Care to download and print your next pair of shoes? Without even paying for them?
The Pirate Bay invite you to share their vision: a world in which footwear is stolen and printable. They’ve announced a new category called “physibles” — files describing physical objects that can be made with a 3D printer.
In their imagined future you do not buy the objects you desire. You download the files and print them. “You will download your sneakers within 20 years,” they promise. Imagine that!
All you need’s a 3D printer
If you’ve used a 3D printer, you’ll know why printable shoes aren’t exciting. Not yet.
If you’re new to 3D printing, allow me to describe the experience in two words:
Wax. Candles.
“Cheap” 3D printers use an inkjet process. They build layers of soft resin into a physical object; a physical object that often — as it turns out — looks a lot like a candle.
I struggle to get excited about shoes that are a wick and a match away from mood lighting, but perhaps I am too fussy. Maybe I should become an early adopter and embrace a technology in its infancy to help shape and improve it. Then in the far future I will be able to say, “Yes! I was there! I was one of the first, I was. The first with printed shoes!”
And I’ll wheel myself over to the digifire and print a machine to rub my aching feet, correct my crippled bones, and sing me a song about the old times, when a spade was a spade and printers didn’t talk back.
But 3D printers are an emerging market!
Tip: “emerging market” is gobbledygeek for “don’t buy one yet”. 3D televisions are an emerging market. You shouldn’t own one of those either.
3D printers are — to borrow the words of a friend who lost five house cats in his experimental transmogrifier before calling it a day — “not quite there yet”.
3D printers are designed for rapid prototyping. They won’t produce objects containing a range of materials. They don’t make things engineered with the fit and finish that we’re used to.
3D printers are not — to put it more plainly — designed to create objects that normal people can enjoy.
But they’ll get better, right?
Will they, indeed? A 3D printer in every home? By 2020 we’ll be printing our own furniture, it seems.
Maybe that’s not so far fetched. By 2020, I’m prepared to believe that some of us will be printing our own candles. But only the very determined. And I’ll tell you why.
I turn 30 this year. I am yet to meet a single person who speaks favourably of their printer. Not their 3D printer. Their plain old “2D” one. This is for good reason.
Printers jam. Printers clog. Printers demand that you curse them in ever-creative ways in order to function. Printers run out of photo magenta even when you’re printing in grayscale. Printers are not generally well-liked.
I struggle to imagine a 3D printer that is much better than a 2D one.
The future of 3D printing, today
I do not wish to be told that my 3D printer is out of nanocyan when it’s doing the tricky bits around the laces. I do not dream of discarding twelve pairs of half-printed, mangled, almost shoes in order to get one wearable pair of sort-of-looks-like-shoes-if-you-stand-here-and-squint-a-bit.
The world has changed. People who hated technology are beginning to fall in love with it. New generations are growing up having never experienced technology when it was hard.
“It just works,” is slowly becoming the default rather than the exception.
Soon, others will see that too. “No!” they will say. “No more of this! To the charity shop with you, Canon S9000i. Go! Poison the home of some other poor sap! Anything that creates this much pain does not belong in my life. Perhaps I, too, can live without a printer like the Others.”
People will learn to reject machines that make things harder for them. There is no place for ubiquitous 3D printers in this world unless they can avoid the simple frustrations that manufacturers of regular printers could not. And I have my doubts.
It is with all of this in mind that I make a promise to you: that I will never steal my shoes from the Internet and print them at home. Instead, I will do what sane people do when they need new shoes.
I will buy them from a shoe shop.
