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3D printers, laser cutters and robotic assembly lines left the realm of science fiction long ago; indeed, some of the tools of digital fabrication have been a key component of mass-production for decades.
But what happens when these technologies become so cheap and accessible that they change the very nature of how we make — and move — things? How will the transportation of goods change when products are made locally, at scale, in decentralised networks of FabLabs, micro-factories and community printing facilities?
“Digital fabrication is allowing anyone to make anything, anywhere, at different scales,” explains Tomás Diez, Director of Fab City Barcelona and a leading figure of the digital fabrication movement, “from personal fabricators at the domestic scale, to fab labs in neighbourhoods, to smart factories at the city scale, to large supply chains.”
According to IBM, “we’ll always need to move goods from Point A to Point B. But how we’ll move goods through integrated networks will transform not just the world of logistics but the nature of manufacturing itself.” In a future where “you can print the part regionally or locally,” perhaps not only the amount of goods that traverse the world’s shipping and trucking networks will change, but also the type of goods.
Less and less we’ll be sending finished, mass-produced products all across the world, only to have tonnes of waste and recycling dumped locally or shipped globally to processing centres in the Global South. As Diez puts it, “The way that cities work today are like big octopuses — really big octopuses with long tentacles that suck resources from thousands of kilometres away. Digital fabrication will shorten those tentacles, and it will make systems that are more resilient locally while being more connected globally.”
In a future where “you can print the part regionally or locally,” perhaps not only the amount of goods that traverse the world’s shipping and trucking networks will change, but also the type of goods.
We’ll likely see cities shifting toward importing raw materials from across the world, converting them to useful goods on a local scale, and then capturing them in a circular system of reuse, restore and recycle. Design studios like SPACE10, Stykka and OpenDesk are experimenting with digitally-fabricated furniture and the types of digital infrastructures and physical facilities that could establish a circular system. Similar prototypes are being explored beyond the walls of interior design, in realms like food, architecture, fashion and prosthetics.
What happens when all this becomes the status quo? How will that change the landscape of shipping and global logistics, and even the physical modes of transport that we’re used to? If a certain supply route only ever carries lithium, would it be serviced by the same kind of truck as a route moving cobalt? Would either of them look like the trucks we have today? And, in the end, could the truck itself become the factory — fabricating digitally even as it delivers?
