MIT’s ‘Fab Lab’ – A new project at MIT envisions ‘fabrication centers’ in our homes.

How to make (almost) anything

MIT’s ‘Fab Labs’ project aims to give ordinary people around the world the technology to design and make their own stuff. Is this the dawn of the age of ‘personal fabrication’?

IF YOU ASK Neil Gershenfeld, there may come a day, perhaps not so far in the future, when we’ll no longer need manufacturers to make our products for us. Gershenfeld, a physicist and computer scientist who runs the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, envisions a time when many of us will have a "fabrication center" in our homes. We’ll be able to download a description of, say, a toaster — perhaps one we designed ourselves — to our computers, and then feed the designs and the raw materials into a personal fabricator. At the push of a button, almost like hitting "print," the machine will spit it out.

"In the end, fabrication [centers] will be just like PCs — just technology that people have," says Gershenfeld, whose new book, "Fab: Personal Fabrication, Fab Labs, and the Factory in Your Computer," will be published in April by Basic Books.

This may sound like science fiction, but prototype versions of such fabrication centers, which Gershenfeld and his colleagues call "fabrication laboratories," or fab labs, are already up and running in Ghana, India, Norway, Costa Rica, and in Boston’s South End. At least four other countries have shown interest in starting labs.

By Katharine Dunn

Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/01/30/how_to_make_almost_anything/