Fab
The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 with 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 anything-including new personal fabricators. In FAB , Gershenfeld describes how personal fabrication is possible today, and how it is meeting local needs with locally developed solutions. He and his colleagues have created "fab labs" around the world, which, in his words, can be interpreted to 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 the of information processing. In this groundbreaking book, the scientist pioneering the revolution in personal fabrication reveals exactly what is being done, and how. The technology of FAB will allow people to create the objects they desire, and the kind of world they want to live in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gershenfeld, who runs MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, foresees a time when computers will upgrade from PCs to PFs, or personal fabricators. This eye-opening survey of "fab labs" completes the progression in Gershenfeld's earlier studies of the overlapping of computer science and physical science, such as When Things Start to Think (1999). A programmable PF, predicts Gershenfeld, will make it possible for users to design and create their own objects, instead of shopping for existing products. Interest in such cybercrafting became evident in 1998, Gershenfeld says, when an overwhelming number of students took MIT's How to Make (Almost) Anything course, aimed at "fulfilling individual desires rather than merely meeting mass-market needs." After inspecting those students' unique creations, Gershenfeld offers a history of how things are designed and made, from the Renaissance to industrialized automation, and then offers an overview of the technology and social implications this science involves. The 150 illustrations aid in clarifying some abstract concepts. Gershenfeld's extrapolation of these futuristic wonders is a visionary tour of technology, tools and pioneering PFers, making this an important update to Stewart Brand's 1987 The Media Lab. However, a "self-reproducing" PF that can make anything, including itself, is a chilling reminder of Philip K. Dick's 1955 Autofac, with its frightening prospect of an automated factory system beyond human control. Agent, John Brockman.