Fab Labs aim to unshackle imaginations

Open-source hardware
MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms began setting up Fab Labs three years ago as free community resources, using part of a $12.5 million National Science Foundation grant and local financing.

Each lab is equipped with commercially available tools, including a laser cutter and milling machine to carve out two- and three-dimensional parts; a sign cutter for creating graphics or plotting flexible electronic circuits; and electronic assembly tools.

Open-source software and MIT-written programs control the devices, machining parts to tolerances that once could be achieved only using equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Citizen inventors with only modest technical expertise swap ideas with counterparts at other Fab Labs around the world by electronically sharing design blueprints or going to a Fab Lab Web site that offers project ideas.

“In a sense, this is like open-source software, but for hardware,” Gershenfeld said.

Industrial designers say such ventures hold great promise.

“I’m not worried about being out of a job, but I think there would be new uses for this technology that people can’t even imagine,” said Gianfranco Zaccai, president and chief executive of Design Continuum, a Boston-based design and development firm. “It might be a harbinger for the return of the village craftsman in a world of high technology.”

Leslie Speer, an industrial design professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, expects Fab Labs will do much to encourage local solutions to developing world problems.

But she wonders whether the planet can handle the spread of customized manufacturing to potentially billions of people, many whom lack material wealth.

“Where are the raw materials going to come from?” Speer said. “Can we as humans on a planet with finite resources afford this decentralized, individualized production model?”

Gershenfeld is emphasizing the project’s practical potential in his search for long-term funding. The five-year NSF grant is entering its final year, and funding from other potential sources as the World Bank has so far eluded him.

However, Norway’s federal government established a foundation to support Fab Labs globally, and a New York-based startup is offering venture capital for lab users.

In the meantime, the invention flourishes.

Teenagers at the Boston Fab Lab used its tools to fashion scrap material into jewelry for sale.

And in an MIT class called “How to make (almost) anything,” a student used a campus Fab Lab to create the “Interpet Explorer,” a computer interface for parrots featuring a specialized mouse that can be manipulated by the bird’s beak.

Then there’s the “Defensible Dress,” equipped with wires programmed to spike outward that can be activated when the wearer’s personal space is invaded.

It doesn’t matter to Gershenfeld, in the end, whether a Fab Lab product has any commercial value.

“A Web browser for parrots isn’t meant to serve a scalable business market,” Gershenfeld said.

That’s exactly what drove Stephenson, the young flight simulator designer:

“It’s different if you make it yourself,” she said. “It’s more personal.”

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