Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “New Dimensions to 3D Printing: Wayne Losey, Dynamo DevLabs”.
A couple years ago, uh i’ve been in toys for more than 20 years, so uh we’ve been designing toys uh for the mass market and uh. Seven years ago i left um. You know a a big big happy job to uh go out on my own, just because i was a little bit tired of the game. Two years ago i started playing around with 3d printing and some of the things that i really wanted to solve for were got notes. On the back of my hand, here we really wanted to solve what digital delivery, digital delivery meant in the product space and obviously there’s a lot of hype around 3d printing, a lot of discussion about it and we had done a lot of work prototyping using it.
For prototyping in inside big corporations, so we sort of knew what it did uh in a prototype stage, but we really wanted to start figuring out what it meant as a manufacturing platform. You know how ready for prime time is, is real 3d manufacturing, so we started investigating you know a very conventional approach to toys, uh called mottobot. The idea behind matabot is that it’s a universal play system. These are going to be sort of universal. You know ball and socket joints gears axles, and the idea is that you’ll use the system to create your own toys. A little bit of background on me as a kid i i was a builder. I had almost every build system. You could imagine as a kid from capsella lego, tinker toys lincoln logs, but all the toys that i gravitated to were toys that you got to design your own, some of the uh really important ones here.
This is the star wars, droid factory. I was actually a little bit older than toy age at that time, but i was fascinated by the multiplicity of things that i could build with it uh you know in the mid 70s, it was great to have a toy that wasn’t completely bound. This is a six million dollar ban maskatron, but the idea is that i would you’d get these components and you would just start mixing and matching and creating what you wanted.
The real telltale sign about my childhood is that every year my family would buy me model kits and the bad part about model kits, and i didn’t really realize this – is that model kits you put them together once and they’re stuck that way for all time. So really in the corner of my room, i had probably 20 boxes of half finished model kits because i couldn’t stand to lock them down in time. This is the way i wanted to play and it really has affected my life since then, in the 80s i started out at 18 years old in the black and white sort of comic revolution when ninja turtles, the tick um. You know in the mid 80s that all these great, independent, uh comics were released. All of that sort of self-publishing mindset was built, uh kind of on punk.
You know fanzines and really that that sort of like can do uh atmosphere for 18 year old, who really wanted to design characters and tell stories. It was an amazing thing to do to to go around the country. Sign autographs do the work, but again what i found about it is comic. Books are about this final product and once i tell that story, it’s sort of locked down, and i think that there is something it just wasn’t the right path for me for 13 years. I was a professional uh in the toy business.
I was the lead creative on brands like star wars, pokemon spiderman, batman, jurassic park, i’ve been around licensing, i’ve been around manufacturing and the business the large-scale business of getting products out in a big way, but at the core of that, what really changed? My life was really putting the user at the center of the experience and after a while, the um, the vehicle of the mass market, really it didn’t satisfy sort of the need of me wanting to be closer to the consumer. The way i was when i was an independent and i could just have a conversation across the table from them so seven years ago i left my business partner and i started dynamo development labs and what we wanted to do was really create more of a think Tank around the way we use products and entertainment to speak to kids. The idea is that we wanted to create a tighter relationship to the consumers, but also help them build more meaning and purpose into the way they played.
All of this leads us to matabot. Right now, matabot sits at probably about 450 parts um all of these are downloadable and are not downloadable but they’re available on our shapeways store. Thank you peter, wherever you’re at right now, but for all the reasons that are important and have been discussed fast iteration. You know we really treat matabot as a proto business and i think at its core. What we’re really trying to achieve.
Is this really lean fast manufacturing model? We do a lot of work in polymide, but when you look at this, it’s a very conventional approach to product. You can go and buy something like this in the aisle at any toy store, and i think, what’s really important, though, is we’re not using what we’re trying to solve for right now, isn’t necessarily exotic uses of 3d printing as a process. What we’re really trying to solve for is, after spending so much time in the mass market.
It’S very easy to see that the the trajectory of the mass scale, business model and product development uh is large and wasteful, and i think that mottabot is important not for what it is. But for why it is some of the things that we’re really trying to figure out um, because there’s so much waste in the large sales scale system is what’s wrong with it uh resource lock. When someone builds a toy, it’s a dead end, it’s great because it inspires kids, they have something in their hand, but when they commit to a million units, all of that resource is locked and it doesn’t matter if you know 300 000 of them end up in A landfill somewhere that resource is dead. It’S a zombie, it’s a corpse walking around, and i think that that’s the saddest thing in the world to me because it’s waste the tyranny of scale.
Your incentives are completely backwards. Uh in the scalability of of your business. When you sell more units to manage your risk, there’s something backwards about that, because now your incentive is to get huge uh and then there’s a lot of play and waste in the system. And then the sheer motivational aspect is people are told. What’S good and a lot of it, there’s no sampling in the system.
You know you’re really creating demand, and that’s great i mean my wife is a marketer. You know so like uh. It’S a very important sales are a very important part of any business, but what we see 3d printing doing is now we’ve got deep variable use when you hold a design in digital form, it’s fluid and it sits there until it it.
The demand from someone actually sets that uh material into action. So it’s sitting there as this virtual good, just like you know itunes or anything else, and then all of a sudden, it’s commanded to turn into a reality, and it it’s it’s beautiful because you don’t have all this waste in the system. We think that platforms are going to be huge, so you’re building components for things just like you would arduino or anything else, and then you use them that way.
The idea that, if you create tools and people know obviously what those tools are good at and they’re inspired by the idea of having a tool it’ll be obvious, why they want to buy it and you give them the opportunity to do hands-on with it. The just very quickly one of the things that we’re trying to solve is how do you take conventional molded items, 3d printed, marketpla, place items, you know, service, bureau items and then print at home materials and then create one agnostic system, uh that that lets the the User uh personalize in any way that they can. This is something we’re going to be solving over time, it’s pie in the sky and it’s going to take a lot of debug on the pieces.
Really. What we’re trying to do, though, is we’re trying to give people the tools to create their own toys, and that’s why this isn’t just going to be about figures. This is really going to be it’s about putting components into people’s hands very much in sort of a lego way, but where the end product is not a kit construction, but really a robust toy, that’s highly playable users are are actually uh. You know building all kinds of things: uh, but they’re dying, their own parts, they’re modifying their own parts and we’re going to try to give them more tools to do that in the future. Some of our barriers. Right now, we’ve got an interactive builder that we’re working on right now someday in the future that might work with peter’s api directly we’re evolving our new product types so that we’re not just we’re giving kids tools to uh play in a bunch of different uh play.
Styles and then we’re gon na start playing around with what 3d printing does really well, it’s adding complexity, we’re going to give you assemblies that you can download and either print or download from service bureaus to really expand the amount of play. So some of the challenges moving forward in 3d – toys in the commercialization of it commercial confidence – is huge right now, and i i think that when you people talk to me all the time whoa, why don’t you go talk to hasbro or mattel about you know they Need to be doing this, there’s no commercial confidence in that right now. This is still a novelty and it’s something that they would because of their systems. They’Re unsure about it.
Part of the reason for that is child safety standards. There’S going to be um, we’re going to learn a lot over the next five years about how standards are going to shift, because you know child safety standards are some of the most uh stringent in the world and then there’s also just the consumer satisfaction. It’S still a big question mark right now: people don’t want buyers, remorse, they’re not going to take the first step, one of our biggest challenges in our products. Is they look terrestrial, but there’s this exotic material that they’re made out of and people they’re slow to turn the corner on buying it, and so we see that adoption curve as one of the biggest challenges moving forward so uh. If anybody wants to talk more about 3d printed toys and the creating kits please get in touch with us thanks a lot. .