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.