3D Printing
Today Terry Wohlers started a interesting discussion on the RPML. Terry has been an active advocate of the term "Additive Fabrication" as an all encompassing term for what we in the Rapid Prototyping industry do for a living. He admits that "3D Printing" is the most popular term now and will remain so in the near future. Adrian Bowyer agrees with him and credits journalists for that since they don't seem to use any other term.
I believe that’s because journalists know that the Rapid Prototyping industry (or whatever you want to now call it) has convoluted itself with technical terms flying left, right and center, and keeps adding more terms every now and then. The journalists do not want confuse their readers with these terms, that’s assuming that they understand the terms in the first place. All they want to do is give their readers some information that will help them get a 3D physical part from his 3D virtual CAD model.
And I believe we can learn something from these journalists. They know what their target audience wants to hear and tell them stuff in a manner that they can comprehend. Any idiot will understand "3D printing" if you give him 2 seconds to think about it.
Take a look at this video from Autodesk. I know people in the RP industry will laugh at the video. I did too. But it gives you an idea of the nature of our target audience. We in the industry should be educating our target audience and talking to them in a language that they understand, not confusing them with more technically accurate terms and acronyms. We seem like a bunch of neuro-surgeons discussing the biological composition of the human brain when the person whom we have to treat is simply asking for an aspirin to clear his headache.
So to answer Terry's question, in my opinion, whether we like it or not, "3D Printing" is the term that will be most popular, not just in the near future, but for a long time to come.
Little wonder that we chose "Print3D" as the name of our company.
I believe that’s because journalists know that the Rapid Prototyping industry (or whatever you want to now call it) has convoluted itself with technical terms flying left, right and center, and keeps adding more terms every now and then. The journalists do not want confuse their readers with these terms, that’s assuming that they understand the terms in the first place. All they want to do is give their readers some information that will help them get a 3D physical part from his 3D virtual CAD model.
And I believe we can learn something from these journalists. They know what their target audience wants to hear and tell them stuff in a manner that they can comprehend. Any idiot will understand "3D printing" if you give him 2 seconds to think about it.
Take a look at this video from Autodesk. I know people in the RP industry will laugh at the video. I did too. But it gives you an idea of the nature of our target audience. We in the industry should be educating our target audience and talking to them in a language that they understand, not confusing them with more technically accurate terms and acronyms. We seem like a bunch of neuro-surgeons discussing the biological composition of the human brain when the person whom we have to treat is simply asking for an aspirin to clear his headache.
So to answer Terry's question, in my opinion, whether we like it or not, "3D Printing" is the term that will be most popular, not just in the near future, but for a long time to come.
Little wonder that we chose "Print3D" as the name of our company.
posted by Deelip Menezes at
3:21 PM
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1 Comments
