9. A Taxonomy of Online 3D Printing Platforms

3D printing was originally intended exclusively for industrial use. But it is progressively becoming a reality for consumers as well. While 3D printing empowers users, most of them require some sort of assistance in the creative process. For instance, at the moment, few consumers own a 3D printer, which means that most still need to use a third-party printer to bring their 3D designs to ‘physical life.’ Likewise, some consumers may own a printer but not have the skills and knowledge required to build the 3D digital model of the object to be printed. Finally, some consumers neither have the ability to create 3D models, nor the means to print them into physical objects. For these reasons, online 3D platforms have appeared in the past few years to fill in these gaps. Many of these cater to consumers and involve them as a part of the production process, either in the design stage or in the manufacturing stage. In this chapter, Rayna and Striukova provide an overview of the current online 3D printing platforms, and they investigate the topics of user-participation, co-creation, and crowdsourcing in relation to these online platforms, as well as their pricing and revenue models.