Coming soon: Quick, Distributed, on demand Support for DiDIY

What's better (and next?) than Digital DIY? Sharing capacity for Digital DIY, of course! From the interview with Fictiv CEO Dave Evans "Is 3D Printing about to Eat the World?":

  • Our goal is to help people build physical objects faster
  • Fictiv provides an “online platform that allows engineers and designers to order parts from idle machines, or machines that have extra capacity.”
  • Users of the service can check a design and then work in real time with an engineer to identify problematic areas, such as a thin wall.

Merging Efficient Automation with Human Innovation

“It’s really about trying to give people better access to tools to build physical products,” says Evans. “The major difference between us and 3D Hubs is that while they are a directory to go and find a printer, for us when you upload a file we’re turning around 3D printed parts the next day, within 24 hours.”

To achieve their speed Fictiv combines automation with a human touch, offering a degree of consulting alongside their approach to the modern machining shop. “When a model gets uploaded to Fictiv we computationally analyze that model to see it is actually producible and get Design for Manufacturing (DfM) feedback.”

Evans draws parallels between the resurgence in hardware and the growth of the software industry...."[simplified coding languages, app development kits]... all contributed to software development becoming more accessible and software eating the world if you will... if we can decrease the barriers to building physical products with better tools, better education, better ways of describing digital objects and translating it to a physical one then that is where we will see a very similar trend in hardware development."

Combine services like Fictiv's with:

... and things become even more interesting. Let's discuss these scenarios at our Final Conference!

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