Disrupting Imagined Futures: Backcasting Health and Body Implications of 3D printing in Australia and Abroad
The Team: Dr Luke Heemsbergen
My project is concerned with the use of 3D printing in medical practice, and we’re trying to think about how the decentralised sharing of designs and manufacture will affect clinical care. So what I’ve done is I’ve invited in some really interesting people from literal brain surgeons to medical ethicists. It’s this really interesting mix of ethicists and practitioners to manufacturers, people who make 3D printing systems.
It’s a back casting project which means we start with a specified future and then consider what paths we need to take in terms of policy and technology and social developments to get to that future. This is a methodology that has been used in policy circles for a while, around things like climate change.
There’s all kinds of legal and social issues as well as ethical issues that come up, and so we’re just going to work through those and the project is there to pull these out and then figure out what kind of collaborations we can move on to once those futures are kind of charted.
I actually just get to choose awesome people who are doing amazing work in ways that are disparately amazing, yet they’re connected in some way and I just get to tie them all together, so that’s been so far a lot of fun and I’ll see what comes from it.
The Team: Dr Luke Heemsbergen (Chief Investigator, pictured)
A collaboration with Anatomics (Melbourne), Shapeways (New York) and ARC Training Centre in Additive Biomanufacturing.