Fab Labs aim to unshackle imaginations

updated 7:36 p.m. ET Nov. 6, 2005

BOSTON - When Makeda Stephenson compared flight simulator games sold in computer stores and didn’t find anything she liked, she didn’t stop there.

The 13-year-old used a set of computer-controlled manufacturing tools at a community center to make her own simulator — one that lets her “fly” an airplane of her design over an alien planet born of her imagination.

In a room filled with computers and tabletop-sized manufacturing equipment, Stephenson created a pilot’s control yoke with motion sensors she fashioned from a melange of old electronic toys and parts.

A computer program Stephenson wrote with help from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology students guides the plane’s movements on her computer screen.

She did it all through a teen learning program at one of seven so-called Fabrication Labs that MIT has established in places as distant as Norway and Ghana. Each lab has tool sets that, costing about $25,000, would be out of the reach of most fledgling inventors.

Advocates of such “Fab Labs” think they have the potential to vastly expand the creative powers of tinkerers and usher in a revolution in do-it-yourself design and manufacturing that can empower even the smallest of communities.

“If you give people access to means to solve their own problems, it touches something very, very deep,” said Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist and computer scientist whose is among the movement’s chief proponents. “Somehow it goes back to nest-building, or mastering your own environment.

“There’s sort of this deep thing inside that most people don’t express that comes tumbling out when they get access to these tools,” he said.

Fab Lab output can be practical, or whimsical.

Herders in northern Norway erected a telecommunications network to track their sheep’s wanderings with radio antennas and electronic tags.

In India, farmers created measurement tools to ensure a safe milk supply and measure fat content, and women found a way to scan and print carved wooden blocks used for a local kind of embroidery. In a separate project, villagers designed small LED lights for use in areas lacking electricity.

Villagers in Ghana, meanwhile, harnessed solar power to make electricity and cook food rather than relying on firewood.

On the fanciful front, a teenage girl in Boston created a diary security system that photographs anyone coming near the owner’s private writings — say, a nosey brother. And an MIT student created something called “ScreamBody” — a backpack-sized wearable air chamber into which someone can voice a muffled scream in a public place. The scream is recorded for subsequent “release” in private.

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