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What if you could someday put the manufacturing
power of an automobile plant on your desktop? It may sound
far-fetched -- but then, thirty years ago, the notion of
"personal computers" in every home sounded like
science fiction.
According to Neil Gershenfeld, the renowned
MIT scientist and inventor, the next big thing is personal
fabrication -- the ability to design and produce your
own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines
consumer electronics and industrial tools. Personal fabricators
(PF's) are about to revolutionize the world just as personal
computers did a generation ago. PF's will bring the programmability
of the digital world to the rest of the world, by being
able to make almost everything -- including new personal
fabricators.
In Fab, Gershenfeld describes how
personal fabrication is possible today, and how it is being
used to meet local needs with locally developed solutions.
He and his colleagues have created "fab labs"
around the world, which, in his words, can mean "a
lab for fabrication, or simply a fabulous laboratory."
Using the machines in one of these labs, children in inner-city
Boston have made saleable jewelry from scrap material. Villagers
in India used their lab to develop devices for monitoring
food safety and agricultural engine efficiency. Herders
in the Lyngen Alps of northern Norway are developing wireless
networks and animal tags so that their data can be as nomadic
as their animals. And students at MIT have made everything
from a defensive dress that protects its wearer's personal
space to an alarm clock that must be wrestled into silence.
These experiments are the vanguard of a
new science and a new era -- an era of "post-digital
literacy" in which we will be as familiar with digital
fabrication as we are with information processing. In this
groundbreaking book, the scientist who has pioneered the
revolution in personal fabrication reveals exactly what
is being done, and how. The technology described in Fab
will allow all of us to create the objects we desire, and
the kind of world we want to live in.
Neil Gershenfeld is the director of MIT's
Center for Bits and Atoms. He is the author of numerous
technical publications, patents, and books, including When
Things Start to Think. His work has been featured in
The New York Times, The Economist, CNN,
PBS, and other media. He lives in Davis Square, Massachusetts.
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