We have, occasionally, obsessed about names.  For instance, the original name of the HVAMC was the Hudson Valley Advanced Manufacturing Center.  I’m still not quite sure where that came from, but I believe politics was involved.  Two years ago, at my colleague Kat Wilson’s suggestion, we changed advanced to additive.  This made a lot more sense, since additive manufacturing is part of advanced manufacturing, but there are a lot of areas in advanced manufacturing that are way outside of our wheelhouse and we do not like to claim unwarranted expertise.   

Our Digital Design and Fabrication program was another naming conundrum.  I’m not sure that we are even that happy with that name, it’s just the best we could think of at the time.  More sophisticated software tools and the advent of digital fabrication methods like laser cutting and 3D printing have blurred the lines between design, fabrication and manufacturing.  Rather than a designer turning something over to someone else to fabricate, it’s now possible for the designer to push a button and produce a prototype (ok, I know it’s not that easy, so more on that later…).  It’s even possible to keep pushing the button and create multiple identical copies.  Dictionary definitions of these words aren’t overly helpful.  I tend to think of fabrication as creating a one-of-a-kind object or small number of objects, whereas manufacturing is creating large numbers of objects that are identical within a certain known specification.  Colleges, of course, have a long history of fabrication across many different fields – art, engineering, science, design, architecture, etc.  What has changed is that 3D printers and similar devices have made it possible to create as many copies as you want, all made to a particular specification.   

With the 40 or so printers in our lab, we can make a lot of parts, so we are now in some middle ground between fabrication and manufacturing, thus fabrifacturing.  I guess it could also be called manufication, but that sounds vaguely like something you could get arrested for.   

Keep On Printing! 

 Dan