Knowledge Production Modes between Science and Applications 2

3Creativity and Additive Manufacturing

The fundamental discoveries that are still the basis of our existence: agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, were the work of very primitive societies. Could it be said that they were the fruit of chance? By analyzing the main techniques, I aim to show the naivety of such an interpretation: “All these operations are far too numerous and complex for chance to account for. Each of them, taken in isolation, means nothing, and it is their combination, imagined, desired, researched and experimented with, that alone enables success. Chance may exist, but it doesn’t in itself produce results. For some two and a half thousand years, the Western world has known about the existence of electricity – discovered no doubt by chance – but this chance was to remain sterile until the intentional, hypothesis-driven efforts of the Ampères and Faradays. Chance played no greater role in the invention of the bow of the bow, the boomerang or the blowpipe, in the birth of agriculture and animal husbandry, than in the discovery of penicillin – from which, incidentally, it was not absent”. The real problem lies elsewhere: “namely, that, despite a dose of imagination, invention and creative effort, which we have every reason to suppose remains more or less constant throughout the history of mankind, this combination determines major cultural mutations only at certain periods and in certain places. For, to achieve this result, purely psychological factors ...