Personal fabrication

\<!\[CDATA\[Now this is interesting. Neil Gershenfeld, a professor at MIT in the US, has an idea he calls [personal fabrication.](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gershenfeld03/gershenfeld_index.html)  He talks about a lot of different things in the article, but his central drive is all about bringing the kind of innovation and technologies that the Internet popularised, to the real world. He argues that the digital revolution has happened, empowering the masses to do cool things with information. Now he’s looking to start that same kind of empowering process with machines that are used to make **things**  .

He compares the current state of fabrication to mainframe computers:

There’s a historical analogy to the appearance of personal fabrication. I first understood that when I was shopping for a numerically controlled milling machine for use in our labs, and I wanted one with a graphical interface and a Web connection. Machine tool companies laughed when I said this. I finally talked to the research head of a big German machine tool company, and when I described what I needed he started pounding the table, literally saying “No, No! You must not have that!” It was a very strange moment until I realized that, word for word, he was giving me the mainframe argument. He was saying that machine tools are expensive machines to be used by specialists; that’s when I really got the mainframe parallel. Both this entry and the one before it came from FUTUREdition, a fantastic e-newsletter that highlights interesting things happening in the world. Highly recommended. ]>