Nick Foster – industrial designer, engineer, futures thinker – promised a “grim” subject matter at the IDSA event last Thursday at Groupon in Palo Alto, and he did not disappoint. In under 60 minutes, Nick gave us a history of how manufacturing was pushed out of northern England, killed our buzz about 3D printing, told us to focus on the mundane instead of the aspirational, and said that Santa Claus wasn't real. OK, the last one didn't happen, but the first three stand.