More Women Are Getting Into 3D Printing. Here's How the Industry Is Responding - CNET

For a long time, 3D printing has been predominantly male. That's changing, though, and it's for the better.

3D printing has always been a family affair in my house. I might be the guy fiddling with the printers to make them work, but my wife and kids use the machines frequently to make cool things for work and play. While I'm interested in the nitty-gritty of how the machines work, my wife is interested in the output and how it can improve our lives aesthetically or mechanically.

3DPrintopia is one of the most popular 3D printing events of the year. Businesses come from all over the world to show off their newest devices and 3D printing accessories, and the public comes to see what's new and show off the things they've made. This year, there were more women and children at 3DPrintopia than ever, and companies are starting to take notice of the shift in demographics. With new machines, accessories and materials aimed at a more diverse group, companies are starting to cater to more than just the tinkerers of yesteryear.

"Children are jumping on 3D printing as a tool, amongst all of the other tools they have in their arsenal, so to speak," says Claire DiFazio from hot-end manufacturer E3D.

Melissa Apter, from Cookiecad, agrees. "We continue to see more ladies joining the [3D printing] community, and it is definitely due to many things, including reasonably priced plug and play printers."

According to Context Analytics, entry-level 3D printing has seen the largest growth in years, up 64% year-on-year, pushed in large part by Bambu Lab, which now commands 26% of the global share. Bambu Lab is well known for offering printers that require almost no setup and very little maintenance. This kind of "plug-and-play" machine shifts the focus from those of us with an engineering mindset to a new group of people who only want the end product. As long as the 3D printer works, that's the extent of this new group's interaction with it.

Setting up a 3D printer is no harder than setting up a sublimation printer or a Cricut.

It's easy to think of using a 3D printer as a daunting task, but the best 3D printers, like the A1 Combo from Bambu and the Prusa Mk4S, can be taken out of the box, set up and ready to print in under 10 minutes. Modern 3D printers are about as difficult to set up as your average home paper printer or a . A few short mechanical things -- attaching cables, installing ink or setting up the cutting blade -- and a few software things like installing the Cricut design space, the 3D printer's app or the paper printer's scan software, and you are done.

Cricut's example is just one of the ways that 3D printing can become more accessible to women. While there are plenty of accessories to make your Cricut do more, it isn't a tinkerers machine. It's a machine for making arts and crafts. For most women, the craft itself is more often the goal than the tool used to make it, and throughout the years, crafting tools have perfected that model.

While it can feel that these untinkerable machines add more waste to the trash piles of humanity, there is little reason to believe that's true. A good quality 3D printer used frequently but not excessively could last five or more years before becoming truly obsolete. I had a Prusa Mk3 for nearly eight years, and the only maintenance it ever needed was some oil on the rods and a new nozzle now and then. This level of maintenance is the same for the average sewing machine, which will require a little machine oil and a new needle to keep it working for years.

More and more colors are available from every manufacturer, including Polymaker.

Throughout the convention you could see the impact of having more women and children in the community. Gone are the days of even the best filament manufacturers offering multiple different blacks and whites and only a few simple colors. There was a riot of colored filament everywhere, from cool pastels to bright greens, and filament manufacturers are clearly making new colors and styles every day.

"When we started the Cookiecad line of 3D printing filament, we were filling a need for colors that weren't available, specifically pastel colors," says Apter, when I asked about the type of people who buy Cookiecad filament. "Our demographic was always heavily female, especially due to our cookie-cutter design software."

3D printing manufacturers are slower to react, but even they are taking steps to embrace the changing demographics. DiFazio from E3D says, "I really love the colors, but it's not the colors that [historically] sell. What will happen, I think, is the multicolor, multimaterial aspect of 3D printing will become much more significant over the next 12 months. ... Printers that have less waste as they print but can change colors better, and then you're going to see the CMYK and the kind of Pantone colors becoming much more prevalent, maybe even catching up with the black ones."

E3D is also actively working on ways to make 3D printing more accessible. Its latest product, the High Flow ObXidian, works with Bambu Labs P1 series to improve filament flow rates and speeds while maintaining the excellent quality of the P1 class printer. Because the P1 series has a quick and intuitive path to replacing the hotend, this no longer feels like an engineering task; it feels as simple as swapping ink out of your all-in-one or putting a new blade in your Cricut.

The demographic change is easy to see in how many more women are coming to these male-dominated conferences.

As more 3D printer manufacturers hop on board the plug-and-play bandwagon, the more likely we are to see a new community build around what the tool can produce rather than the machine itself. It will be up to us, those already deeply embedded in the ecosystem, to make this thing we love so much as welcoming as possible to the newcomers. Gatekeeping is almost always toxic and should have no place in any hobby or fandom. It's perfectly OK to have people who love to tinker and people who don't. In fact, it will be essential moving forward, as there will always need to be people who know how to fix these plug-and-play machines as they begin to break down. We will need repair shops, preowned shops and more people to keep these machines running for people to enjoy for years to come.

It's not just the hobby itself where we're seeing change; it's also happening in our media. Content creators like Uncle Jessy and the 3D Printing Nerd still dominate the space, but women creators are rising in popularity. TikTokers like Filament Stories and Cookie Cad are showing us a new way to think about printing and the materials we use to do it. Even more than media creation, women make up a huge segment of the design part of 3D printing. Some of the best artists, the ones pushing what a 3D printer can do, are women, and that sector is expanding as fast as the hardware side. For example, check out 3DPrintBunny on Thangs. She is making 3D designs that blow my mind.

Everyone I spoke to at 3DPrintopia had the same general answer to the question of where they see 3D printing going in the next five years. It's going to be in the hands of people who are more interested in what a 3D printer can produce far more than how it can produce it. Historically, that means more women and more children, but it also means a boom in the amount of printers in your neighborhood.

"I think you're going to end up with two printers in every home," DiFazio says. "Not one printer on every street." And while I think that future is a ways off, it's a lot closer now that so many more people are actively engaged.