Review: Fab, The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop
Posted by Ian S. Nelson Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:27:00 GMT
Fab is an interesting book by Neil Gershenfeld. It chronicles a class Neil designed and taught at MIT called "How to build just about anything" and then some "field experiments" where they take some industrial fabrication equipment, make some easy to use software and deploy it to various communities around the world. Very similar to Hole in the Wall.
It's an easy read that you'll blaze through. The basic idea is that if you give people tools to build stuff, they will build stuff and in general in the world, that ability to fabricate tools and various other artifacts is probably a lot more important than something like internet access or DRM. Further, the people who want to build things aren't always the people you think as Neil's class was filled with non-engineers. I'm not sure the MIT campus is a good sampling of the public though.
To be fair and critical though. A lot of the work is kind of swept aside. Giving someone a sign cutter gives them a tool to produce circuit boards but actually building a useful set of circuits and debugging them is a different kind of problem. Maybe I'm a bit pessamistic, having seen the industry work and done my part to debug custom hardware in the past.
It's still an interesting read and an optimistic one. I couldn't help but think Neil swept a lot of the complexity and difficulty away as he wrote it to make it look easier than it is but I also kind of wanted to have access to one of his "fab labs" to play around with stuff.
technorati tags: book, fabrication, fab, gershenfeld,
