Chapter 4 We Are All Designers Now

So we might as well get good at it.

WbθΓL I was in high school in the late 1970s, we had workshop class as part of the “Industrial Arts” curriculum. It wasn’t quite clear why this was a required credit—we lived in suburb of Washington, D.C., and there were no factories around and most of my friends’ par­ents were lawyers and government workers.

At home, I made Heathkit electronics kits, which involved solder­ing irons and weeks of painstaking work with wires and components, but were the cheapest way to obtain something like a citizen’s band radio or a stereo amplifier. Chemistry kits had actual chemicals in them (as opposed to little more than baking soda and a ream of le­galistic warnings, as is now sadly the case), and were great fun. Any­body with a cool or temperamental car spent the weekend under the hood with a wrench, hopping it up and otherwise tinkering with its mechanics. “Taking things apart to see how they work” was just what kids did, and finding uses for the parts launched countless fantastic machines, some of which actually worked.

But starting in the 1980s and 1990s, the romance of making things with your own hands started to fade. First manufacturing jobs were no longer a safe way to enter and stay in the middle class, and the workshop lost even its vocational appeal as the number of manufacturing workers in the employment rolls shrank.

Imported Asian electronics became better and cheaper than Heathkit gear, and the shift from individual electronic components like resistors and transistors and capacitors to inscrutable microchips and integrated circuits made soldering skills pointless. Electronics be­came disposable boxes with “no user serviceable parts inside,” as the warning labels put it. Heathkit left the kit business in 1992.¹⁸

Cars evolved from carburetors and distributor caps that you could fiddle with to fuel injection and electronic ignition that you couldn’t. Chips replaced mechanical parts. The new cars didn’t need as much maintenance, and even if you wanted to go under the hood there wasn’t much you could fix or modify, other than to change the oil and the oil filter. The working parts were hermetically sealed and locked down, a price we happily paid for reliability and minimal upkeep.

Just as shop class disappeared with school budget cuts, better op­portunities in the workplace for women and gender equality killed Home Economics. Kids grew up with computers and video games, not wrenches and band saws. The best minds of a generation were seduced by software and the infinite worlds to be created online. And they made the digital age we all live in today.

That is how the world shifted from atoms to bits. The transforma­tion has gone on for thirty years, a generation, and it’s hard to argue with any of it.

But now, thirty years after “Industrial Arts” left the curriculum and large chunks of our manufacturing sectors have shifted overseas, there’s finally a reason to get your hands dirty again.

Today, schoolchildren learn how to how to use PowerPoint and Excel as part of their computer class, and they still learn to draw and sculpt in art class. But think how much better it would be if they could choose a third option: design class. Imagine a course where kids would learn to use free Ç-D CAD tools such as Sketchup or Autodesk 123D. Some would design buildings and fantastic structures, much as they sketch in their notebooks already. Others would create elaborate videogame levels with landscapes and vehicles. And yet others would invent machines.

Even better, imagine if each design classroom had a few 3-D printers or a laser cutter. All those desktop design tools have a “Make” menu item. Kids could actually fabricate what they have drawn onscreen. Just consider what it would mean to them to hold something they dreamed up. This is how a generation of Makers will be created. This is how the next wave of manufacturing entre­preneurs will be born.

“Desktop” changes everything

Two decades after “desktop publishing” became a mainstream re­ality, the word “desktop” is being added to industrial machinery, with equally mind-blowing effect. Desktop Ç-D printing. Desktop computer-controlled routing, milling, and machining. Desktop laser cutting. Desktop computer-controlled embroidering, weaving, and quilting. Even desktop Ç-D scanning, or “reality capture,” digitizing the physical world. Desktop fabrication is leading to full-on desktop manufacturing.

What’s so important about the word “desktop”? Just consider the history of the computer itself. Until the late 1970s, “computing” meant room-sized mainframes and refrigerator-sized minicomputers, which were the sole domain of governments, big companies, and universi­ties. Technologists had long predicted that computing would find a place in the average home—the Moore’s Law trend of declining price and increasing power practically guaranteed that day would eventu­ally come.

Companies from IBM to AT&T’s Bell Labs got their best minds to brainstorm how a computer would be used in the future home, and came up with precious little. The most common prediction was that it would be used for recipe-card management. Indeed, in 1969 Hon­eywell even offered a $10,000 “kitchen computer” (official name: the “H316 Pedestal Model”), which was promoted on the cover of the Neiman-Marcus catalog to do just that—it was stylishly designed, with a built-in cutting board. (There is no evidence that any actually sold, not least because the very modern cook would have to enter data with toggle switches and read the recipes displayed in binary blinking lights.)

Yet when the truly personal—“desktop”—computer did eventu­ally arrive with the Apple II and then the IBM PC, countless uses quickly emerged, starting with the spreadsheet and word processor for business and quickly moving to entertainment with videogames and communications. This was not because the wise minds of the big computer companies had finally figured out why people would want one, but because people found new uses all by themselves.

Then, in 1985, Apple released the LaserWriter, the first real desk­top laser printer, which, along with the Mac, started the desktop pub- Iishing phenomenon. It was a jaw-dropping moment, combining in the public imagination words that had never gone together before: “desktop” and “publishing”! Famously, Apple’s printer had more pro­cessing power than the Mac itself, which was necessary to interpret the Postscript page description language that was originally designed for commercial printers costing ten times as much. But Steve Jobs wanted the Mac desktop publishing suite not just match to the qual­ity of commercial printers, but to exceed them.

Remember, at that time publishing used to mean manufacturing in every sense of the word, from the railways that brought huge rolls of paper and barrels of ink to the printing plant to the fleets of trucks that took the finished goods to market. The “power of the press” came from the massive printing presses of that era; the newspaper unions that still exist today are a reminder that newspapers used to be facto­ries with blue-collar workers pushing pallets of paper around.

But with desktop publishing, a smaller version of this was in reach of anyone. In a sense, you could “prototype” a publication at home by printing a few copies, and then, when it looked right, you could take a floppy disk with the file to a copy shop to be printed in volume. Consumer-grade desktop tools spoke the same language (Postscript) as the biggest industrial printing plants. It wasn’t for everyone at the start, to be sure, but over time, high-quality color desktop printers got cheaper and better. Today such printers cost less than $100 and are in practically every home (the killer app turned out to be digital photography, not newsletters and flyers).

Taking publishing out of factories liberated it. But the real impact of this was not in paper, but in the idea of “publishing” online. Once people were given the power of the press, they wanted to do more than print out newsletters. So, when the Web arrived, “publishing” became “posting” and they could reach the world.

Even the simple act of posting online is a way of occupying what were once factories. Today your PC is seamlessly connected to warehouse-sized server farms (the “cloud”) that allow you to ac­cess massive-scale computing in an instant.

So there you have it: the industrial machinery of the biggest twentieth-century media empires transformed into the sort of thing that you can command from your laptop. Yesterday the biggest com­puting facilities in the world were working for the government, huge companies, and research labs. Today they’re working for you. That is what the “desktop” wrought.

DIY design

So now the Ç-D printer is where Jobs’s Macintosh and LaserWriter were twenty-five years ago. As with the first laser printers, Ç-D print­ing is still a bit expensive and hard to use; it’s not yet for everyone. We haven’t really figured out what the killer app will be. But what we do know is that it will get better and cheaper even faster than the laser printer did, thanks to all the basic mechanical and electronic technol­ogy Ç-D printing shares with its dimensionally deprived ancestor, the inkjet printer you’ve already got. The only real difference is that it squirts a different liquid (molten plastic, not ink) and has one more motor to control height.

Like then, the first users are a little lost. When desktop publishing was first introduced, tens of thousands of people discovered that they knew nothing about fonts, kerning, text flow, anchors, and all that; they had to learn a couple of centuries’ worth of publishing terms and techniques overnight. Many garish documents with a dog’s breakfast of typefaces ensued, but so did an explosion of creativity that ulti­mately led to today’s Web.

Today, with the spread of desktop fabrication tools, a generation of amateurs is also being suddenly confronted with the baffling language and techniques of professional industrial design, just as they were in the desktop publishing era. Now it’s not wraparound text and line justification, but “meshes” and “geode,” “rasters” and “feedrates.”Don’t worry—you’ll know what you need to soon enough, and someday kids will be taught these skills in fifth-grade digital fabrication class. Remember, the early days of the personal computer revolution were equally arcane—“pixels,” “bytes,” “RAM”—and now we hardly give the details of computing a thought, in part because maturing technol­ogy hides most of that plumbing from us.

So, too, for the Maker Movement. Today it is full of people who are dazzled by the potential of the industrial-quality tools now ap­pearing on their desktops. The alien language and techniques of physical creation are intoxicating for the geeks; they’re rushing to ex­plore this strange new world. But that is just the first wave of what is quickly becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Soon these early tools will become as ubiquitous and as easy to use as inkjet printers. And if history is any guide, it will change the world even faster than the microprocessor did a generation ago.

We are all designers now. It’s just time to get good at it.