Absolutely it is and it’s a growing movement, my 3d printer is old and cheap but it’s already stopped me buying a whole class of products (i.e. small plastic fixings and cases) the newer technologies are incredibly cool especially some of the pick-and-place enabled multi toolhead models.
Since I first started following the reprap project home fabrication has increased in quality massively, there are a lot of sites with endless things you can download that have continually improved over the years. CAD and slicers have improved hugely, they’re going to continue to at an increasing rate not only as more people use them but coding tools are getting better too - my projects have benefitted hugely from ai streamlining the coding process I’m sure CAD software writers are benefitting too.
We’re not too far from ai gen CAD which will be a game changer, having chat gpt style ai help guide you through putting together open source projects will help users too - being able to say ‘i need to upgrade the motor in my washing macjine’ and ai can help select a range of options ‘this motor and that controller or thia controller and that motor…’ finding local companies that will fabricate the parts for you so they plug into the bits you fabricate at home, or local companies fabrication open source designs.
Collaborative design projects are the key, I’ve been working with a few people trying to find methods that make it easy for large amounts of people doing small things to make meaningful progress on big projects. I think it’ll become common for most people to be involved in at least some form of collaborative project once people are used to using open source designed items fabricated in the way generics are.
Digital twins also hold a lot of promise along those lines. If we can lower the barrier to make or modify them at least, then even if you don’t have the means to actually make something yourself you can still contribute with some level of certainty that it actually makes sense (passing models, and tests for example).
Absolutely, I think general people being able to participate with testing and design ideas would be a huge boost for those that design stuff, it’s so difficult having to work out what to try and determining what works, also building information about the product, researching methods and comparing them, etc. I think it could be a really interesting system where there’s useful work to be done at every level.
