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so good morning and I don't know welcome to our chat today for the 3d printing specialization which is being offered on Coursera so this is this chat has been set up in the second course in the series which is 3d printing applications my name is Vishal system I am the instructor for that course and also helping the entire specialization I'm also the director of the Illinois maker lab at the University of Illinois which is the world's first 3d printing lab set up in a business school you know we are fortunate to have with us a new lab and development consulting development and disaster relief particularly focused at how technology can be applied in the field and so you know the firm he also works with the field ready and we are going to get his perspectives on how digital manufacturing you know in in any form not just 3d printing can enable response to disasters at scale thank you for joining us Andrew could you introduce yourself first yes my name's Andrew Lam the way I got into this was through my involvement in a disaster relief organization called radar which does a lot of training for humanitarian relief workers around the world and I used to run an organization called engineers at borders here in the UK and essentially one of the things that became quite interested in is the idea small scale large numbers of small scale tributed decentralized technologies that could empower equal to determine their own development in this so with red are empowering individuals and engineer our borders empowering individuals it was a natural fit to then look at some of the more innovative technologies that are out there I was approached by field Raley's co-founder a relief worker called Eric James who was also on the board of radar at that time and he had more than twenty years worth experience has more than twenty years of experience of doing frontline relief work and program management for a variety of different large organizations and well he basically convinced me with a problem which is that the logistical supply chains that aid agencies use when they try to respond to disaster to help people affected by disaster are the bugbear of a lot of aid workers they a lot of aid workers can't do their jobs because they don't have access to the things that they need to do raid work his idea that was could there be a way to use 3d printing digital fabrication to make supplies in the field and that is a very that idea was you know fitted with my mice or the philosophy and the ideas some of the things I've been working on that's how I know you know Disaster Response you know it seems that you know a distributed technology that's available to leverage in the field would certainly work but give us a sense of what the problem really is when you when you face a disaster in the field and perhaps how you know what's the mission behind field ready in trying to address this issue and then we can talk about how 3d printing comes into play the problem really is that after a major disaster particularly in a context that isn't well prepared for it so here you know in Nepal last year just over a year ago a major earthquake that the building codes won't have to scratch the you know it's a Nepal this although a very rapidly developing it's very poor country it wasn't very well prepared for the earthquake and so an awful lot of the infrastructure was destroyed when an earthquake hits it's it destroys a lot of the key infrastructure and certainly a lot of the livelihoods of people in in the affected area and so in Nepal they had problems actually trying to get supplies to people basic supplies and by which I mean themes like shelter shelter supplies tents stoves blankets things like that up in the mountains it can be very cold in the pool but it's but because the earthquake has damaged all of the infrastructure it's very hard to get those things there and so even after what might be a very very very long supply chain and I'm trying to get things to the International Airport say you're across the Indian border of the Chinese border into Nepal they still had severe problems getting aid out into the villages you're talking about you know trying to navigate the Himalayas here it's it's a it was a phenomenal supply chain problem and so that so the problem was essentially the effect that they had people weren't getting what they needed to be to survive and I think there's an awful awful lot of criticism of the way that aid response happened worked in the Nepal earthquake and some of the barriers it's still facing but actually it's a very very difficult context to work in so the the fundamental problem is one of survival after a disaster but then also reducing vulnerability to disasters to these sudden shocks that can destroy the infrastructure and obviously we could what they have told that story you can see how it relates to supply chains so specifically perhaps on the you know Nepal case itself I remember reading about some project that field-ready had tried could you share details of that story yeah we've been active in the pool for I would say fully active for about seven months now we did an initial assessment trip a few weeks after the earthquake in May last year and we basically found that the time was right there was a lot of confusion and you know trying to trying to innovate in that context would it be very challenging for what you know good ideas still relatively new organization we went back in September and found that actually that there was there was a kind of the space was suddenly available that the immediate needs had been met and the question now was attending into the ongoing needs of the affected communities so we did a couple of assessment visits to different areas of Nepal one of the things that really came out very clearly from all of aid workers and all the people living in IDP camps that displaced people camps in the worst-affected districts of cinder pal Jack and Gawker was it's really it sounds really strange but actually Walter fittings was it was a big problem they were having to improvise a lot of water fittings and and you know let's put this in context Nepal a very poor country you know a lot of people are living off pipes that push together anyway but now people are being concentrated into concrete shelters rather than being able to sort of develop their own housing they're being collected together because of all the rubble elsewhere so they're in these very high-density camps and water and sanitation is a big issue so you want decent water water fittings to connect all the planks together and they were having to improvise a lot of connections so one of the things that I did was my colleague mark and right out there is a quick proof of concept of making water supply fittings in an IDP camp that that are basically not available on the local market and they're a much better way of connecting pipes together the we went back in December when we started a sort of longer-term program there and the fittings that we the fitting that we've made with still operating so work very effectively and a lot of people were asking how can we do all this and since then my colleague Abby Taylor are all technical coordinator program lead out there in facing Katmandu but working the districts she's been doing all sorts of incredible work with 3d printers and 3d printing molds to a bit of injection molding parts um sorry electrical items get in the clinic the power into clinics restored by 3d printing new covers for electrical sockets improving communications amongst the very deep valleys that they have in the foothills of the Himalayas by designing helical antenna which is basically constructed out of some wires and poles and some 3d printed connections connectors I've been doing a whole variety of things like lots of support on the medical component side you know spare parts for baby warmers you know incubators essentially that have been used in hospitals but the hospitals in Kathmandu get a lot of donated equipment from and richer countries and after a while you know when those products aren't made anymore they're still using them but and they have to make their own spare parts and we were helping them to do that okay I know one of the things you know that's probably you know I noticed in your conversations is a lot of it is being driven by your team how do you get this out into the field so that you empower the people there to you know as and I think you mentioned earlier also the issue of response time so I would think you need to figure out a way to empower the people in the field to leverage this technology any any thoughts on how you would dress that challenge or how you're trying to address that challenge yeah this is this is actually really exciting area for us a big there are some business models that we're exploring and for field ready we we want our purpose is to try and solve problems in logistical supply chains in disaster relief we don't necessarily want to be a supplier to either of 3d printers or of the things that really printers make to aid agencies so a lot of what we do is training and then a capacity building of local talent local makers they tend to be sort of engineering graduates and getting that skillset trained up to you 3d printers now I should say the context of this is before we were in operating in the ball we've done some a pilot in Haiti and what we found in Haiti is actually that whilst there were people in 80 who were OK at making things the level of IT literacy of being able to use computer-aided design software with actually quite low I guess in the universities in Haiti they don't have sufficient access to computers or to the software that they need to make stuff to design stuff in the pool the situation's a bit different the the the talent in the local population when it comes to 3d design work is extraordinary really really high interesting yeah so the problem at the universities is that that perhaps a shortage of tools and and so they've got computers but they haven't got necessarily the tools and where tools are donated big machine tools they tend to be big machine tools that you might find in a machine lab in a laboratory in America or the UK or something like that and sometimes the students aren't allowed to use them basically kids so there's a lot of because there's restrictions like that right yeah all right so essentially you've got this latent desire for a large number of engineering students very highly trained on and kick it to design who want to use 3d printers so we've actually we've been working with a few training them up and the the area where we've needed to train them is essentially this is how to use a 3d printer I mean today there's it takes a little while to get used to some of the subtleties of the orientation the different parts that you might want to print and things like that but but the main focus of our training there has been problem identification and what figuring out what is appropriate to be printed are 3d to be made on a 3d printer I want Mike engage with other tools and we've been focusing on quality control that's a really really big issue but now beyond that in the longer term what we're hoping to build is a network called humanitarian makers who are humanitarians that can make things but where our approach to that is trying to recruit makers and train with humanitarians rather than with routine humanitarians and training and its makers which is ugly and then in the longer term in terms of business model supporting all of this we've got an idea called beads that the internet of production the concept is essentially the internet of production or the may connect with nicknamed of the niccola's is this an idea that from the field Reggie's point of view the challenge is after a major disaster you need very high volumes of supplies so you might you know one aid agency Paul might I think it was safe children brought in about two hundred thousand buckets into Nepal 3d printing a bucket is probably not the best idea in the world fine two hundred thousand of them it will also you know that is not the way to go so question with the Internet of production is an idea about or can we find a way to use let's say there's a feature in five years time where metal 3d printers are commonplace can we put metal 3d print molds for buckets which can be distributed to say 50 local bottle making plants that might make plastic water bottles for living in though they're injection molding machines could be repurposed to make say 4,000 buckets each so that eight agencies can then order 200,000 buckets from the local market rather than saying you know making them say in China or in Pakistan stockpiling them in Copenhagen and Copenhagen flying or in Dubai and then flying them into New Delhi and then trucking them into the Paula can we actually support the local market and and and what's needed there is an interface between the big and the small between distributed manufacturers and concentrated so the distributed supply and concentrated demand and we think there is value here in the idea it's massive production I think that's a great idea I think we've seen you know a couple of the things that you're describing at you know in these feel locations we see that happening in the lab as well there's a lot of latent demand that's not able to leverage these tools you know again like engineering students they have labs that are purpose specifically for you know class projects or for high-value projects and they don't have the ability to experiment and you know fail cheaply and then innovate so I think that's the space we filled out with a you know open access community-based cheap you know FDM based desktop printers which and people come up with amazing stuff absolutely and actually interesting and Salons idea is something we're trying to get involved in in the field so actually by by deploying this kind of distributed manufacturing technology digital fabrication 3d printers primarily one of the things we've been able to do is actually identify local needs that quite frankly couldn't be met in any other way and so the PM to find items like the corner of a baby warmer for a hospital Katmandu a baby warmer days made anymore there's no spare parts supply chain it's not in any aid agency catalog you know if you want that to work you're gonna have to improvise something and generally what they were improvising there wasn't hygienic yes so you know this wasn't in a catalog anywhere we took a functioning corner bracket oh no the baby warmers had one that wasn't broken we hooked up a 3d model of it just by measuring it by hand with all the nooks and crannies and then we were able to print out a copy test it out and do a bit of rapid prototyping Dimitri so it includes a design nature didn't break again now you can find that design on Thingiverse but you can't now because we've shared it that's the value of open but actually you wouldn't find that in an aid agency catalog and you wouldn't able to you wouldn't find that certainly on a full market so in those areas at the moment through its big potential for 3d printing I think the grassroots innovation you know our enabling grassroots innovation you know we've seen several stories like that out of the other project which our learners also get introduced to which is the subsistence marketplaces project yeah where we've got you know allowing low literacy low income consumers to become better or smarter consumers and participate in a marketplace or perhaps let them understand how our marketplace functions and to add to that skill we are looking at 3d printing as an sort of a step to make them producers as well and you know solve local problems yeah and that's that's really where the Internet of production idea begins work is we do need critical mass of talents and you need to have a reliable quality control which because the talent point as well you know if you in theory if you had 50 different factories with or makerspaces in togo that all had similar printers you would be able to get to share a design and be able to get very rapidly larger quantities of a particular item without international supply chain so it'd still be local some local supply chains involved bidding but but again that supports the local market the I think that there is you you can walk around any town or any disaster affected community in a developing country and there are plumbers and electricians and carpenters and metal workers and welders and roofers and you know that the builders you know there's an awful lot of local talent and the question is how how can we at low capital cost create good jobs so that they themselves can sort of add value in their work and deliver higher quality reproduce early and a reproducible basis and essentially move them from being laborers or consumers to creators and I think that's a very powerful concept of what the future of employment in developing countries might look like because there's you know there is all of these countries are facing huge demographic changes with the growth of people on the age of 25 and you know you're not going to be able to get all these people working in a factory now no matter how much you might try and encourage Toyota to invest in your country you you're not gonna be able to employ them the answer is you've got to help people to do things themselves I think and and by the way people who create a happier than people who consume absolutely yeah I think we see that I mean one of the objectives of setting up this course and you know creating a beginner level curriculum and you know learners are going to learn software and 3d modeling skills the software has become more and more accessible and you know it and in free in most cases and it works without very high-end computers now I mean it still requires something but it's not that resource intensive and with a lot of the open-source projects around the hardware it is possible you know to have a 2/3 you know maybe $200 kit which can serve some basic purposes in can be assembled by people in the field absolutely and I think so on the software side in in the pool we can change I have a problem with design ok we can recruit local people to do the design work but certainly if we're trying to work with aid agency staff all agencies are trained to be aid workers they're not trying to be manufacturers or makers so we've been looking at we with Imperial College in London and they helped us to develop some software where you can listen to puppets in beta version at the moment we're testing it in the pool but you can say I've got a pipe of this size over the pipe of this size and get the software to automatically design a pipe fitting that will connect the two of them together all right so you don't have to design each one and turn and it you know it will parametrically design the busy so increasingly Europe I mean that enable I know the great group that has been working on 3d printing that's it's they have a some work with autodesk to look at parametric design of and prosthetics so there's no for the automation options there obviously they're sharing designs and things like that i think the what was the other part of what you said the it wasn't just software the other thing is Hardware the open-source side of things yeah one of the big problems that we have in the world at the moment I would suggest is that it's very hard to share know-how data open data and open knowledge is reasonably easy to share on the Internet Wikipedia and all of the world's open data platforms a testament to that but it's very hard to share know-how openly to show someone how to make something yeah I'm on the board of a foundation called the afro pedia Foundation which runs a website called afro pedia it's like appropriate technology Wikipedia but it's called afro pedia and it has all sorts of information on there about know-how to helping people to know how to make appropriate technologies themselves and it's a very very busy website it's used a lot in particularly in developing countries but actually there's also a hell of a lot of use of YouTube you know I think a lot of people what of the learners on this course will have at some point gone to YouTube to learn how to do something in my case to tie a bow tie okay what to fix a piece of Ikea furniture anyway we need to get better at sharing know-how openly and that's a real challenge for all of us who have got access to education and have the space to be able to share what we've learned in richer countries to be able to not just share know-how me it's very hard to get an engineer to write how they did something yeah it takes a long time but but that's gonna be the next big challenge is sharing class and course it's like that's really how you know sharing know how I think one of the learnings from our other projects where you're working in the field is also that there is a lot of know-how in the field that needs to be captured and exposed to that context or perhaps similar contexts in another country which are solutions are better than what you know you and me sitting you know perhaps in an ivory tower can even think of as to what's relevant for that context yeah I mean one of the things we're talking about with this software that for pipe fittings is like what we're trying to do in an IDP camp in Nepal of using this software to 3d print water fitties you know what let's try and do that in London let's try and bring that technology and learn how to learn how to doing it over that and bring it to London because if you can get the more you can get rid of supply chains you're more efficient you just focus on the movement of all materials the more you can add and value in the local economy bring back manufacturing jobs talk to the UK to London yeah and and have makers around the world and actually you know I would really rather my house was the place I I live in which was built in the similar way to some of the earth structures that they have in Nepal earthquake resistant because they're just so much better at dealing with the climate absolutely yeah so we've got a lot to learn both ways but sharing that know-how is it's going to be a real challenge for for the next generation of engineers that are coming out of universities and coming out of courses like this now great urban so with that let's open up the floor for questions we have we have you know folks from Bangladesh India at least those are the ones who introduce yourself in the chat the question is in Bangladesh that is unknown you Kathleen 3d printing technology to come there I would say the the a very powerful way to do this is to join or to join a community that I've been involved in called the global innovation gallery the global innovation gathering is network of makerspaces in developing countries around the world and I'm afraid I can't remember their web their web address but I'm sure if you look at global innovation gallery you'll find something and the point about this is that if if you and a few friends are able to get together and set up a makerspace in a place like Bangladesh it doesn't need to be a particular grantee in fact you know the more accessible it is to people that the easier it is to grow you can have a few 3d printers few computers with some design skills and the good global innovation gathering will be able to share some experiences about how they've developed their you know their strengths achieve their business models for supporting those spaces in developing countries they have a project called a hub in a box which is actually quite interesting to look at so check them out but the the other part of this is that from a field-ready point of view it is worth speaking with your university or with your if you have any links to people who work with international aid agencies that might be a way to reach out and certainly getting in touch with me at field-ready we'd be able to be able to find out which aid agencies that we know of are operating in Bangladesh on disaster preparedness work that we could bring this bringing this technology and figure out how to use this technology to support supply chains they're great I hope that answers your question um there's been another one we should go for I don't have any I just wanted to add or there's one from Naboo only in terms of what do you think about print material as it's hindering the economies of scale you know in terms of those materials are also not environmentally friendly any thoughts on alternate materials which are more sustainable yeah I have I have a bit of a problem here in the sense that there is some fantastic work being done by groups like tech for trade and several others on the idea of using recycled plastic to create 3d printer filament one of field reddy's decisions has been to make sure that we use sort of proven commercial technology rather than the most cutting-edge experimental technology that's being developed by Green Line tech for trade so until there is a commercial plastic recycler on the market and we can recycle local supplies of waste plastic field-ready is going to stick to abs and PLA and because of the context that we work in international disaster relief work we the nature of that business is that there's always a duars flying in and out so putting some wheels of plastic in onto into a shipment or into the bags and friends and colleagues in those agencies is how we're solving that problem at the moment be it is a you picked up on an important challenge for us though because the last thing we want to do is to replace supply chains of initiative products with supply chains of raw materials our purpose is to try and get rid of supply chains altogether so that things can just be made locally but you know not every country has access to raw plastic and yeah I mean I think there's yeah there's all sorts of projects I see here that the child you put proto printing from India it's a really promising area of work the way we're using recycle plastic moment is were through some material called poly floss which is a bit like candy floss or candy as you might call it in the US but it's made from recycled plastic and we're trying to look at using that as an insulating material the economies of scale question it's about basically switching from a 3d printing process to using 3d printing to make molds and then you're using recycled plastic to fill those molds basically that's how you reduce it in terms of help and hemp and algae as a base material we've not got experience with that we do use ceramic we're experimenting with that but I'm afraid I can't answer your question there but so alone so children's question um the recent 3d printing technology at a personal level are not most about to be fast and reliable enough to provide an end user product IRA tend to agree and accept if you're doing small volumes so that's how we're putting it into immediate use to answer your questions we're doing small volumes of items let's say 50 umbilical cord clamps to go on the umbilical cords of newborn babies doing say 50 or plus a month it you know that it's it's low volumes the quality of those products on a 3d printer is good enough and in some cases better than what is available even through international supply chains but I can young local on the local market the reliability aspects we are using enclosed 3d printers and to deal with the issues of dust or you know disruption to the printing process the to the extrusion process sorry the we we are running our three printers of car batteries no you might sort of drive into an IDP camp and hook up a 3d printer to the vehicle's car battery solar panel installations are something we try out in the next couple of months but I mean there's no reason why that wouldn't work and I suppose that the final part is actually the raw materials question which is something I've already spoken about we rely on in the day in the humanitarian disaster sites of people traveling in and out I hope that makes sense those small plastic perhaps that available in low volumes is really where we're at in terms of scaling up we're looking at 3d printing molds things could that they can then be made in margin bottoms I found the question from crime Gupta which is basically he says his interest in 3d printing and looking boards a career opportunity I want to convince the technology in India for various purposes there are some fantastic group in India working on this and I would go to our website called the announced a group a n a n se group and on that website a few of our colleagues and partners have let me see if I can write it into the chat okay so if you look up the announced a group they have created a map it takes a little while to load because there's a lot of entries on it a map of maker spaces and plant labs and hacker spaces in primarily in developing countries and you can find out where your nearest when your nearest sort of hub or makerspace is and then start trying to network with people in there increasingly what's happening is that people companies and universities are approaching these spaces to try and help with design of their own products so depending on the nature of the place you're working with that might be an opportunity but they will also know about hackathons and maketh honest and I know recently in India the International Committee of the Red Cross did something called that enable maker fartin which was looking at prosthetics with people who lost their limbs in crisis situations in warfare conflict situations and that was run in India and you know the that's right and sort of run there's a competition so you could brush your skills up in the local makerspace get used to the skill and enter these these competitions that you mM can then use to to get noticed I guess the other way to go is to speak to a manufacturer a local manufacturer you know maybe your school or your family might know someone who makes things and see if you can get see if you can persuade them to give you an internship or something like that to help do a bit of research and development and how they might use 3d printing in their work I know certainly there's a lot of hospitals in India that are interested in in that work not just manufacturers I think Karen mentioned earlier on that he's actually working in a start-up which is manufacturing 3d printers in India yeah so he should he should probably have access to the hardware yeah yeah absolutely so we had alkalete probably just joined us late he's interested in 3d printing in architecture and then perhaps one last question talking about the new developments in the multi fusion printer from HP which we've all heard about and they finally launched is that you know relevant yes okay so that's on architecture first of all we because we're we've got a background in disaster relief but that's our main work we haven't been getting involved in architecture there have been a number of efforts to look at the use of digital fabrication technologies in the supply of been actually making refugee shelters or emergency shelters and there's some research groups looking into that I don't think that will necessarily work one of the fundamental concepts in disaster relief with refugee populations anyway is that the shelter's should should not be permanent so we're say you are you are printing with concrete that can look pretty permanent and it does cause legal issues for some of the camps there are you know refugee camps like to dive in Kenya where no structure is allowed you're not allowed to kind of put any foundations down for any building so you can only really build with wood and metal sheeting and plastic sheeting the multi fusion 3d printer I'm really excited about I can't wait to get our hands on one and I think the what we're seeing seen is an increase in speed just like we had with traditional 2d printers I think increase in quality and speed in color the prices coming down it's going to be more accessible and what I'm worried about is that the business model might shift to well kind of like the traditional printer at the moment where you have to pay for the supply or proprietary ink as it were and proprietary filament or whatever it may be and so the low the upfront cost of the printer might be low the cost of the supplies the material that it uses might be high and that's where I'm worried about that kind of technology you know that kind of business model emerging I think that again concentrates the capacity to make things in the hands of a few companies rather than distributing that to everyone which is hopefully what the recycled 3d printer filament work Montenegro has to do and we'll close our discussion here thank you so much for sharing your thoughts I think your message and perhaps we can share that I mean with this video we'll be sharing that with all our learners inside the course and so if any of them wants want to get involved with either field-ready or your other you know you know other projects should we just direct them to your website and my twitter handle is at Angela and my email address is Andrew dot lamb at field-ready dot org photography if you um yeah you put that in the chat yeah it's instructress maybe I've learned a lot from what people are interested anyway I'm very glad that there are people all over the world interested in this particularly from developing countries and countries that could potentially skip an industrial revolution not - absolutely yeah using this Canasta allergy and I'm really interested to go and learn a little bit more about 5d Quincy I have to say that's new to me so thank you to you into your lunge well thank you to all the viewers - for joining and we will share the recording of this video in the course and I think I can also share the details of the chat with all the links inside the course as well so and if you if any of you are not in the course yet you can find information I'll give you our website as well the last link that's where you get information about the course so thank you everyone and we'll see you back in the code in the class