I'm just putting this here because I have some things to think about later. Niel Gershenfeld was a big influence on the orognal Digital Craft Research Lab in Milwaukee. As I prepare to move into my new teaching space, I need think about the words below and think about the gaps.
Fab Lab founder looks back and to the future
It was 20 years ago today … that Dale Dougherty (not Sgt. Pepper) came to play. I’m proud now to have been the first interview in Make:, although I was puzzled at the time. I’d been making things all my life, but didn’t get why that act warranted capitalization, or a magazine, or becoming a noun+verb+adjective. Rereading the interview now, I’d give myself a C for vision, a B for technology, and an A for people.
Vision
In the interview I mentioned some of the places fab labs had spread to, but didn’t note that each was inspired by another lab opening. That led to exponential growth (as measured by the fablabs.io portal); there are now around 3,000 fab labs in 150 countries; that’s 11.5 doublings over 20 years, a pace that is comparable to Moore’s Law for digital technologies. That trend has come to be called Lass’s Law, after Sherry Lassiter, who leads the Fab Foundation (more on that shortly).
Gordon Moore’s prescient 1965 article that articulated what became Moore’s Law, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” got almost everything right, but missed two important things. The first was duration — he projected 10 years of doubling; it actually began to roll off after 50 years. And he foresaw the positive impacts of digital scaling, but he (along with most everyone else) didn’t anticipate the associated spread of spam, fake news, and income inequality, resulting in consequences we’ve spent years reacting to.
The Make: interview ends by mentioning my upcoming book Fab, which in 2007 celebrated the emerging parallel between personal computing and personal fabrication. It wasn’t until my next book, Designing Reality, in 2017 that I addressed the technological roadmap for 50 years of scaling the performance of digital fabrication, and along with my brothers Joel and Alan looked at how to address barriers and risks now rather than waiting for them to manifest (an updated version will be coming out as an audiobook).
In retrospect, the technological part of that scaling has been the easy part. Much harder has been building the organizational capacity to keep up with it, because empowering anyone to make anything, anywhere, challenges the historical boundaries between work and play, education and industry, formal and informal settings.
To keep up, we’ve had to create a Fab Academy for hands-on technical training which grew into Academany, aka the Academy of Almost Anything after geneticist George Church and colleagues used the platform for a Bio Academy; a Fab City initiative for cities to produce what they consume which began as a 40-year countdown to urban self-sufficiency in Barcelona when Vicente Guallart was the city planner); and a Fab Foundation that’s dedicated to supporting the growth of the fab lab network and its programs, regional capacity-building, the social impact of technology innovation, and my favorite annual event, the FABx gathering that’s rotated among sites around the world.
With the subsequent proliferation of hacker spaces, makerspaces, super labs, mini labs, bio labs … a single count is no longer meaningful as it was in the early days of standardized fab labs. We’ll continue to track the scaling of digital fabrication, but what really matters is its impact, which is why all of these programs are now focused on measuring outcomes.
Technology
The $25k fab lab inventory that I described grew to $100k by the end of what I’ve called the fab 1.0 era of purchasing fab labs. A major addition in response to demand was large-format machining, for making things from furniture up to houses. And at the time of the interview 3D printing was too expensive, proprietary, and immature to include; thanks to pioneers from Adrian Bowyer to Bre Pettis to Josef Prusa to Max Lobovsky it’s now become affordable, reliable, and useful.
In the interview I suggested a fab lab might eventually be able to make another lab. This fab 2.0 era has matured much faster than I expected at the time; machines and their builders including Daniele Ingrassia’s Open Lab Starter Kit, Jens Dyvik’s Fabricatable Machines family, Jake Read’s Clank, and Nadya Peek’s Jubilee are sharing open designs for machines that can compete with their commercial predecessors, while also sharing benefits that include teaching skills, creating work, and easing repair, customization, and reuse.
The democratization of “machines making machines” is leading to both more and less expensive labs. More expensive, through milliondollar- scale super fab labs with more advanced tools able to replace supply chains for many of the components that go into those machines. And less expensive, through few-thousand-dollar minilabs based on commoditized production from open designs. It’s also expanding the scope of capabilities, including fab labs making bio labs, and an Open Metrology initiative that developed with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to expand access to advanced scientific measurements.
The biggest technological omission in the 2005 interview is what my lab (MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, or CBA) has spent the most time on since — the distinction between analog additive and subtractive processes and what I’ve called the fab 3.0 stage of discrete digital assemblers, and the fab 4.0 stage of machines and materials merging in self-assembly. CBA has since shown how the robotic assembly of functional building blocks can lead to record-setting material properties, and be used for making everything from cars to boats to planes to space structures. We’re studying the nanoscale boundary where bricks effectively become quantum, and are developing assemblers that can assemble themselves from the parts that they’re assembling. This recursion is at the heart of my 50-year digital fabrication scaling roadmap, and is the experimental realization of John von Neumann and Alan Turing’s theoretical models of life.
People
I found the most prescient part of the interview to be what seemed almost incidental at the time — the people that appear in the article.
One of the TAs I mentioned for my course How to Make (Almost) Anything, Raffi Krikorian, went on to create the computing infrastructure at Twitter, then rebooted computing for the DNC, and is now the Emerson Collective’s chief technology officer. Another, Manu Prakash, has become a pioneer in frugal innovation, famous for (among many other things) his 50-cent microscope that’s been distributed in the millions. One of the students, Amon Millner, coinvented the Scratch programming language that’s been used by millions of kids; another, Ayah Bdeir, created the littleBits electronics building blocks that have had a transformative impact on STEAM education.
I appreciated all of these people at the time, but didn’t foresee what their impact would be. Something similar followed at scale in the fab lab network; through it, countless remarkable people have become change agents: Abu Adam, Adam Stone, Adrián Torres, Adriana Cabrera, Anastasia Pistofidou, Aristarco Cortes, Bas Withagen, Beno Juarez, Blair Evans, Cecilia Raspanti, Chirag Sharma, Daniele Ingrassia, Duaa AlAali, Enrico Bassi, Felicity Mecha, Fiore Basile, Frosti Gíslason, Haakon Karlsen, Henk Buursen, Jani Ylioja, Jean-michel Molenaar, Jens Dyvik, Jogin Francis, Krisjanis Rijnieks, Srinath Kalbag, Kamau Gachigi, Katie Rast, Luciana Asinari, Luciano Betoldi, Mel King, Nadine Tuhaimer, Namgyal Gyaltshen, Nancy Wu, Norella Coronell, Nuria Robles, Pradnya Shindekar, Quentin Bolsée, Rahul Rajan, Rico Kanthatham, Santi Fuentemilla, Saverio Silli, Sibu Saman, Tomás Díez, Ujjwal Deep Dahal, Vaneza Caycho, and Youka Watanabe are just a sample. The social engineering that makes this possible for them has proved to be more significant than the technological engineering.
What began as an outreach project turned into inreach — more knowledge has come from the network than has gone out to it. The greatest opportunity I see at the intersection of digital communication, computation, and fabrication is tapping our greatest wasted natural resource: the underused brainpower of the planet. That’s why the newest projects I’m involved in are building on all of this fab lab infrastructure to create a distributed incubator and a platform to teach 21st-century vocational skills.
For Make:’s 40th anniversary it’s easy to predict that the “almost” will be dropped from How to Make (Almost) Anything, and that the metaphor of “bits to atoms” will become literal. What’s harder to predict, but even more exciting to shape, are the seeds being planted today for the future of how we’ll live, learn, work, and play.
Featured photo is Neil Gershenfeld addressing the audience at the FAB24 conference in Puebla, Mexico, in August 2024 by Grace Gershenfeld
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