Reboots are a tricky thing to get right. More often than not, they’re built on hype and promises or wildly misjudge the needs of the audience. ‘And Just Like That’ was not our mother’s ‘Sex and the City’. The Ford Capri, reborn as an electric SUV, retains barely a glimmer of the classic fastback coupé. A po-faced Lara Croft? No, thank you.
When something seemingly springs out of nowhere to overnight popularity, repeating that alchemy is difficult. Though, not impossible, as one of additive manufacturing’s own subgenres has proven.
What image does ‘desktop 3D printing’ conjure for you? Is it a vignette of a MakerBot Replicator? Is it a nerd-coded makerspace? Is it those awful dragons you see everywhere now on TikTok and car boot sale tables? Or is it something entirely different?
Trade show floors used to appear divided. It was as though desktop 3D printers, usually surrounded by plastic trinkets, had precisely nothing to do with the ‘real’ 3D printers that were firing lasers and showing off complex parts for rocket thrusters just a few aisles over. It was this garish thing that would be blamed for planting the seed of doubt around 3D printing and leave the grown-ups to pick up the pieces for years to come.
