Ready or not, the 3D-printed future is coming, and the first examples are already arriving in cities around the world in the form of office buildings, small houses, public furniture, public art and self-driving buses. Restaurants that squirt your meals into intricate shapes through a 3D printer will likely proliferate, and before long, this tech revolution is expected to take over all sorts of urban construction processes, like building roads and bridges. 3D printing requires far less labor than other building processes, of course, something that makes a lot of people nervous about the future of jobs. But it’s also cheaper, more sustainable, and results in far more complex, ornamental structures.

Public Furniture: 3D-Printed Benches Made of Trash Bags

‘Print Your City!’ is a new initiative by Rotterdam-based research and design studio ‘The New Raw’ transforming plastic waste into urban furniture with 3D printing. The ‘XXX Bench’ is a double-sided rocking chair seating two to four people who have to use equilibrium to balance the seat. Each one weights about 110 pounds, is made from recycled plastic pellets from municipal plastic waste or flakes from ground recycled products, and is 100% recyclable itself.

Public Art: Giant Sculptural Sundials

3D printing will likely invade urban environments in the form of large-scale public art before we see a whole lot of architecture and infrastructure. This giant sundial taking the form of a flowering fan is one example. Made by design group ‘prescription’ in conjunction with Arup, the geometry of the structure is optimized using specific solar data from any world location to give it a unique form wherever it’s constructed. It’s 3D printed from strong, flexible plastic, and the design is 100% scalable.

Office Buildings: ‘Office of the Future’ in Dubai

Dubai’s ‘Office of the Future’ is the world’s first 3D-printed office building, created layer-by-layer using a special cement mixture in just 17 days at a cost of just $140,000. Only one employee was needed to monitor the printer at any given time, while seven other employees installed the building components onsite along with electricians and specialists. The 3D printer used for the project is pretty remarkable itself, measuring 20 feet high, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide.

Restaurants: ‘Food Ink’ 3D-Printed Meals

While the building itself is not 3D printed, the food inside ‘Food Ink’ is. This pop-up restaurant uses 3D printers to create dishes like pizza, hummus, chocolate mousse and other foods that can be made with printed pastes to create culinary sculptures.The project is “putting to work most innovative technologies, like 3D-printing and augmented reality, in order to elaborate the most exquisite interactive edible experience.” How long will it be before this is a common practice in many restaurants?

Transportation: Autonomous 3D-Printed Bus

This boxy, strange looking bus by Local Motors debuted in Washington D.C. in 2016, giving autonomous rides at the company’s introductory event. The driverless, 3D-printed ‘Olli’ has 12 seats and is powered by IBM Watson’s Internet of Things for Automotive technology, a car-focused cognitive learning platform. “Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue,” says Local Motors. “Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we’ve been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future.”

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3d Print The World 12 Ways This Technology Will Soon Flourish In Cities

What do you do with 497 obsolete VHS tapes? Noah Scalin ripped them apart and made them into a giant three-dimensional skull-shaped art installation entitled ‘Dead Media‘. The proprietor of Skull-A-Day has been making a skull a day, every day, since June 4th, 2007.

Scalin was commissioned to create the project by Tidewater Community College Visual Arts Center, which supplied him some of the video tapes. Others came from friends and his own collection. Some of the titles that can be spotted among the destroyed mass are notably obscure, like ‘Valdez Winter Update 10-25-89, Exxon Company U.S.A.’

Says Scalin, “In the spirit of the famous painting The Ambassadors by Hand [sic] Holbein the Younger, the skull was created to only look correct from one point and is actually quite distorted in real life.”

Other skull projects that have been featured on the site were made of turnips, scrap metal, a pile of books, flower petals, bullet holes and grated crayons.

We’ve all been there, when that beloved gadget where you could once find the sweet spot has now gotta go; it’s too slow. Geeks want the next best and shiny new toy, the fastest hot new gadget on the market. But that toxic and outdated electronic equipment winds up in landfills to leach poisonous heavy metals into the soil and groundwater. Instead of leaving a technological footprint on the environment, let your inner eco-geek blossom. Here are 25 hardware hacks and magnificent manipulations of e-waste repurposed to functional geeky gadgets.

Circuit Board Clocks

(image credits:ArtEco)

Plenty of printed circuit boards are headed for processing to extract the precious metals before hitting the landfill. Before you throw it out, stop and think how to recycle obsolete parts into a functioning gadget for your favorite geek. These hardware hacks of circuitry and creativity are so slick that it might send you dumpster diving for discarded electronics. The desk clock on the left was repurposed from a 40 GB hard drive control board. The clock on the right was recreated as a blend from a Circa 1990 laptop drive controller and from a 20 MB Seagate low-profile, high-speed, dual mode drive controller card.

Codename: COOL

(image credits:trendhunter)

This example of blurred boundaries between one person’s trash being another’s treasure should be codenamed COOL. This futuristic motorcycle was crafted from recycled computer and VCR parts. The engine is an electric DC Motor to power a belt for the rear wheel drive, but was turned on for demonstration only.  Maybe one eco-geek will soon figure out how to get this bad boy hitting the highway and cruising full speed into adventures.

Eclectic Collection Of Time Keepers

(image credits:ArtEco)

Time rules the world whether we want it to or not. Geeky gadgets around the globe include an eclectic collection of hard drive and floppy cases, RAM, processors, other chips and circuit boards. Some eco-geeks can turn discarded aerospace and military hardware into functioning sculptures and clocks. The top two wall clocks are made from a drive platter and a hard drive case. The pendulum wall clock on the bottom left was once a militarized hard drive shell, while the pendulum has a 4″ wafer with vapor deposition memory chips. On the bottom right, this desk clock was a drive platter with a heat sink stand from a Pentium processor chip.

Hardware Hacks Repurposed To Geeky Gadgets

(image credits:ArtEco)

Reverse-engineering and disassembling technology are the building blocks of eco-geek beauty. The top left desk clock was recycled from a Pentium II processor with support chips. On the top right, this desk clock was repurposed from an office telephone PC board and is sitting on a heat sink from a Pentium processor chip. The bottom left wall clock was salvaged from the geek part graveyard and the injection molded aluminum case came from a 10 MB Maxtor drive with a platter in the center of the clock. On the bottom right, this wall clock had a previous life functioning as a militarized Seagate hard drive frame.

Eco-Geek Galore

(image credits:ArtEco)

These creative initiatives focus on commissioning clunkers into clocks. On the top left, this deep desk clock was built from a vintage Circa 1950 Civil Defense dosimeter reading device. What was once from a high-performance computer, now has been repurposed into other functions that were not what the chip-makers or manufacturers had in mind. Hardware hacks like the wall clock on the top right once functioned as an ATM firmware board with 28 pin gold sockets. On the bottom left, an 80 GB militarized hard drive board now works as a desk clock. The bottom right desk clock consists of a drive platter, recycled computer cabinets, and DRAM modules from an early IBM PC.

Geeky Gadgetry Doesn’t Always Involves Clocks

(image credits:the Blue Kraken,Debbie Arem Designs,Creative Activities,Debbie Arem Designs,Debbie Arem Designs)

Geeks who jam came up with guitar picks made from circuit boards.  But clipboards like circuit boards come in all colors and sizes. A creative eco-geek turned yet other circuit boards into a bird house. On the bottom left, this repurposed circuit board clock also has a recycled 78 RPM vinyl record and a recycled CD. On the bottom right, this rare all black recycled circuit board now functions as a clock with recycled brass. We geeks are everywhere and we hold the power and talent to change the world for the better.

Obsolete Parts Recycled Into Geek Art

(image credits:Brenda Guyton,ArtEco)

Ever wondered what else you could do with all those motherboards, hard drives, circuit boards and ROM that look cool but are headed for the trash? Some outdated or broken miscellaneous computer parts are made into awesome art animals like the 3.5 feet tall jack rabbit on the top left.  Jack’s nose is made from a computer monitor coil, his toes from hard disk drives and his ears have copper sheeting. K-9 on the top right is 3 feet tall and repurposed from obsolete electronic guts that would otherwise be headed for the landfill. Yet for functioning art to show your geeky romantic side, why not turn the circuit boards from AT&T phones into a three-panel tea candle? On the bottom left, is a decorative Praying Mantis holding two cray memory chips. The legs can be gently moved.

Scary Or Slick Skull

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For a truly inspirational and green way of recycling parts, take a look at this huge skull. This fantastic art is recycled from obsolete and no longer useful computer screens and keyboards, circuit boards, and otherwise broken computer pieces. Such masterpieces mitigate the environmental damage of technology while offering a creative new approach to destroying data on old hard drives.