O’Reilly SolidCon

The made world is aggressively dematerializing through a combination of reality capture and digital manufacturing. In principle anything our sensing machines can see, our making machines can reproduce, at an increasing rate and with increasing fidelity. Simultaneously distinctions between sensing, information processing, and actuation blur in devices where the skeleton and shell are equal parts of the functionality as the interior components. These two trends are intersecting in devices that are constructed as a single unit. In some cases, the material a device is made of can simultaneously capture information, process it and act on it. Against this background commodity materials and machines mean complex behaviors are not dependent on unique material properties, or singular machines, but how the material is arranged, the pattern. Like mask work in an integrated circuit, the power of the device shifts from materials and machines to how the patterns in which materials are arranged. Using examples from paper folding to multi-material 3D printing and printed electronics, I will examine how defining novel fine-grain patterns of commodity materials using commodity machines is a key activity in the design and manufacture of smart, connected devices from shoes to buildings. I will talk about how making the trillion-device Internet of Things is going to be wildly unlike how consumer electronics are currently manufactured.