Killer Apps for Personal Fabrication: Products for a Market of One

Pack a shipping container with $20,000 of laser cutters, sign cutters, micron scale 100 nanosecond microcontrolers, milling machines, send them to the inner city, to villages, to slums and what do you get? Steam turbines, high gain antennas, instrumentation for agriculture, toys, eyeglass frames, local solutions to local problems.

Neil Gershenfeld’s NSF’s-funded Fab Labs are astonishingly cool. The idea? Computers should empower people to modify the world, not just get information about it.

There was a time when you could make just about anything you could buy. As the objects we buy became more and more complicated, somewhere along the line the tools available to us fell behind, and now we can’t make just about anything.

A future with Fab Labs all over the world would see a nearly unimaginable renaissance in person creativity. Imagine being able to make anything you could envision. The first generation that grows up with these tools will be one to watch.

Link: Neil Gershenfeld’s talk at TED [via Joey Roth]