The gravity-defying future of manufacturing | Schendy Kernizan

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

Schendy Kernizan (0:10)

If I have an idea in my mind and I have a pencil, can I draw it in space and then have that shape there?

Elise Hu (0:17)

That's manufacturing innovator and TED fellow Schendy Kernizan, describing something that sounds like science fiction, but isn't. He's found a way to manufacture objects by printing them inside a gel that holds their shape in mid-air, with no mold, less waste, and no gravity to fight. He calls it drawing calligraphy in space.

TED fellows are early stage innovators, TED finds and supports. You may have heard from some of them on this show before because I'm a big fan of this program. It's a community of more than 500 fellows from around the globe whose work reaches more than 200 million people a year.

They're not just improving broken systems, they're building a better future for all of us. In Schendy's case, he's taking on one of the oldest systems there is, how we manufacture the things around us. And he replaces the assumption that we must rely on molds and force every body and object into a handful of standard shapes. In this episode, he shares how his process could make truly custom products, ones that fit your exact body accessible to everyone. But getting here was anything but simple.

Schendy Kernizan (1:22)

People often imagine that, you know, innovation is like one big breakthrough and you're done. But in reality, that journey is really created from thousands of different failures along the way.

Elise Hu (1:35)

Stick around after the talk for Schendy's conversation with TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds. They get into how growing up in Haiti taught him to build things out of whatever was around, and the advice he gives his daughter that he thinks all of us could use. That's all coming up right after a short break.

And now, here's our TED story and conversation of the day.

Schendy Kernizan (2:05)

I'm Schendy Kernizan. I'm creating a new way of manufacturing objects. I'm part of a company called Rapid Liquid Print that is rethinking how products are made.

3D printing, for those who are not familiar with it, that's been a technology that's really taken off in the past 30 years. Traditional manufacturing was using a method that's just been so outdated, not digitized. 3D printing became kind of the new way of making that people said, oh, this is going to replace traditional manufacturing. But the issue is that you need to build on a platform, so you always need a surface that you're starting with in order to create an object. And the more complex that geometry becomes, gravity starts to become a limitation of what you can make. In order to circumvent that, you need to actually create support. And then you need to remove those supports, so it's really kind of a manual effort of cleaning those pieces that are then discarded and quite wasteful. So 3D printing has almost become kind of this system that's great for prototyping, but hasn't really created that bridge from prototyping to production. We solved that by printing inside of this gel that holds the shape that you're drawing. You're able to eliminate gravity.

Think of the ability of, if I have an idea in my mind and I have a pencil, can I draw it in space and then have that shape there? So you go on the computer, you draw the geometry that you want, and that information gets sent to the printer. And as the machine is moving, think of your arm moving that pencil around, the material is coming out of it, and the machine knows how fast or how slow it needs to go, and where it needs to be drawing it inside of the tank. The gel is mostly water that's been transformed into a gelatin. And think of hand sanitizer consistency, where it can move, but it has structure to itself, and the viscosity is strong enough where whatever you extrude inside of it doesn't just pull at the bottom.

And when it's done, you just let it there until it fully cures.

You're literally doing calligraphy in space. You're able to make parts faster. You can customize the colors that you want. You can blend colors, create gradients of colors. And instead of having this mold that you then need to discard or put away because your design is different the next time that you build something with this gel, it's reusable. So you can extract that part, you rinse it with water, and you're reusing the gel to make more parts. So it's a reusable process and sustainable way of making things.