US lighting brands "not going back to 20th-century manufacturing"
American lighting companies are using 3D-printing and digital manufacturing to try and fix the "extremely broken" lighting manufacturing industry, Ellen Eberhardt reports.
In a bid to create more efficient, localised and ultimately, sustainable mass production, lighting companies such as New York-based Juniper, California-based Gantri and Brooklyn-based company Wooj have all integrated 3D-printing technology into their manufacturing lines.
"We are not going back to the 20th-century manufacturing system where there's a very high set-up cost and the only way that you could make something work is by manufacturing it overseas to essentially utilise cheap lower labour costs," Gantri founder Ian Yang told Dezeen.
"We want to use technologies to benefit the creative class, to help them think about better, bigger, more interesting, more exciting ideas."
Yang's complaints echo similar sentiments shared by Juniper founder Shant Madjarian, who is currently in the process of reorganising the company's production methods by combining traditional techniques, such as injection moulds, with developing technologies.
Founded in Brooklyn in 2011, the company produces a range of architectural lighting products using a mass customisation approach – creating lighting systems as a kit of parts that can be "slightly customised" to fit the needs of offices, residential and commercial spaces.
"The industry needs to be broken down"
Madjarian's ultimate goal is to bring the majority of manufacturing in-house, specifically to a Connecticut warehouse the company recently relocated to.
"The industry needs to be broken down," Madjarian told Dezeen. "It's a complete mess. I covered a lot of different industries, and this is atrocious."
This stems, in part, from the complexity of the manufacturing system commonly deployed by US lighting companies. In the industry, a design is typically manufactured in several parts overseas, where labour and cost of manufacturing is more affordable.
According to Madjarian, electronics are typically manufactured in China, while elements like finishing brass with a patina or polish might happen in Canada, and assembly takes place by hand in the USA.
3D printing an alternative to traditional injection moulding
The international coordination alone makes the lighting manufacturing process complex, but Madjarian points to other issues as well, such as "old school" and lethargic certification processes, and an underlying competitiveness in the industry for larger production jobs.
Madjarian believes that manufacturing more elements in-house may offer a solution to some of these issues.
However, this requires US domestic technology to be faster, more affordable and less labour intensive, which is why he's embraced developing technology such as 3D-printing.
Although it's used in a variety of cases within production, manufacturers emphasise the process provides an alternative to injection moulding – a manufacturing technique that's heavily relied upon in the current industry.
Injection moulds are made of a durable metal, with the shape of a specific part carved out of its body.
A molten material, such as a plastic, is then poured into the mould and solidifies within seconds into a piece, which is then used in assembly as part of a larger design.
Injection moulds can last hundreds to millions of production cycles if maintained properly and, once automated, can produce thousands of pieces at rapid speed with low per-item costs. However, initial investments can run from $2,000 to $100,000 depending on the part, and if a design needs a small tweak, it requires an entirely new mould.
"When you get that injection mould, then you have to retool it every time you want to change it," said Madjarian.
"If you take the inevitable changes and tooling costs, a couple $1,000 each time you change it, that adds up."
In contrast, 3D printing requires no mould. A designer, or manufacturer, finalises a piece in computer software, then prints it layer by layer. This process also allows for small changes to be made to a computer model and then printed quickly in its updated form.
For Juniper, which is working on a hybrid manufacturing approach, 3D-printed parts are being developed as a stand-in on smaller production runs, especially as a design "settles".
In contrast, Gantri and Wooj have entirely abandoned injection moulding in favour of 3D printing.
"3D-printing is a part of our technology stack"
Gantri's Yang has fully invested in the 3D-printing manufacturing process, with the goal of bringing the technology to "industrial-scale efficiency", while also tackling the "high barrier to entry" partially created by cost of injection moulds for lighting designers.
He has been working for the past 10 years to develop a "digital factory" to support his recently launched online platform Gantri Made, where creatives can submit designs to be printed in bulk.
Located in the Bay Area, the factory is lined with over a thousand 3D-printers.
"I'm very bullish," Yang said. He added that the printers themselves were just one innovation in the 3D-printing manufacturing plant.
"3D-printing is a part of our technology stack, but it's only one part," Yang told Dezeen. "The biggest value add is software orchestration, robotics and post processing – things like that."
"We built our factory over the past five years, and it's been very challenging to build, because no one has done it before," he continued. "Managing factory team members, production, yield, lead, time, quality – all these manufacturing things are really, really hard, especially when you're doing that scale."
On a smaller scale, Brooklyn lighting studio Wooj also relies entirely upon 3D-printing for its manufacturing process.
Its Greenpoint studio hums with a dozen or so printers that are used to create in-house designs and collaborations with local creatives.
"3D printing represented both a manufacturing method and a potential economic solution"
Wooj emphasised that 3D-printing has numerous benefits including its ability to speed up the creative process, allowing an idea to be printed as a physical prototype "in a matter of hours instead of weeks".
"My interest in digital fabrication and manufacturing grew out of the 2008 recession," Wooj founder Sean Kim told Dezeen. "I was a recent grad facing a very onerous job market – and I became fascinated by the idea that you could design something immaterial on screen and produce it physically with minimal effort."
"To me, 3D printing represented both a manufacturing method and a potential economic solution," he added.
Wooj also advocates for the sustainability of 3D printing, but only if the technique is used in a particular way.
"Additive manufacturing is often touted as more sustainable than, for example, injection moulding, but the bottom line is – you're still making stuff, and there's still waste," said the studio.
"Our specific approach to 3D-printing as a manufacturing tool is that the real value comes into play in the iterative process – we can have a catalog offering a wide variety of products, and we're not obligated to make anything until somebody wants to buy that specific item."
3D printing has "enormous potential"
As part of this overall approach, the studio also prints its lamps with recycled plastic filament, a combination of polylactic acid (PLA), derived from corn, and polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG), a strong, temperature-resistant and recyclable material.
Ultimately, Kim believes 3D printing has "enormous potential" for homeware production.
"The idea of democratized production is very exciting to me – I really believe that it's creating new opportunities for locally manufactured, bespoke products that traditional manufacturing can not deliver on due to the production requirements for an initial run."
Yang and Madjarian echo similar sentiments.
"The most interesting and exciting things always come when people think of technologies as a rocket ship that can take you to a place that you couldn't previously go," said Yang.
"We're here to create a new way for products, the ideas that weren't previously possible under the current mass production scheme, to be manufactured."
Recently, Dezeen spoke to designer Faye TooGood about the impact of AI and globalisation on the design industry during this year's Stockholm Furniture Fair and Bruce Hannah called for manufacturing to move back to major cities.
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