News and Analysis

How 3D Printing Could Change More Than We Think

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So if you follow our Twitter feed, you saw the awesome news that Teenage Engineering, a synthesizer company, encourages people to print 3D replacement parts for their synthesizers.

Now that’s awesome on the whole cool-technology-culture, thing.  It’s also pretty awesome from a customer service perspective.  But I want you to think about this a bit further.

  1. This idea is great for making things easier on companies and customers.
  2. There are sites like Shapeways that will 3D print for you.
  3. There are also industrial collectives that have various tools people pool money to use.
  4. This is a lot like Print On Demand.
  5. Print On Demand is spreading, such as Kodak’s deals with CVS. (If Kodak can stop laying people off so they don’t have enough people to do it).

Now you probably see where I’m going here.  If POD is spreading, 3D printing can spread as well – it certainly seems to be.  I can easily see companies like CVS, Lowes, Home Depot, etc. keeping 3D printers around to make custom components.  Hell, some companies may let you print entire products in time.

Think what this means culture – and of course career wise.

  • People will need to be able to operate these things.  This changes supposed retail jobs and may give people options to move up at careers – and think of how companies may need POD or 3D printer managers and experts.
  • Companies could use this as further outsourcing.  They could literally exist as entities providing directions and support to print.
  • This changes consumer behavior.
  • This chances storage and mailing behavior.
  • This will bring up a lot of fascinating legal challenges (go for it geek lawyers).

So what do you think?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

Why Kickstarter Had To Get More Real

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Well, you probably saw it but Kickstarter is changing their rules on hardware and people have to get real:

  • Risks and challenges must be stated and how they’ll be overcome.
  • Hardware must do what it says it can do, or you can only show what it currently can do.
  • There’s a crackdown on photorealistic portrayals.
  • Changes “bulk” donor benefits (sometimes infamous as appealing to resellers)

First, let me be honest in my assessments – I think the Ouya is part of this.  I trust the Ouya product (in fact I shelled out a $100 donation and if you know me, then you know how hard it is to get me to part with money).  But there’s been rumblings here and there on how it could have been a scam and how others could scam people in similar ways.  The Ouya could be a success that later breaks Kickstarter.

However this is also just part of being more realistic – Kickstarter is pretty successful, and that means they want to be realistic and continue that success.

Success, good publicity, big scores is not the “end” of any venture like Kickstarter.  No one starts with the perfect business model, and even if they somehow did, the changes in the world would make it imperfect in time.  So even big popular hits like Kickstarter have to change.

The lessons to take away from this are:

  • Even successes have to adapt.
  • Kickstarter (and it’s imitators) will doubtlessly keep changing rules – so if you’re using it for your career or projects, remember that.
  • This is a good bit of “ammo” to use at work to show a company getting realistic and changing rules.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Offense, Defense, Whyfense: How We Got To The Defensive Job Search

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Last Column I put out the theory that there’s Offensive and Defensive job searches, and we may want to focus more on “offense” and active career planning and pursuit.  This begs the question – if my theory is correct (let’s assume I am of course) then how did we end up in a state where there was so much defensive job searching – or when it became such a bad idea.

First I think that people have often played defensive with their jobs because that’s where the money is.  There’s an inherently conservative approach to where the cash-flow is.

Secondly, I think for years (but not the last 20 or so) that people often didn’t worry career-wise as much as they do now.  Paths were more defined.  Companies had promotion systems.  The economy hadn’t been ruined by morons.

Third, though I feel that people got more “careerist” 20-30 years ago, more aggressive (coinciding non-coincidentally with globalization, the tech booms, and ideas about economic ownership), this didn’t last a long time.  I think people need to be more “On Offense” in careers, but the idea we’re all Internet-dot-bomb era super-go-getters who lapsed is terribly wrong.

Fourth, then we had repeated economic meltdowns all engineered by various “go-getters” who were unethical, greedy, and ignorant.  Also, probably ugly.  Anyway, you then had people playing Defense on careers because we kept having dot-bomb meltdowns, economic collapses, and of course finally the big ol’ financial meltdown.

Of course people play Defense a lot – they always have, they didn’t have to in a lot of cases, and any era of super-careerist go-getterism was short and got wiped out by the big economy-go-booms of the last decade or so.

So now we’ve got to play more Offense and I don’t think the “cultural infrastructure” is really there for it.  But it’s time – we don’t have much choice, and I think more active engagement may let us solve the problems.

Kind of makes me wonder if we’d had more people on Career Offensive if they’d have stopped some of these problems – and how many aggressive people actually helped cause them . . .

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.