PajamaManufacturing

You are ready for the homeworker revolution. But are you ready for the home manufacturer revolution?

Over the last couple of years, some of us have been hearing about MIT’s FabLab (officially “The Center for Bits and Atoms”). Professor Neil Gershenfeld has been leading a potential revolution in desktop manufacturing (the fab in fabrication). The idea is that a PC could “drive a printer that deposits material in layers to form three-dimensional objects.” For the moment, this is useful primarily for prototypes or mini-manufacturing (manufacturing of object with limited public demand), but let your imagination wander.

The most advanced desktop fabricators are also known as 3-D printers. They cost about $25,000 - $35,000 and they fit comfortably into a home office.They’ve been used for a wide variety of things including architecture and medicine. According to Bruce Sterling, most of them work “by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic.”

Now, Cornell University is joining into the 3-D manufacturer-printer world. A home manufacturing free-for-all can’t be to far away.

To quote an article from the “New Science Tech” website, “Some day, Lipson believes, every home will have a ‘fabber,’ a machine that replicates objects from plans supplied by a computer. Such devices could change how we acquire common products, he suggests: Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.

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