"The 3D printer won't save you."
I had said this in passing to a colleague today, as somewhat of an ethos for the design students of the University we both lecture at.
It's currently crunch time for the design students everywhere to submit projects they have been working on for the last semester. Many of whom resort to 3D printers to produce the prototypes & models concepts they develop for presentation for assessment.
Make no mistake, I love my Makerbot 3D printer, and it's an awesome situation that emerging designers face with the abundance of rapid prototyping options. The ability to go from 3D render on acomputer monitor to physical object in a matter of hours is an amazing thing. And also it makes for lazy, failure-prone designs.
It is an interesting feeling that I love, where I experience a part in front of me with my hands and eyes that I spent hours, maybe months, evolving a deep understanding of an object. An object that emerged from my own imagination. From sketch, to render to prototype, and maybe production. I personally always feel a strange dissociation between the virtual object held predominately held in my mind (from hours in a CAD program obsessing over details) and the real one when it becomes an object I can feel.
However, this feeling in designers is sometimes manifested as surprise when the designer sees their design as real objects. (I have felt this too)
"Oh, it's bigger than I thought it would be!" is fairly common phrase uttered when presented with parts fresh from the printer. That is if printed parts were successful and didn't collapse inside the printer under their own weight. 3D models in CAD usually aren't burdened pesky things like gravity, or other forces (until a simulation is performed at least..) and a designer must usually look to their intuition to imagine if a structure will yield and fail. Even if it is an extremely basic structure or scale model, careful thought must be given to all the functions an object performs.
The hours spent developing this designer's intuition must come from experimentation, and in my opinion is a crucial attribute in a designer. Experimentation with materials and processes to learn the most fundamental properties of construction in real world is very much outside the abilities of even the best 3D printer. To say nothing of the limited range of materials that you must use for 3D printing processes makes for some uninspired design outcomes.
Designers who only consider the form without considering the function are destined to be unsuccessful.
Don't forget that simply "not falling apart" is a pretty important function that everything needs to perform.
JM