Thursday, November 25, 2004
The Dream Factory
A view by Bruce Sterling on the future of fabrication:
When it comes to coining terms of art, few can beat Neil Gershenfeld of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. In the wake of such influential concepts as wearable computing, things that think, and Internet Zero, Gershenfeld and his intrepid grad students are cobbling together mobile manufacturing systems they call fabrication laboratories, or fab labs.
A fab lab is a miniature factory for the digital age. The latest version consists of three Linux PCs, a laser cutter, a combination 3-D scanner and drill, a numerically controlled X-Acto knife, and a handful of RISC chips. Set it up, turn it on, and you can crank out not only solid objects like eyeglass frames and action figures but, thanks to Gershenfeld’s research, electronic devices like radios and computers, too. The professor recently installed one at a technical institute in southwestern Ghana, where it has proven hugely popular. His success suggests that manufacturing - like publishing, coding, music and film distribution, and communications before it - is about to bust out of its industrial confines.