complex; the trend is rising, changing, then rolling, accumulating waste and ensuring unlimited demand for new products. The monetary and environmental costs of purchasing, manufacturing and transporting textiles are staggering and, as people are beginning to realize, totally unsustainable. 3D printing makes clothing fabrics do not need to be rolled up in meters, then cut and stitched, but printed and ready to wear (Roberson, 2018).

Library & Tinker

We printed our design at Toronto public library-Fort York. The printer they using called UItimaker 2+ 3D Printer. This printer has a large build volume and can easily fit onto any desk. It has swappable nizzle, and people can easily switch between different sizes. The standard is 0.4 mm, but people also can use 0,25 mm for details. We saved our design to an SD-card which slots into the printer for printing. Then we start the printing with a control panel, and we can make any adjustment during the print. It can print using many different materials and fast prints. Tinkercad is a simple browser-based three-dimensional design and modelling tool. Tinkercad allows users to imagine anything and then design it in a few minutes. The build of shapes are the primary tool for this platform, with the grouping of different shapes can help the user to create a new model of their design and create details for it. It also can create vector shapes, then import them into 3D models. For our project, we use TinkerCad to design the glasses, but we used another platform called Thingiverse to print the object.