Manufacturing guy-at-large.

Work-ish: 3D printed dropout protectors

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I think Nick Pinkston has it absolutely right: "3D printing is great, but it's only a small part of the solution." The current hardware revolution is about the workflow from development to manufacturing to distribution. Sure, I'm sure I'll have more and more 3D printed objects in my life in the next 5-10 years. But the effects of product customization (which will be significant) and kanban/just-in-time manufacturing (which I believe will be huge) will far outweigh the designer's ability to neglect draft angles when designing plastic parts. In the near future, I expect we'll be buying more stuff that hasn't been built yet than we have since the industrial revolution. In the next decade, I expect Amazon (or whomever) to be literally building the parts required to fulfill my order the night after I place the order. 3D printing will be a big part of this process, but so will distributed manufacturing and rapid delivery systems. And innovative ways of finding new products (and, on the flipside, innovative ways of finding new customers) will totally change the game.

I tend to recoil at most of the crap that's made with the current generation of FDM machines, but I've spent some time recently trying to think of objects in my life that I would accept being shat out of a MakerBot. A few traits I was looking for:

  • Needs to be made out of plastic
  • Needs to be disposable
  • Needs to have a rough surface quality (low layer resolution)
  • Needs to be something that's hard to find in a brick-and-mortar store
  • Relatively low part mass, to reduce print time & cost
  • Low dimensional accuracy to accommodate all sorts & conditions of printers
  • Bonus points if I wouldn't want to buy it from Amazon due to package quantity, lead time, etc. 

I'm sure there are better use cases, but one thing I came up with was dropout spacers. When shipping a bike, you usually remove the front wheel and install a dropout spacer into the fork. The spacer protects the dropouts from impact from below and also protects the fork from impacts from the side. Most consumers don't keep dropout spacers around, and wouldn't necessarily think to go to a bike shop to pick some up (most shops give them away) when they're shipping their bike. When the bike is unboxed on the other end, the spacers usually go straight to the trash, and surface finish is totally inconsequential. Plus, the spacer itself isn't very massive, and the dimensional accuracy required is low.

I spent an hour or two modeling, and got Shapeways to print me the result for $13. It's a bit more than I would want to pay for a piece of plastic, but the FDM version would be basically free. The finished version is shown below. I rather like it, and think that things like it will be printed - not in the home, probably, but by brick-and-mortar third party services like Kinkos, or web shopping platforms like Amazon and Shapeways - as a matter of course in the future.

If anyone is interested in printing one of their own, I'd encourage them to grab the model on the Thingiverse. I also published the model and a bunch of other stuff in a GitHub repository. 

 

Inventor and Shapeways.

Inventor & Shapeways. SLA parts from Shapeways tend to have a bunch of powder slag in any crevises; this one was packed full. 

Picking out SLA dust.

Back to front: Injection molded rear dropout spacer; injection molded front dropout spacer; my SLA front dropout spacer.

Lyle Lovett on Dressing

Added on by Spencer Wright.
You're saying something with your appearance whether you mean to or not, so you may as well mean to. For example, on a weekend morning, you might actually mean to say, "It's Saturday and I don't care how I look, and I don't care what you think of how I look, and I don't care if I ever have sex again."
You might really mean that. But you'd better think about what you're saying, because everyone else is. The idea that we humans are good-natured, politically correct, nonjudgmental beings is pure fantasy. We are, at the very least, judgmental.

...
Fashion is communication, plain and simple. I don't mean to sound as though I'm telling you something you don't already know, because any self-respecting man with even a little common sense knows exactly what he's saying and to whom he's saying it as he gets dressed in the morning. We all wear uniforms of sorts that allow us to be accepted. There's no shame in that. That we have the gumption to clean up and, as we stare into our closet, care about how we'll look shows we're trying to put our best foot forward.

Lyle Lovett in Esquire. Via Timoni.

 

GitHub for 3D Design

Added on by Spencer Wright.

In the past, I've used Autodesk Vault for version tracking & backup of 3D design files. I was using Inventor for work at the time, and was a part of a group that sometimes (though not often) shared files. It was useful but totally inconvenient, and I'm happy to now be setting up GitHub for my own 3D design file sharing, version control & backup. 

Not being fluent with GitHub in the past, I'm still a little hazy on the terminology and process. Over the past few months, I've cobbled together a system or organizing 3D part and assembly files from SolidWorks and Inventor. For some reason, I set up separate folders  (named "SolidWorks" and "Inventor") in the "Documents" folder of my hard drive. Inside each of those folders is a bunch of separate project folders. When I create a new project, I choose a two-letter shorthand for the project; the project folders have been named, e.g., "CS Cycles Parts". Inside is a bunch of part and assembly files, and usually a subfolder called "Static Exports" which contains STLs, STPs, PDFs and JPEGs.

I'm doing this all from Windows 7 on Boot Camp, so I downloaded the Windows GitHub client and got started. First, I tried creating a new repository on the GitHub web interface and then adding existing files to it, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out the dialog. Then I realized that I could drag and drop a directory from my hard drive into the desktop GitHub client, but for some reason it kept wanting to reassign the repository to .../Documents/GitHub/. Also, it complained about special characters, so I removed all the spaces from my directory names and replaced them with underscores.

Finally I just created new repositories in the desktop client, but named them the same as the existing project directories. GitHub kept wanting me to put them in the /Documents/GitHub directory, but this time I could change the location to be /Documents/Inventor/ - the parent of the existing repository directory that I was trying to set up. 

My first commits all just had titles like "First Posting," and I published the commits immediately. To my immense pleasure, I'm now able to see the contents of those directories in GitHub, and a bunch of the files in the "Static Exports" directories display in Git's STL viewer within the browser. 

I'll be interested in seeing how GitHub fits into my design workflow. For now it's - at the very least - a great backup system. I hope it becomes a collaborative tool for me in the near future. 

If anyone has tips for how to use GitHub to host design projects, I'd love to hear them. 

Be Happy.

Added on by Spencer Wright.

It should be noted that this was diagrammed within the context of one's career. Otherwise, there would definitely be spaces for family/friends, health/physicality, and possibly a spot for pizza.  

I think Tinder is okay.

Added on by Spencer Wright.

And how dating, like most things, is mostly about showing up and wanting to be there. 

Note: This draws from my personal experiences with a variety of romantic and dating approaches. It in no way is meant to be a comment on the dating preferences of others, or - more importantly - the qualities of the women I've seen, cared for, hurt, or been hurt by. Also: YMMV.  

Why I date.

I date because I like being romantic with women. Romanticism allows for openness that doesn't usually exist elsewhere in life. It offers different joys, and different pains, and is, has been, and will (I hope) continue to be a net positive in my life. It allows me opportunities to learn about other people's hopes, dreams, and ways of communicating. It teaches me about my own strengths, weaknesses, and inabilities.

Having an endgame is not my game. Dating is not a chore; I date because I want to date. Showing up to a date wanting anything else but to be there, with this person- I find that highly disrespectful.

There are, as far as I can tell, two factors that determine whether I enjoy being on a date:

  1. Whether I want to be on the date.
  2. Whether my date wants to be on the date. 

OkCupid encourages me to message, and presumably date, people who fall within the compatibility profile that I claim for myself. If I insist that I wouldn't date someone who smokes, OkCupid will lower the compatibility ranking of smokers. If I admit to owning a dog, OkCupid will match me with people who like dogs.

Sorting through matches on OkCupid is an exercise in establishing criteria for who I'm willing to see, and then exercising judgement based on that criteria.  The thing is, I find my own criteria to be largely reactionary and arbitrary; I have a great deal of mistrust for my own prejudices. Moreover, I am not at all sure that the ideal relationship that I am presumably imagining even exists - and, assuming that it does, whether it would ultimately make me happy. 

So I rank suitors on whether or not it seems that they want to go out with me, and I weight the result with the accuracy I believe they have in their assessment of my character. On OkCupid, I find a high portion of people to be deeply ambivalent about dating. I choose, insofar as I am able, not to date those people.

It's possible the same holds true for Tinder; I suspect that it likely applies across the general population.  But because Tinder selects for mutual attraction, I find that interactions there tend to be a bit more enthusiastic. In addition, Tinder pays due homage to the arbitrarity of attraction. Despite whatever I might say in my OkCupid profile, it would be dishonest of me to enumerate why I am attracted to any one person. For that matter, I can't honestly say why I've fallen in love in the past - and I suspect that the same holds true for most of us. And yet OkCupid insists that I have some insight into what type of person I'll fall in love with next... I just don't believe them.

Call it what you will: Hot-or-Not; a vanity machine; strictly for hookups. I think Tinder is arbitrary, weird, and insightful. And I see no reason why it would be any less effective than anything else out there.

Starboard

Added on by Spencer Wright.

A generalized usage for an existing word that I'd like to encourage: Starboard. 

In sailboat racing, there are a few means of determining right of way, and they're taken seriously. The most fun, in my experience, is this one: 

When boats are on opposite tacks, a port-tack boat shall keep clear of a starboard-tack boat. 

This rule applies when two boats are crossing paths, but usually when both boats are on similar tacks - both either heading upwind or downwind. Depending on conditions, they might be approaching each other rapidly. Regardless, the boat who yields right of way will lose ground in the race, so when one boat asserts right of way, it is commonly done with gusto.

"Starboard," in these circumstances, is such an assertion. The speaker - commonly the skipper of the boat claiming right of way - is indicating that he's on a starboard tack, and is requesting that a nearby port-tacked boat yield.  But more importantly, "starboard" is an acknowledgement that we are playing by well-accepted rules, and we agree to act accordingly.

So I'm proposing that we expand the use cases for this term. The first place I can see using it is in cyclist-pedestrian interactions, where right of way is often ceded - or worse yet, wordlessly assumed.  I think a bit of clarity could be injected here, and it would be useful to just acknowledge - aggressively, defensively, or otherwise - that we want to live in a system that has some means of negotiating conflicts.

I also see it in day to day interactions. Starboard means "you wronged me," it means "I'm sorry." It's meant to be something that we agree will make our interactions better. It's "I should have done the dishes." It's "You buy the drinks this time." 

The point is: Acknowledge someone else's perspective. It's the best way to resolve conflict that we've got. 

Pietra Rivoli on progress in developing economies

Added on by Spencer Wright.

NPR's Planet Money... rocks. Their t-shirt saga in particular has been an excellent piece of long form journalism (and, incidentally, also a great example of how crowdfunding is primed to shake up revenue streams in journalism).  This week's installment included an interview with Pietra Rivoli, and the segment below struck me on a few levels. I think the lesson here can apply not only to economies, but also to companies whose primary product is a low value commodity. If your business is converting one commodity to another, one possible way to make a big jump in your revenues is to control the supply chain in one direction (raw materials) or the other (finished goods).

Below, Pietra Rivoli being interviewed by Alex Blumberg. 

If we want to try to figure out: Is [the Bangladeshi economy] stuck? Or is it moving, inching slowly forward? What kinds of answers would you be expecting to hear from people to indicate one direction or another? 

Well, if you think of where Bangladesh is in the t-shirt story, it's in this cut-and-sew phase. So there are backward linkages from there, back to yarn and fiber, and there are forward linkages from there, to the retail complex, to the department stores in New York. And in order to not be stuck, you either have to expand the backward linkages or the forward linkages. And I think the interesting question is, What are people thinking about that? What kind of prospects are there, for capturing value moving in either direction?

You mean these cut-and-sew factories that we're going to be visiting - why aren't they doing their own spinning? Or why aren't they doing their own retailing going forward?

Exactly. 

If you're not following Planet Money, you should be. It rocks.

Jonathan Rosenberg on Leadership

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Below, excerpts from last month's First Round Review post, "42 Rules to Lead by from the Man Who Defined Google’s Product Strategy ." All are taken from a lecture that Jonathan Rosenberg, former Google SVP of Product, gave to Claremont McKenna College in 2010.

#3 Every word matters. 

“Be crisp and direct and choose each word wisely,” Rosenberg advises. “Communication isn’t rambling on in long-winded emails or spewing out every thought that comes to your head.” He quotes author Elmore Leonard. When asked what has made him so successful as a writer, Leonard famously said, “I leave out the parts that people skip.”

#8 Avoid the HPPO.

HPPO stands for “the highest-paid person’s opinion.” When you have a problem or a question, don’t naturally accept the HPPO in the room. Title means nothing. If someone’s experience has value, they should be able to frame a winning argument. “Everybody at every level should have an equal voice in the outcome, based on the strength of his or her arguments.” Rosenberg names Jim Barksdale as his favorite HPPO. As CEO of Netscape, Barksdale once said, “If we have data, let’s look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

I have, I am afraid, made the mistake of accepting a superior's inadequate argument when I should have pressed for a better path. I've also pushed against authority in ways that were ineffective and counterproductive. Disagreeing with a misguided superior is a delicate task, but one which I would hope to improve my skills at. 

#10 Crowded is creative.

There’s a certain electricity that comes from working in a crowded, bustling space. “Offices should be designed for energy and interactions, not for isolation and status.”

#13 Show up.

True for everyone, and more for leaders: “Working from home is a malignant, metastasizing cancer,” Rosenberg says. “Ban it." 

#15 Hope is not a plan.

I was, once, part of a team whose plan was some secret sauce, made of a mixture of hope and faith. It was not an effective way to manage a project. Robert Greene instructs (in his dubious but interesting 48 Laws of Power) to "plan all the way to the end;" I tend to think that, so long as one's plans aren't precious, planning is of very high value.

#23 Don't hire specialists.

“Especially in tech,” Rosenberg says. “And don’t grow up to be a specialist. The job will change, and the underlying pace of the technology will transform the landscape so quickly that the specialist’s job will be gone.” As Einstein said, “Change is the only thing that is permanent.”

Not being much of a specialist myself, I can't help but agree. 

#36 Good judgment comes from experience. 

“On my team, I asked everyone who screwed up to write a postmortem and publish it to the entire team,” he says. “You would think this would be a shameful experience. But we kept an archive of all these things, and you know what, show me a team that never makes a mistake, and I’ll show you a team that has never done anything innovative.” Errors shouldn’t be defended or buried. They are what make you smarter. You can learn more from your mistakes than from your successes if you take time to study them.

I think this is a fantastic idea. 

#40 Mean what you say. 

A great leader has to commit -- body and soul -- to a team’s goal and vision. People can tell if it’s not the case, and they’re always watching. “Smart people can smell hypocrisy. So think before you speak, and make sure you spend your time on the things that you say are important. Culture is set from the top, and once set, it cannot be changed.”

As a manager of managers, then, it's important to have your team on board with a project's objectives and goals. I no longer wish to work towards goals that I'm not committed to. Under those circumstances, managing your own work and relating to the people around you is a fruitless task.

Gems from Richard Hamming

Added on by Spencer Wright.

A few months ago, Jace introduced me to a 1986 talk by Richard Hamming titled "You and Your Research." It took until now for me to complete it, and many passages struck me as particularly poignant. They're excerpted below; emphasis is mine.

On courage:

One of the characteristics of successful scientists is having courage. Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.

On ambiguity: 

There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind. When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them.

A lovely balance indeed. I suspect that good salespeople tend towards ignoring the flaws; good managers tend to acknowledge them but remain enthusiastic.  

On focusing your subconscious:  

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

I suppose the implication of this - and it's not a particularly surprising one - is that to achieve first class results, you can't be spending much time thinking of anything else. My question: Is the result a first class life? I suspect for me - and for most people - it's not. 

On Great Thoughts Fridays: 

Friday afternoons for years - great thoughts only - means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important. I found in the early days I had believed `this' and yet had spent all week marching in `that' direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction? I either had to change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did and I marched in the direction I thought was important.

I think this is a great idea. In addition to 20% time (where a lack of productivity is almost the primary short term goal), I would love to devote some portion of my schedule to thinking about what is and isn't important.

On the importance of working on important problems: 

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

This is, simply, a highly succinct and profound observation.  I agree completely.

On seizing on opportunities: 

The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy.

This relates to something I wrote recently about maintaining a variety of projects. It's my feeling that - at least at this point in my career - keeping an open mind about what I want to focus on is of great value. More importantly, I try not to be wistful about projects that remain unfinished, as it is likely that they simply weren't as interesting as whatever else I have chosen to work on.

On personal appearance: 

You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going to give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo and an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about.

It took me a long time, and a lot of prodding from now ex-girlfriends, to learn this.  Fitting in is useful, if what you really want is for your thoughts to be heard. It's not fair, but it really isn't that hard either.

On good work vs. changing the system: 

Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.

I realized at a certain point that I cared more about doing something than I did about fixing the means by which things get done. Part of this was a deep ambivalence about the degree to which I - or anyone, for that matter - am a good judge of the quality of the systems I work within. In other words, who is to say whether any changes I might be able to effect are net positive? I know now that I would rather produce work that I can stand behind.

IoT PaaS

Added on by Spencer Wright.

This passage - in particular, the part I've bolded - from an old McKinsey paper on the Internet of Things kind of blew my mind today: 

 
In the business-to-business marketplace, one well-known application of the Internet of Things involves using sensors to track RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags placed on products moving through supply chains, thus improving inventory management while reducing working capital and logistics costs. The range of possible uses for tracking is expanding. In the aviation industry, sensor technologies are spurring new business models. Manufacturers of jet engines retain ownership of their products while charging airlines for the amount of thrust used. Airplane manufacturers are building airframes with networked sensors that send continuous data on product wear and tear to their computers, allowing for proactive maintenance and reducing unplanned downtime.

I would like a future in which we're paying more and more for services, and less and less for parts. I think of this a lot in the context of the retail service industry, but the application described above is fascinating. Imagine if Boeing redefined themselves as a company whose primary product was the thrust required to drive aluminum cans through the air. The implication of this is really interesting. It would shift the way that airlines dealt with fleet maintenance and upkeep, and might change the way all parties dealt with fuel usage as well. I had no idea that this kind of shift was underway, and I find it quite heartening.

How would your industry change if you redefined the product you offer?  

3D Printing: One part of a New Paradigm

Added on by Spencer Wright.

I often have the urge to cut-and-paste an email I've written onto a blog post.  Ideas mull around in my head, and it's often the case that an email chain prompts me to finally compose the thoughts that I've been meaning to get down for months. 

This morning, I had cause to write a message regarding the questions I have about 3D printing, and managed to nail down a few points that I've been working through recently. 

Note: I would be remiss not to mention the sources of much of my thinking: 

- 

As a hardware product manager, I've sourced 3D printed parts (SLA, mostly) on a few occasions in order to prove out basic functionality. As a prototyping tool, it's been very useful to me (notwithstanding the value that inexpensive CNC prototyping shops like rapidmachining.com offer). As a manufacturing technology, though, I'm a little less impressed with 3D printing, especially because the industry seems most interested in replacing inexpensive injection molded consumer products with their FDM analogs. As SLS/SLA models become more cost effective and - more importantly - easier to procure, I suspect that the cost-benefit will shift, and I'll begin to see more 3D printed objects in my personal life.  

But the model for producing those parts is far from settled, and I'm most interested in how the big players (I figure that Shapeways, Kinkos, and Amazon are probably best situated) will integrate the entire manufacturing process: 

  • Design (cf. Quirky; the current proliferation of hardware crowdfunding & acceleration programs)
  • 3D printing (SLA/SLS, and *limited* FDM) 
  • Secondary operations (namely drilling/tapping)
  • Assembly (monolithic consumer objects are boring; it'll only be once 3D printing is integrated with fasteners, wiring, electronics, etc. that it becomes really interesting)
  • Distribution (ten days to ship a Shapeways model just isn't sustainable)

In short, I'm interested not in 3D printing itself, but in a new paradigm for product development, manufacturing, and distribution. My work background is in traditional manufacturing, where information systems tend to be closed and resistant to change, and I'm particularly interested in hearing people's opinions about how, over what timescale, and by what means these tendencies are likely to change.