What Does 3D Printing Change?

Abstract

The structure of the worldwide production and consumption system that represents the status quo for making and moving most of the world’s objects is undergoing extensive change due to innovations, notably 3D printing, which irrevocably alter the roles of producers and consumers. People suffering material poverty in the Global South are currently a crucial but underrated part of this system, through their endurance of inequalities and austerities in labour, environmental conditions and standards of living that would be intolerable in the Global North. In this chapter, Birtchnell and Hoyle examine changing forces in production and consumption arising from post-Fordist manufacturing methods that privilege mass-customization, made-to-order objects, and craft aesthetics. Moreover, producing-consumers — ‘prosumers’ — now demand accountability and transparency from their chosen methods of production, and they invest their identities in objects through their interactions as ‘produsers’.