Future of Product Design

This might not make as much sense to you as a high school student but one of the biggest barriers to more industrial design is mass manufacturing. Because the cost of tooling (the machines that make the parts of products) it helps companies if they can make more of the same thing to pay for that tooling. Since they have to make so many of the same thing that object has to be generic enough so the maximum number of people will buy it.

In the next 20 years if 3D printing successfully converts to on demand manufacturing it won’t matter as much what parts the machine is printing, it will only matter that it is printing something to amortize the cost of the machine. So… a prediction could be that there will be more demand for industrial design not less as people may want very individualized products. Maybe. We will see what happens to the world in 20 years (or 20 days).