Marjorie Norma did not invent 3D printing, but she was instrumental in
standardizing it. And when her competitors came for blood, she ended up on
top, because she still had the best product, and brand loyalty. The science
of additive manufacturing was still in its infancy when she started working
on it as a pet project. She knew that speed and sophistication were going to
progress on their own, and that all she had to do was keep up with it. She
was focused on how people would begin using such things in their home. This
meant that industrial synthesizers, and biomedical synthesizers would be
less useful to most customers than food synthesizers. For the most part, she
found that the current machines were either very large, or very small. Many
of them were designed with a specific result in mind, or had unfortunate
limitations. If people were going to place these things in their homes, they
needed to be versatile, and be capable of making more than just a single
pastry at a time. It was never going to transition from a novelty item for
people with a disposable income to a ubiquitous household appliance, unless
anyone could download any program, and print anything. She got her idea when
she walked into her kitchen one day, and looked around. By the entrance was
the refrigerator. It took up the most space, and it wasn’t always full. She
also had a stove/oven combo, above which her husband had installed a
microwave oven. Then there was a sink, and a dishwasher. She owned a fairly
small kitchen, and she made pretty good use of the space, but she wasn’t
much of a cook, and neither was anyone else in the house. What if she could
put everything together, or almost everything? She kept looking back at that
fridge. Yes, it was the largest, but it was also the most important. A lot
of foods don’t require any cooking, but they all require storage, unless you
want to go to the store every day. Some people do that, but it’s not very
efficient, and that lifestyle isn’t marketable. There was a solution, and
she could find it.
She used that refrigerator as the basis for her new design, knowing that
most living spaces were capable of accommodating it. Some units were only
large enough for a mini-fridge, but people who lived in such places already
knew how to make sacrifices. The top of her design was a water tank. It
didn’t necessarily fit in every space, but it would be optional, and
customers could connect a waterline either way, just like they would for
that refrigerator. Under that would be where the cartridges went. Here she
took inspiration from the toner bottles in the copy room down the hall from
her office. For the synthesization cavity, she found herself limited by the
dimensions of everything else, but it was still larger than the capacity of
any standard oven, so that was more than enough. Since the cavity is where
her users would be retrieving their food, they couldn’t put this on the
floor, but at a reasonable height, which meant everything below it could be
dedicated to storage. She chose to include a utensil drawer, and then an
extra cartridge cabinet. All told, she figured that a fully stocked
synthesizer could feed one person for about six months. Her original model
did not include a dishwasher, but later ones did, allowing customers to keep
almost an entire kitchen in the space of a refrigerator. It could be
programmed to make just about anything, cool food, heat food, and supply
water. What more could a normal person need? Well, they needed tools, and
they needed organ and tissue replacements. She started to work on those
machines next.
No comments :
Post a Comment