posted 20 April 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: entrepreneurs, local manufacturing, local preference
The other day John Robb wrote about personal fabrication, explaining that it is “…a method of low cost and small scale production for anything from 3-D objects up to and including intelligent systems (it will get even more effective as the costs are driven down and capabilities increase in concert with Moore’s Law). It has enormous promise and will likely provide a way for resilient communities to not only stay completely ‘modern,’ but even advance economically and in quality of life faster than communities dependent on traditional centralized sources of production.”
Today, an older article at Innovate Forum showed up in my reader: “Does Local-Food Movement Offer A Glimpse of Manufacturing’s Future?” The article reads, “Prototypes, once prohibitively expensive, can now be churned out for next to nothing on 3D printers…. What’s still missing is a flexible, low-cost manufacturing process that can create an assortment of finished goods without the extended supply chains that have become commonplace.”
I thought it was an interesting bit of synchronicity to happen upon two articles, separated in time by approximately two years, that both talk about a little known project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms: Fab Labs, short for “fabrication laboratories.” So I’ve been investigating further and holy smokes, what a cool thing Fab Labs is!
What exactly is a Fab Lab? Fab Lab is an abbreviation for Fabrication Laboratory. It is a group of off-the-shelf, industrial-grade fabrication and electronics tools, wrapped in open source software and programs written by researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms. Currently the labs include a laser cutter that makes 2D and 3D structures, a sign cutter that plots in copper to make antennas and flex circuits, a high-resolution milling machine that makes circuit boards and precision parts, and a suite of electronic components and programming tools for low-cost, high-speed microcontrollers. MIT has additionally written a Computer-Aided Machinery (CAM) program that can read all of the different kinds of ways that people describe things digitally and turn them into tool paths for all of the different ways it’s possible to make them. Researchers have written another program for Fab Labs which helps users share their files and experiences as they work, so that users can teach each other rather than relying on a fixed curriculum.
Fab Labs are evolving as our research evolves. A full Fab Lab currently costs about $25,000 in equipment and materials without MIT’‘s involvement. It is a rapid prototyping platform, and as such is meant to encourage local entrepreneurs to take their own ideas from the drawing board to prototypes to starting local micro businesses, Fab Lab also teaches users critical skills in computing, electronics, programming, and CAD/CAM fabrication techniques—a set of internationally recognized skills. It is additionally a platform from which a community’s technical challenges can be shared with an international roster of engineers, who can help problem solve and design solutions for the community.
In other words, Fab Labs have taken the means of high-tech fabrication and shrunk them down to desktop size, empowering local-level entrepreneurs to design and build machines that make goods, and the goods themselves. But this is not limited to low-tech goods, such as toothbrushes and wrenches; it also enables the manufacture of electronic gizmos, replacement parts for existing electronic gizmos, medical instruments, appliances… anything whatsoever.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, says of students in the class he taught which inspired the Fab Labs concept:
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.
This is an amazing nail-on-the-head observation for those of us working on localization issues: just as the widespread adoption of reading and writing allowed the Renaissance to bloom, so too will the widespread adoption of design and fabrication knowledge allow local and regional economies to bloom. Many localization-folk have been saying this in different ways for a long time now — if we are to evolve into a truly sustainable lifestyle we need to learn how to do and make things for ourselves, with recycled and locally-available materials, which is very much a form of literacy. But even beyond this, personal fabrication knowledge offers the potential of a future in which innovation is constrained by neither shortages of capital nor shortages of energy, because innovation literacy is effectively pried from the clutches of corporate proprietary R&D and distributed as free knowledge, available for use to anyone with enough interest and motivation to climb the learning curve.
Moreover, personal fabrication offers the opportunity for communities to truly go “off the grid” economically, possibly even literally. Its ability to foster innovation and short-run, small-scale fabrication means that communities need not rely on trucking to import household staples like light bulbs, water filters, cooking utensils and personal hygiene products — the tools required to create these things can be designed and built within the community, shrinking the “economies of scale” advantage down to a manageable, accountable human level. A community with its own fabrication capabilities, no longer dependent upon trucking, could do very well for itself by recycling its existing garbage into replacement parts, biofuels, and products that don’t break down in the first place.
The implications of personal fabrication for sustainability are staggering. A community that can manufacture most or all of its own goods no longer has any need of federal currency, except for the payment of taxes. That community has effectively dropped out of the growth paradigm: in our current monetary system, nearly all money is born into the world as debt with interest, creating a built-in requirement for growth beyond the value of the original loan. The economy must grow, and if it doesn’t, it means there is less money to make new loans — the amount of available money shrinks, and the economy shrinks along with it. It is a profoundly stupid system that ensures the demise of civilization, if not of multicellular life itself. By wrangling itself from the need for federal currency to pay for goods shipped from afar, a community is free to design its own currency system to support the long-term health of its environmental resources, not their extraction; a local GDP-like indicator that goes up when people are healthy, happy, and well-fed, not down; and local business and investment strategies that are based on symbiosis and cooperation, not solely on competition.
According to the Fab Lab website, it currently costs about $25,000 to set up a new Fab Lab. Peanuts! For the price of a new car, a community can set itself up with the means of breaking free from a doomed system and of building a foundation for long-term, sustainable community wealth, in all its forms.
None of this is to say, however, that Westerners’ current high-consumption lifestyle can continue unabated. We still need to “redeploy ourselves in the landscape,” as James Howard Kunstler says, but personal fabrication can further that project remarkably if it becomes widely available. The dissemination of personal fabrication capabilities would be, in my opinion, an appropriate capital and carbon investment into creating a low-carbon, self-sufficient, sustainable future.
I will be keeping an eye on MIT’s Fab Lab project. Stay tuned.