Formlabs Believes the Future of 3-D Printing Is With Pros, Not Tinkerers

Formlab’s trio of founders invented their high resolution, $3,300 3-D printer at MIT’s Media Lab and have raised over $22 million dollars in venture capital and crowdfunding pre-orders. Formlabs

As an associate partner and managing director of Ideo’s Boston studio, Colin Raney’s typical day at the office revolved around designing drug-dealing robots and gadgets that can read your mind. Raney spent eight years traveling the globe, helping the largest companies in the world solve their most interesting problems, and inventing the future. Despite holding one of the cushiest gigs in the design world, Raney recently decided to trade in his designer desk to join the Cambridge-based 3-D printing upstart Formlabs as their new head of global marketing.

Formlabs has been on a tear after developing a slick, $3,300 3-D printer at the MIT Media Lab, then raising nearly $3 million on Kickstarter and over $19 million in venture capital to fund its development. Their technology, which uses a laser and liquid resin to produce parts with four times the resolution of other low-cost systems, has become the go-to technology among artists and designers who require high-fidelity printing on their desktop.

Colin Rainey via Colin Rainey

Now, Raney’s mission is to use the design thinking and business model innovation skills honed at Ideo to help Formlabs reach its true potential. “I’m excited to help design the business that brings this technology to the world.” says Raney. “Desktop printing is still in its infancy and I’m excited to design the experiences that allow this technology to empower engineers and designers.”

You’ll note Raney made no mention of consumers and offered no bold promises that there would be a Formlabs machine in every home. Raney believes that 3-D printing can change the world, but primarily by empowering professional engineers and designers to do better work, faster. This view stands in contrast with companies like MakerBot, led by self-styled mad scientist Bre Pettis, who promises a world where low-cost 3-D printers turn every school and garage into a micro-factory.

“The hype cycle for 3-D printing is that it will replace manufacturing, that you can print anything in the home, but in my opinion that’s actually not the best use of the technology,” says Raney. “People will say you can print a coat hanger if you need one, but you could probably get them from Amazon faster and cheaper than you could 3-D print them.”

What the Power-User Market Really Needs

Instead, Raney and Formlabs want to enable designers to do things that would be unworkable any other way. Take fellow MIT Media Lab alum Skylar Tibbets and his ingenious CAD algorithms that allow for printing 50-foot long chains inside a five-inch box. Or toy designer Danny Choo who used the Form1 to create production tooling for one of his hyper-articulated action figures.

According to Raney, applications like this are only the beginning of what’s possible once designers and engineers have high-power machines at their desks. “At IDEO, we spent a lot of time thinking about how maker technology would evolve in the next 5-10 years, and how people might use it,” says Raney. “As we started to design concepts, you could see how 3-D printing made it possible to produce ideas that would be almost impossible.”

Doing the impossible requires technological breakthroughs, and as the head of a major design and engineering studio Raney heard the constant refrain that 3-D printers would continue to get faster, cheaper, and more reliable, but one important spec was always noticeably absent from these promises: detail. “For the desktop 3-D printers to become a tool that engineers and designers can use, they need to deliver a really high level of detail,” says Raney. “This allows engineers to create intricate parts or designers to produce beautiful objects, and without detail, I’m afraid the technology will just be a novelty.”

Unlike most 3-D printer companies, Formlabs is laser-focused on the professional market and doesn’t believe most homes will have a printer in the near term. George Hart

There are user experience challenges to address as well. As 3-D printer transition from being fridge-sized machines attended to by skilled technicians to desktop devices, tradeoffs in usability must be made. “One of the bigger myths of the 3-D printing space is that the prints just don’t roll off the machines,” says Raney. A key part of Formlabs’s mission must is to instill confidence in users that the machine can produce high-quality parts without requiring hours of post-processing.

There are also business challenges to overcome. Formlabs is being sued by 3D Systems, the $5.4 billion dollar market leader. Autodesk recently created a reference design for a similar SLA-based 3-D printer that it released as an open source design, equipping Chinese knock-off makers with tools to flood the market. And plenty of hardware hackers have taken aim at Formlabs in recent months raising millions of dollars for new systems.

Despite the mounting obstacles, Raney is up for the challenge because the potential is so enormous. “You won’t see 3-D printing everywhere, but where you see it, it changes lives.”