GUILLERMO WECHSLER

January 8, 2007

From Print to the Web to PFs

PFs: Personal Fabricators.

Neil Gershenfeld is conceiving a new capability to put together the world of software design and the world of machine design in his Center of Bits and Atoms (CBA) at MIT. The basic idea is that we can design in a computer (cadcam) and “print” three dimensional objects using a network of supersonic jets of water, powerful lasers, microscopic beams of atoms, and probably in the future some nanotech manufacturing. This new unity, based in the idea that the universe is literally a computer, is called PF, paraphrasing the PC. As he described it, what is emerging, is a new Renaissance, a new sort of mass literacy were the focal aspects are not anymore reading and witting, but “mastering available means of expression.” Some of consequences of these experimental practices are:

1. Re-connecting the production experience in a unified practice of conceiving, designing, producing and using an artifact.


2. Empowering people to control the technological environment in which their communal life thrives.


3. A new type of just-in-time, on-demand teaching and coaching (in opposition to the current pushing-content, just-in-case form of education).


4. Expanding the value of collaboration. He said about this new style of collaboration: “once a student masters a new capability, such a water-jet cutting, or micro-controller programing, they have a near-evangelical interest in showing others how to use it.”

Nothing about this is totally new, with the exception that is growing in the historical moment in which there is Internet, there is an Open Source economy, and there is the GNU GPL to give a legal framework to new ways of collaboration. Even more interesting, his labs are replicating around the world, especially in low-income, resourceless communities in Ghana, India, or Boston's Tent City...with results as astonishing as those of the highly educated MIT students.