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passive parts and materials to printing integrated, active systems that can sense
and react, compute and behave. We will move from controlling an object's
mechanical functionality to controlling how it processes information and
energy as well.
When this day comes, we'll be able to print (almost) anything—from a cell
phone to a robot that strolls out of the printer. But like any sci-i story, there's
also a catch. That robot will not look at all like today's robots because it will
not be limited by the constraints imposed by conventional manufacturing. Nor
will it be designed directly by humans, because the new design space is too
large for humans to fathom. The ability to manufacture active systems made
up of both passive and active substructures with such freedom will open the
door to a new space of designs and a new paradigm of engineering, one as
powerful as biology.
Cofabrication of multiple materials
At the core of the longer term future of 3D printing technologies is the ability to
print with multiple materials simultaneously. In previous chapters we covered
printers that print multiple components, each made of a different material. For
example, a plastic extruder can print with red plastic one day and with white
plastic the next. A metal printer can print titanium intertwined with stainless
steel. Indeed, the ability to co-fabricate parts of different materials can remove
challenges and limits of traditional assembly and enable us to make increas-
ingly complex objects. But what makes multi-material printing truly exciting
is the ability to co-print multiple materials simultaneously, patterning them
together into complex, new meta-materials.
In the early days of paper printers, there were some dot matrix printers that
had a quad-color ribbon that could print dots in red, green, blue, or black.
However, you could choose only one color at a time. There were even pen
plotters that could use eight pens with eight different colors but you had to
load the plotter with the colors you wanted in advance, and each line could
use only one pen.
The breakthrough came when printers could mix primary colors on-the-ly
at increasingly precise and high resolutions. Like moving from a monochrome
