We are entering a period where the consumer is a designer and manufacturer, too,” said Carl Bass, the chief executive of Autodesk. “We are entering a period where the entire act of making things, seeing how they are used and what the manufacturing process is will change.
At the Make It in America confab in Washington last week, I said that if we want to revitalize manufacturing in America, we have to increase participation in manufacturing. The 3D printer is one of those tools that can change how we think about manufacturing and get us to consider manufacturing as something we all do. When computing was done on mainframes, few of us cared about it and it certainly didn’t have direct impact on our lives. If manufacturing is done by a few, it will no longer be relevant to all of us.
Dale Dougherty 