The proliferation of 3D printing technology has made a whole world of physical objects instantly accessible. Anything you want can be materialized before your eyes with the press of a button.
Even though he’s equipped with that sort of unlimited possibility, Ian Yang just wants to make a nice lamp.
Yang is the founder and CEO of Gantri, a San Francisco company that designs, fabricates, and sells 3D-printed lamps. While he has entertained the idea of branching out to other genres of home decor, for now the limited focus is deliberate. Yang says the company aims to make attractive, high-design products as a way to shine a light on the potential of 3D printing as a quick and relatively inexpensive form of manufacturing.
"Design has always been something that's very out of touch from consumers," he says. "It's very expensive."
With its 3D printing tech, Gantri can keep things affordable. The company’s facility in San Leandro, California features a giant, custom-made 3D printer dubbed “Dancer.” Each of the lamps Gantri sells is made of a plastic derived from corn-based polylactic acid (PLA). Each piece is printed and assembled at the factory, then hand-finished with a water-based paint and shipped directly to consumers. The whole process, from design sketches to finished lamp, can take as little as eight weeks. More than 30 designers have contributed to Gantri’s library, resulting in an eclectic collection of plastic bulb holders.
The latest of these collaborators has a pedigree in the tech world. Ammunition is a San Francisco design firm that has designed Polaroid cameras, branding for Beats by Dre, a robot barista, and the light-up beacon for Lyft vehicles. Today, the two companies announced a collection of 10 new lights, available on Gantri’s website. Starting price: $148.
Ammunition’s collection is in step with the firm’s characteristic minimalist aesthetic. There’s a mix of table lamps, task lights, wall lights, and standing floor lamps on offer with shapes that range from tall mushrooms to something reminiscent of the Bat Signal. The styles also align with Gantri’s unofficial design ethos. These lamps tend to be off-kilter pieces with soft, rounded edges. Bases and shades seem to blend together into one smooth piece. They don’t look like the type of lamp you’ll spot in a Kohl's.
This breadth of variation wouldn’t have been possible without the flexibility of Gantri’s process. Yang says that most luxury lighting brands launch far fewer lights per year, simply because they’re constrained by the amount of resources and oversight traditional manufacturing requires. With the final product being 3D printed, Ammunition was able to view a prototype as soon as they had a design.
“There's this sense that 3D printing is just as basic as you have an idea, sketch it out, and then you send it to the printer and it’s ready in 24 hours,” says Victoria Slaker, vice president of industrial design at Ammunition. “But what [Gantri] has done is create a platform that allows designers to evolve designs … to kind of keep iterating and keep developing in a way that we would never have done on any other project.”
Yang compares the process to app development: Roll out a version one, get customer feedback, and update to version two.
“What that really allows us to do is just to give designers the time to design,” Yang says. “They don't have to be on the phone with a vendor in China. They don't have to fly 12 hours to Shenzhen. They can just like sit at home, they can prototype, they can focus on design, because the platform takes everything away.”
3D printing makes production far speedier than traditional manufacturing. Companies typically assemble mass-market goods at large scale; doing it in bulk keeps costs down. But with that comes the gamble that there will even be a market for the hundreds, thousands, or millions of products that have been built. With 3D printing, companies have the ability to create products on demand and not risk filling warehouses with countless unsold baubles.
“You’re not going to have stuff that doesn’t sell and then gets discounted and then ends up in landfill,” Slaker says. “It’s because somebody decided they want the light that it exists.”
One doesn't have to look hard to see the potential environmental benefits. When the majority of the building supplies comes out of a nozzle full of raw material, there’s no need to create custom dies or molds to form each individual product. It also cuts down on the shipping footprint.
“There is lots of enthusiasm about 3D printing in the environmental community,” says Shelie Miller, director of the environmental program at the University of Michigan. “If you have very little waste, you can be precise in your energy savings.”
Still, she’s careful to avoid sweeping optimism about the process. The environmental benefits of bioplastics are iffy at best, as PLA waste won’t biodegrade without specialized industrial composting. And 3D printing has had a bit of a rocky journey itself. It's an $11 billion industry, but one that has so far been mostly used for niche or specialized purposes, like medical manufacturing.
“In some ways, the technology is so new that we don’t yet know exactly how it will affect the industry,” Miller says. Although, she adds, there’s a bright side brought to you by basic capitalism: “The good news is that companies care about materials and energy costs. They want to reduce material waste and energy use because that will make it less expensive to produce their product.”
The role of 3D printing in the consumer goods industry is still unproven at a large scale. All the more reason for Gantri to start small, making one light at a time.
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