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The Dream Factory – Any product, any shape, any size – manufactured on your desktop!

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.

By Bruce Sterling

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_2

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.

But what happens when a fab lab leaves the lab, when it becomes a plain old everyday fab?

For a clue, take a look at today’s top-of-the-line desktop fabricators, also known as 3-D printers, rapid prototypers, and stereolithographs. These machines, which can be as small as an office copier and cost as little as 25 grand, have found productive niches all over: architecture, design, medicine, packaging. Most work by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic. They can only output solid objects, and those tend to be frail, best used as prototypes for more serious manufacturing.

In theory, an ultrasophisticated molecular-assembly fab could make amazing things – say, a diamond-encased iPod. But never mind the high end; the low end is more interesting. Desktop manufacturing brings the digital revolution into the domain of everyday things. Where once there were objects, now there are well, fabjects.

Now bear with me, because I’m about to blue-sky. To make an object with a desktop fab, you need three things: the equipment itself; a digital design, or model, of the object; and consumables – as in plastic, powder, or goop. The equipment may be prohibitively expensive, but it’s bound to become less so. If fabs decline in price to, say, $2,500, they’ll become the hacker hobby tool du jour. Another price drop of similar magnitude and you’ll find broken ones at the curb waiting for the garbage truck.

As for the digital models, you can borrow or steal the plans for desirable objects at little to no cost. There are two ways to do this. You can Wikipedia them on the Web, open source-style. Or you can swipe them from the physical world: Parallax-photograph an object and software automagically converts it into a digital shape.

Swiping a shape won’t get you the object’s interior. But if you spot a simple item with an appealing form, and it’s made of a uniform substance all the way through – plaster, glass, plastic – then you can rip, mix, and burn it into a cheaper format, just like a videotaped movie or a ripped CD. It won’t be as good as the original, but it might be good enough, and it will look great.

The real sticking point is the goop. The companies that manufacture printers always make sure the ink costs more than vintage champagne. So even if you paid almost nothing for a fab and a CD full of CAD-CAM plans, you’ve got to round up some low-cost atoms. Where will they come from? Garbage – scrap plastic, glass, and wood pulp, in particular. This is a source of atoms people would actually pay to get rid of.

Now imagine a vast, rising tide of bastardized things, shoddier than the cheapest postwar products of Japan, coming from Congo, Myanmar, Fallujah – a global outbreak of Napster-fabbed mayhem. Fabbing would be the ultimate industry for the perennially unindustrialized; the consumer cornucopia for the antideveloping world; a mushroom patch of recycled decay that pops up whenever the World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, or US Patent and Trademark Office turns its back.

It will be a long time before commercially available desktop fabs can, like Gershenfeld’s fab labs, turn out functional circuitry, much less replicate every gizmo in a middle-class American home. But it might not be long at all before they can make nearly every essential possession in a third world village. Nobody copyrights those. Forward, to the future of the fab!

Email Bruce Sterling at [email protected].

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