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Personal Fabrication
The next big thing in computers will be personal fabrication: allowing anyone to make fully functioning systems -- with print semiconductors for logic, inks for displays, three-dimensional mechanical structures, motors, sensors, and actuators. Post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming. For a few thousand dollars, a little tabletop milling machine can measure its position down to microns, so you can fabricate the structures of modern technology, such as circuit boards.
This is an excerpt of an article originally published on Edge,
July 24, 2003. Published on KurzweilAI.net October 30, 2003.
I run the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. It involves about
20 research groups from across campus: biologists, chemists,
physicists, mathematicians, various kinds of engineers—all
people like me for whom the boundary between computer science and physical
science never made sense. We think about how information relates
its physical properties. The way the world's evolved, hardware
has been separated from software, and channels from their content,
but many of the hardest, most challenging, and most interesting
problems lie right at this interface. These range from some
of the deepest questions about how the universe works to some of the
most important current technological frontiers.
Let's start with the development of "personal fabrication."
We've already had a digital revolution; we don't need to keep
having it. The next big thing in computers will be literally
outside the box, as we bring the programmability of the digital
world to the rest of the world. With the benefit of hindsight,
there's a tremendous historical parallel between the transition
from mainframes to PCs and now from machine tools to personal
fabrication. By personal fabrication I mean not just making
mechanical structures, but fully functioning systems including
sensing, logic, actuation, and displays.
Mainframes were expensive machines used by skilled operators for limited
industrial operations. When the packaging made them accessible
to ordinary people we had the digital revolution. Computers
now let you connect to Amazon.com and pick something you want,
but the means to make stuff remain expensive machines used by skilled
operators for limited industrial operations. That's going to change.
Laboratory research, such as the work of my colleague Joe Jacobson,
has shown how to print semiconductors for logic, inks for displays,
three-dimensional mechanical structures, motors, sensors, and
actuators. We're approaching being able to make one machine that can
make any machine. I have a student working on this project who can
graduate when his thesis walks out of the printer, meaning that he
can output the document along with the functionality for it to get up
and walk away.
In support of this basic research we started teaching a class, modestly
called "How To Make (almost) Anything," where we show students
how to use the millions of dollars of machines available at MIT
for making things. This was meant to be a class for technical students
to master the tools, but I was wholly unprepared for the reaction.
On the first day a hundred or so students showed up begging to
get into a class with room for ten people, saying "Please,
all my life I've been waiting for this. I'll do anything to
get in." Some would then furtively ask "are you allowed
to teach something so useful at MIT?" There was a desperate
demand by non-technical students to take this class, who then
used all of these capabilities in ways that I would never think
of. One student, a sculptor with no engineering background,
made a portable personal space for screaming that saves up
your screams and plays them back later. Another made a Web
browser that lets parrots navigate the Net.
From this combination of passion and inventiveness I began to get
a sense that what these students are really doing is reinventing literacy.
Literacy in the modern sense emerged in the Renaissance as mastery
of the liberal arts. This is liberal in the sense of liberation,
not politically liberal. The trivium and the quadrivium represented
the available means of expression. Since then we've boiled
that down to just reading and writing, but the means have changed
quite a bit since the Renaissance. In a very real sense post-digital
literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming.
I've even been taking my twins, now 6, in to use MIT's workshops;
they talk about going to MIT to make things they think of rather
than going to a toy store to buy what someone else has designed.
In a place like Cambridge (MA or UK) personal fabrication is not urgently
needed to solve immediate problems, because routine needs are
already met. These students were not inventing for the sake of their
survival, or developing products for a company; they were expressing
themselves technologically. They were creating the things they
desired, rather than needed, to make the kind of world they wanted
to live in.
Between this short-term teaching with advanced infrastructure and
our long-term laboratory research on personal fabrication,
I had an epiphany last summer: for about ten thousand dollars
on a desktop you can approximate both. What makes this possible
is that space and time have become cheap. For a few thousand
dollars a little tabletop milling machine can measure its position
down to microns, a fraction of the size of a hair, and so you
can fabricate the structures of modern technology such as circuit
boards for components in advanced packages. And a little 50-cent
microcontroller can resolve time down below a microsecond,
which is faster that just about anything you might want to
measure in the macroscopic world. Together these capabilities
can be used to emulate the functionality of what will eventually
be integrated into a personal fabricator.
So we started an experiment.
Long before the research was done, we thought that it would be
a good idea to learn something about who would care and what
it's good for. We started using micromachining and microcontrollers
to set up field "fab labs" (either fabulous, or fabrication,
as you wish). They weren't meant to be economically self-sustaining;
it was just a way of building up experience. We intentionally
put them beyond the reach of normal technology in places like
rural India and the far north of Norway. Once again we found
a desperate response, but here personal fabrication does address
what can truly be life-and-death problems.
In one of these labs in rural India they're working on technology
for agriculture. Their livelihood depends on diesel engines,
but they don't have a way to set the timing. The instrument
used in your corner garage to do that costs too much, there
is no supply chain to bring it to rural India, and it wouldn't
work in the field anyway. So, they're working on a little microcontroller
sensor device that can watch the flywheel going by and figure
out when fuel is coming in. Another project aimed a $50 Webcam
at a diffraction grating to do chemical spectroscopy in order
to figure out when milk's going bad, when it's been diluted,
and how the farmers should be fairly paid. Another fab lab
is in the northeast of India, where one of the few jobs that
women can do is Chikan embroidery. The patterns are limited by
the need to stamp them with wooden blocks that are hard to make and
modify; they're now using the lab to make 3D scans of old blocks and
3D machine new ones. At the other end of the world, at the top tip
of Norway, there's a fab lab that is being used to develop radio "bells"
so that nomadic data can follow the Sami's nomadic herds of sheep
and reindeer around the mountains.
Each of these examples really are matters of survival for these people.
Silicon Valley start-ups aren't trying to solve these problems,
and even if they were, the business models are unlikely to work
on this scale. Through fab labs, locally-appropriate solutions can
be developed and then produced locally. The design files can also be
shared globally, for open-source hardware as well as software problem
solving.
Working on this project has led to some very strange days in Washington
DC for me, where I'll go from the World Bank to the National
Academies to the Pentagon, and they all want to talk about the
same thing. The possibility of personal fabrication is enormously important
for each of these institutions' agendas, but it does not easily
fit into their existing organizations.
The World Bank is trying to close the digital divide by bringing
IT to the masses. The message coming back for the fab labs
is that rather than IT for the masses the real story is IT
development for the masses. Rather than the digital divide,
the real story is that there's a fabrication and an instrumentation
divide. Computing for the rest of the world only secondarily
means browsing the Web; it demands rich means of input and
output to interface computing to their worlds.
The National Academies have been trying very hard to interest people in
science and engineering, but on balance they've not been very successful
at doing that. But the fab lab experience suggests that, instead
of just trying to get people interested in learning about science,
it's far more compelling to enable them to actually do science
that's personally meaningful.
Continued on Edge.
© 2003 Edge.
Reprinted with permission.
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