[MUSIC] Hi, we're here in
Brooklyn New York once again. We're here today to talk
with Francis Bitonti. Francis is world famous for being one of the first people to print
a dress using 3D printing technology. We've talked to Francis about this dress, about the cool projects that he's working
on now in that 3D printing domain. Let's go see if we can find him. Come on in. Well, good morning, Francis. Thank you for
taking the time to meet with us today. >> Yeah, my pleasure. Great meeting with you. >> Can you tell us a bit
about your 3D printing story, how you became interested
in this technology? >> Sure, so I started as an architect. I was an architect that was displaced. I was working as an industrial designer
at the time, and we were using it for prototyping. And, it was just sort of one of these like
a-ha moments when we got a prototype back. Like it had similar mechanical
structural properties to what we were getting out of injection molding,
but I got it without tooling. I got it really fast, and we're able to do
things that I couldn't do through molding. So I just became really,
really fascinated with it after that, and I had this kind of dream in my head
that it could be a manufacturing tool. I still consider what I do pretty
close to industrial design. The way that we have to think about
projects is much closer to how an industrial designer might think than
a fashion designer because we're not really working with fabrics. We're making things soft, but a lot of materials we start with
are not in the realm of textiles. We learn textiles, but I don't think
like the kinds of materials and what we end up with in the assembly
process has very much to do with what fashion designers deal with. So I'm reluctant to kind of call myself
that, like most of what we work on gets on someone's body, so
it's fashion in that respect. But from a materials
design sort of standpoint, I would consider the expertise
of the studio to be more chores industrial design. I don't think it was
the first 3D printed dress. It was one of the first
that was articulated and flexible, and it had lot of features
that were unique at the time. But I don't think it was the actual first. >> One of the first. >> It was one of the first. Yes, definitely,
definitely one of the first. >> Well,
it's not something that we see everyday? >> No. [LAUGH]. >> Most of us don't have one in
their wardrobe I would imagine. >> I don't think so, no,
that was an expensive dress. [LAUGH] It's very similar to how
you would design a dress normally. I think the big difference
is with 3D printing, you're tasked with designing
your own material. Like on that dress, we had a design on
these little articulated joints, and then we had to come up
with a way to manage, I think there was like 3,000 unique
articulated joints in there. So like we started in a very,
very small scale and then we made methods for
applying that to something larger. >> So,
all of those 3,000 pieces were 3D printed? >> Yes. >> How long did that take? >> The printing wasn't that long. I think they printed the whole
dress in about two days. >> Really? That's amazing. >> It took longer to kind of polish it,
to glue crystals on, then it did the printing, yeah. A lot. I think this is probably one of the things
that needs to be resolved in the industry the most. We've got a lot of CAD packages. And I think the reason for that is they're
all kind of good at something else, and we've sort of cobbled together work flows
that make sense for what we're doing. There's a gap right now, and a lot of
the software that you would use for the industrial designer's
mind is in the past. They're designed for like machining. With 3D printing, you're dealing
with parts that are low volume, high surface area. When you're machining stuff, you usually
get low surface area, high volume, because you're given like standard box of
material and a lot of it is obstructive. So the tools are designed for that,
and I don't really think we have much out there right now on the way
of designing tools that are, I think that make sense the way in additive,
you would design for an additive process. It's a lot of thermoplastics, yeah, that's
the kind of majority of what we work with. I'd see a distant future
with organic materials, but I don't know if I see it
in the very near future. We've been putting a lot of energy
in looking at elastomeric materials, things like that. Because we were looking at it like
cellular structures, like assembling lots of small, rigid components, and
I think that's inherently limited. So I think on the wearable
technology side, it's an advantage to that because
if you're dealing with polymers, you can have invented electronics,
sensors, things like that. I think there's a multimaterial
proposition there, and as an advantage to having elastic
materials that can address the body. So I think that's going to
be a huge value add for 3D printing on the fashion textiles front. On the other side, I think we've
been seeing a lot of shoes, and that makes a lot of sense because we
are working with plastics right now. I think midsoles, outsoles, insoles,
all that stuff, their complex geometry, the sizing, size is complicated. It's never really been solved. Well, I think the way we make shoes has
been, it's made customization difficult. It's a million dollar, well,
more than a million dollar question. I guess, like the things I could say for
sure is that you're going to have an increase in the amount of desktop
technologies that are available. I definitely see things going like
smaller, faster, cheaper already, inspite of I think what a lot of
the public has seen as a frustration, like it's not doing that. It absolutely is, I think this hardware
gets there a lot slower in software. And I think within five years,
you'll completely see that happening. I think they'll be an incentive to start
selling files or maybe print it home for certain things. The print-at-home thing is still very
questionable to me in what role that might play in someone's house. I don't think it's going to be like
the replicator from Star Trek. I think it be like something
you'd have in your tool shop. I think the cost of machines and
materials is coming down. They're going to get more competitive. And it's going to open up
a lot of opportunities, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what. Scanning's only as good as the tools,
you have to analyze the scan. It's a lot of data, and I find we
don't really use scanning all that much without working with someone who
has some software to process that scan. Like we've done a lot of work with shoes
recently, and there's this kind of idea, I'm going to scan my foot and
then use the foot to build the model. There's a relationship between
the form of the product and the thing that goes on your body, and
it's not a one-to-one relationship. So like we really need software to
process scans in a meaningful way. I think that if you have been involved
with working with the kinds of materials that 3D printers can and
the kinds of things you can get out of it, it's mind-blowing right away because
you're not offering industrial scale, these machines are really small. They're basically portable. You're taking something that's really
always been very inaccessible, and it is accessible. I mean, it's not easy yet, but we can
very easily see that it will be easy. And that's the gamechanger, because that's
going to let you build a manufacturing infrastructure that's going to look very,
very different than what we have now. Takes a long time to get
hardware to market, and you see this a lot when
you look at startups. Like software startups,
you'll hear about funding, and then boom, they're on the market. And then a hardware comes out, and it's usually a year later
before that product ships. All right, so you're already starting
at this much slower rate of evolution, and there were a lot of patents that I
think prevented healthy competition, especially around things like materials,
that really kind of kept costs super high and sort of kept in this realm
of being exclusive to prototyping. That happened with FDM, there's a lot
of stuff going on with FDM, and I find FDM really exciting right now. And it's been in
the public domain a while. We've had a chance to let people iterate
and innovate, and now it's mature. As we're starting to see a lot of these
patents run out, you're going to see that same thing happen, and I think
the rate of innovation will increase. Our website is a good place,
social media, we post a lot. Actually, social media is
probably better than the website. I don't update the website that much. >> And the social media site,
what would our learners type in to find. >> Just my name, Francis Bitonti,
Twitter, Facebook. >> Thank you for your time. >> Cool, thanks a lot. >> Really appreciate it. [MUSIC]