Morning Kate and all
Just a few quick notes to add about visitor facing museums activity in this area - though I'm probably a bit out of date as the last research I did on this was mid last year and the space is changing rapidly...
First I'm sure there's someone from the V&A on here who could comment and update from an internal pov but 2011 they did a couple of things including an exhibition of 3-d printed objects interspersed through their collections displays during London Design Festival, called Industrial Revolution 2.0. The same year their exhibition Power of Making (stating an interest in this one) had Makerbot 3-d printers in the demonstration area (called Tinkerspace) which was used for demonstrations and workshops.
Of the 'un-named US institutions' I'm pretty sure they would include the Met Museum in New York which did a Hackathon in 2012 inviting 25 digital artists in to 'play' with their collection. The Smithsonian have a project creating a digital archive of 3-d files of their collection which will be made available to the public to download and print. The Art Institute in Chicago have a page on Thingiverse (a 3-d printable file resource) which invites: "Do you have a scan or derivative of an Art Institute artwork? Message us and we'll add it to our Thingiverse collections."
Your family is right that this technology has been around for a while, but with desktop technology becoming available and accessible (Makerbot - circa $2K) there's a corresponding critical mass of activity which is moving it from super niche towards if not mainstream then certainly a much broader availability. Just looking at the number of articles this year on Dezeen shows that designers are starting to seriously engage with the possibilities - so hitting a high street near you soon.
The other point to make is about copyright and ownership - already the design world is in a state of tension about it and for those of us who deal with commissioning and collecting contemporary designers and artists, or who are still trying to exert control over any copyrighted material there will be another round of figuring out what the possibilities are (see the gun printing article below for more on this, or look at/think about the implication of the Thingiverse libraries as they populate).
And just to mention a sweet thing was the piece on the culture show a couple of weeks ago which pitched man against machine (designer Dominic Wilcox against a 3-d printer - both made Big Ben). I liked Dominic's.... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qgdj0
All the best
Dee
(National Trust and/or From Now On)
Links
http://i.materialise.com/blog/entry/3d-printing-in-the-worlds-greatest-museum-of-art-and-design
http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/28/2830911/smithsonian-archive-3d-printing-model
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/powerofmaking/
http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/features/2012/high-tech-met/3-d-hackathon
https://store.makerbot.com/replicator2.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/3d-printing-gunmaker-forms-company-to-flout-copyright-law-a-la-the-pirate-bay/
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