The gravity-defying future of manufacturing | Schendy Kernizan | TED

I’m Schendy Kernizan.

I'm creating a new way of manufacturing objects.

I'm part of a company called Rapid Liquid Print

that is rethinking how products are made.

3D printing -- for those who are not familiar with it --

has been a technology

that's really taken off in the past 30 years.

Traditional manufacturing was using a method

that's just been so outdated,

not digitized.

3D printing became kind of the new way of making that.

People said, "Oh, this is going to replace traditional manufacturing."

But the issue is that you need to build on a platform.

So you always need a surface that you're starting with

in order to create an object.

And the more complex that geometry becomes,

gravity starts to become a limitation of what you can make.

And in order to circumvent that, you need to actually create supports --

and then you need to remove those supports.

So it's really kind of a manual effort of cleaning those pieces

that are then discarded.

And it's quite wasteful.

So 3D printing has almost become kind of this system

that's great for prototyping,

but hasn't really created that bridge from prototyping to production.

We solved that by printing inside of this gel

that holds the shape that you're drawing.

You're able to eliminate gravity.

Think of the ability of, you know --

if I have an idea in my mind, and I have a pencil,

can I draw it in space and then have that shape there?

So you go on the computer, you draw the geometry that you want,

and that information gets sent to the printer.

And as the machine is moving --

think of your arm moving that pencil around --

the material is coming out of it,

and the machine knows how fast or how slow it needs to go

and where it needs to be drawing it inside of the tank.

The gel is mostly water that’s been transformed into gelatin.

And think of hand sanitizer consistency

where it can move, but it has structure to itself.

And the viscosity is strong enough

where whatever you extrude inside of it doesn't just pull out the bottom.

And when it's done,

you just let it there until it fully cures.

You're literally doing calligraphy in space.

You're able to make parts faster.

You can customize the colors that you want.

You can blend colors, create gradients of colors.

And instead of having this mold that you then need to discard or put away

because your design is different the next time that you build something,

with this gel, it's reusable.

So you can extract that part, you rinse it with water

and you're reusing the gel to make more parts.

So it's a reusable process and sustainable way of making things.

As human beings, anything I touch, even from your phone case,

usually having some kind of flexibility and give to it

feels more relatable

than having a hard surface that you're touching.

Early days, there was another research group at MIT

that was doing a lot of prosthetics, orthotics.

They saw our process and thought,

"Hey, this could be actually beneficial for us."

And that led us to talk to more clinicians out there,

more people in that space.

People said customization would be really beneficial,

but [they] don’t have a way to do that easily.

Most of the time, what's really pushed on the patient

is to wear, you know, small, medium, large,

because it's faster and easier to do.

The downside to that is that you're being squeezed into something

that doesn't fit you well.

So we started printing and testing parts for them.

And I remember seeing the first time they showed us pictures of their patients

trying something that we had printed in our garage at the time

and hearing how, like, "This is the best fit I've ever had.

This really feels great on my body.”

That patient needed such a custom solution

and being able to scan [a] patient in the morning,

print in the afternoon and have something ready the next day,

it was exactly something that they were looking for

that they couldn't do before.

I think myself and others in the world,

we would love everything to be customized to our bodies and our needs.

Making mass customization more accessible to people is how I see the future.

There are a lot of industries that can benefit from this,

from toys to fashion, how cars are made, rockets were made,

consumer goods and things that we interact with.

Ways that we grow things or make things are going to be different.

One of the things that I dream about is the idea that we can create new things

that will inspire further travel, for example, in space,

or even habitats in space

we can kind of explore in

and come up with new solutions that maybe we haven't thought of.

It does excite me to see that people want to use this tool

to push their industry forward

and try new things that they couldn't do before.