Hi, I’m Neil Gershenfeld. I direct the

Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.

I’m going to take you on a tour of our Boston fab lab, at the South End Technology Center (SETC). The name fab lab can be interpreted two ways: a lab for fabrication, or simply a fabulous laboratory. This lab is one of a growing network of field labs we’ve set up since 2002, in places like rural India, northern Norway, Costa Rica, and Ghana.

These labs grew out of work on campus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where we have been doing basic research on additive digital fabrication. The idea that inspires us is that the next revolution is going to be the personalization of manufacturing: using accessible digital technology and machine tools to program the physical world we live in, just as we today program the bits in worlds of information. To do this research, we bought millions of dollars worth of machinery at MIT. My colleagues and I started teaching a course modestly titled “How to Make (almost) Anything” to teach students how to use these machines. The interest in the course was overwhelming. What was also surprising were the wonderfully quirky ways students used the tools, using the technology as a means of personal expression, which I believe is entirely analogous to the earlier personalization of computation.

Intrigued by this parallel, with support from the National Science Foundation, we began setting up prototype versions of these capabilities in the field. We wanted to see how personal fabricators will eventually be used. You can think of a fab lab as being comparable to the minicomputer stage in the history of computing; DEC PDPs were used by workgroups rather than individuals, but that was good enough for inventing most of the modern applications of computers.

By personal fabrication, I mean a desktop machine that can create three-dimensional structures as well as logic, sensing, acutation, and display. The kind of research we’re doing at MIT will eventually lead to those capabilities being integrated into a single process.

Let’s look around. >>

Make: 25