i+D - November/December 2018 - 43

Fit to Print - By Brian Libby

The top of Steelcase's
Bassline table was
rapid liquid printed
in just 28 minutes,
requiring little to no
post-processing other
than attachment to
the legs.
(Image: Steelcase)

Life (and Housing)
on Mars
David Bowie famously sang, "Is there life on Mars?"
If the red planet is someday colonized by humans,
3D printers may play a crucial role: enabling robots
to build dwellings. Through its Space Technology
Mission Directorate, the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) is exploring such
possibilities through its Centennial Challenges. As
part of that competition, NASA has partnered with
Bradley University in its 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge,
a multistage process in which teams of college students
successfully are creating first digital representations of
the physical and functional characteristics of a house
on Mars using specialized software tools. The next
step, in April 2019, will be to gather at sponsor
Caterpillar Inc.'s facility in Illinois (near Bradley)
to actually build their designs.

"A novelty alone will not sustain itself. 3D printing, like any technology, does
have to bear a distinct advantage," Forslund says. "The customization or
the expression that you can give an object or a product that before wasn't
possible: That might be something." He sees different forms of 3D printing,
be it rapid liquid printing or other versions of increasing size and speed,
as becoming a kind of bridge, "from very low-volume, high-cost ways of
making something and the other spectrum that produces units in the tens
or hundreds of thousands. 3D printing can be a bridge between those
extremes. So, you could introduce a product at a lower market volume and,
as it achieves higher volume, you could potentially shift to a different form
of manufacturing." Steelcase envisions a future when basic tables, chairs,
and other furniture can be customized for each client.
It's not to say that most interior design or architecture firms are using 3D
printing every day or using it to produce parts of every finished architectural
product. Even at firms like Gensler, which designed the 3D-printed office
buildings in Dubai and also gained notice last year for a research product
that combined drones and 3D printing, "it's a bit more rare to use 3D printing
on the interiors and architecture side," explains Josh Berliner, an architectural
and product designer in the firm's San Francisco office. "But, there's a
lot of potential in so much of 3D printing. We're starting to get to a point
where there will be [the] opportunity to change the way that we build
and think about construction techniques a little bit differently. I think that's
really exciting."

BRIAN LIBBY
is a journalist, photographer, and awardwinning filmmaker. His articles have appeared
in The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, The Atlantic, and Architectural Digest.

i+D - November/December 2018

"There have been some interesting questions and
possibilities that have come out of it so far," says
Lex Akers, PhD, dean of the Caterpillar College of
Engineering and Technology at Bradley University. "For
instance, how do you build the 3D printer? Do you
create just an enlargement of a current 3D printer, or do
you use the autonomous feature of a fairly large robot
moving around and printing the object? We've seen
both. We're building habitats, so we're building a dome.
It has to be a material that you can rapidly put down,
but also solidify so you can continue to build on top
of it. Some people put sacrificial structures inside, and
that had to be done autonomously. Some used materials
they'd come up with that would allow rapid printing
without any internal structure."
Perhaps most exciting, NASA is encouraging student
teams to envision actually using the planet's indigenous
material, like dirt and rock. "We're at a point where we
know what the Mars soil is like, and every ounce you
put on a rocket is precious," Akers says. "It only makes
sense to make use of what's there, just as humans have
always done on Earth."
Whether on our third planet from the sun or on Mars,
Akers believes the larger narrative that 3D printing
is part of is the automation of the future building
industry. "There will be less manual labor and much
more innovative programming," he says. "There will be
much more need for architects and engineers, and less
drudgery of getting paid to carry things around." But,
that speed and efficiency will solve problems. "It's been
estimated we'll need an additional 30 million homes a
year to deal with population growth and also people
who don't have homes. Mars isn't the only place where
we need to be able to build rapidly."

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