The Affects of 3D Printing On Travel Behaviours

Many of us have sought to cut down on printing in order to preserve paper. But now MakerBot Industries have introduced the 3D printer that prints objects from base materials. It now seems that one possible future scenario in retail is decentralized manufacturing: 'off-grid' DIY consumer product creation. Get to the Future 17 August 2010 The futuristic vision of consumption is vastly at odds with how shopping is currently imagined by most retailers: consumers travel to product-hubs (malls, shopping squares, city centres), often by car, and then purchase stocked goods and take them home with them.

But small-scale decentralized manufacturing has much in common with current e-shopping practices: a product is ordered online and then delivered by mail (inevitably when you're not at home, leading to a further step of travelling to the central post-repository to collect the item, often by car). But with 3D printing the user merely downloads a template, adds the base materials to the printer, and lo and behold a product is born! No waiting and crucially no travel, until you need to stock up on base materials.

The model of business has obvious attractions for flat-pack retailers like Ikea - it seems a natural progression for their business model. But Ikea are now seeking to take the technology one step further by promoting a 3D food printer or 'Cornucopia Digital Fabricator'. Shiny Shiny 12 August 2010 The device mixes food canisters to create "the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques". Soylent Green anyone? Of course, the idea of mixing components to make food for space travel has already been become a trope in science fiction movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It remains to be seen how off-grid food and product generation affect travel. A whole gamut of possible impacts can be imagined, from a reduction in leisure-shopping trips; reduced, or standardized, freight and cargo deliveries; and of course no more weekly shopping trips.