Alexandra Lange
Architecture & design critic

"3D printers have a lot to learn from the sewing machine"

A digitally-driven revival of interest in sewing proves that people want to create, but the 3D-printing movement is failing to cater to a market that wants something practical and beautiful.

There’s an appetite for the “refashion,” recycling an old dress or an adult T-shirt, and turning it into something new. Once upon a time, the use of flour sacks as fabric prompted grain-sellers to start offering their wares in flowered cotton bags. If some boutique grain company began doing that again, there would be a run on their product. Under the technology radar, there’s a community of people sharing free patterns, knowledge and results, without the interpolation of brands, constantly obsolescent machinery, or the self-serving and myth-making rhetoric Morozov finds in Chris Anderson’s Makers. There are the answers to the questions “Why bother?” and “How creative?” Rather than sewing being a cautionary tale, 3D printing can’t become a consumer good until it learns a few lessons from why we sew now.