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Fab: Personal Fabrication, Fab Labs, and the Factory in Your Computer
What if we could someday put the manufacturing power of a Ford factory in our own garage? According to MIT's acclaimed technoprognosticator Neil Gershenfeld, the next big thing is personal fabrication--the ability, literally, to make your own products, in your own home, with a miniaturized machine that combines consumer electronics with industrial tools. This sounds like science fiction, but in fact it is exactly where the digital revolution was at the dawn of the age of personal computers. It used to take a mainframe computer the size of the MIT campus to tackle problems that a desktop computer can now easily solve. Personal fabricators (PFs) are tomorrow's personal computers. PFs will bring the programmability of the digital world to the rest of the world, by being able to make anything (including themselves). Students have already made everything from a defensive dress that protects its wearer's personal space to a chestpack for storing screams and then releasing them at a more convenient moment. But whimsy is only a beginning: Such experiments are at the vanguard of a new science and a new era--an era of post-digital literacy --that will let people create objects they desire and thus make the kind of world they want to live in.
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