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The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the can-it-make-me-a-sandwich dept.

posys noted an interesting talk from Neil Gershenfeld's called "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication". It's a TED talk which I've found greatly enjoyable in the past, and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat. If you are interested, you can also return to the original TED page.

5 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. they will never change the advantages of a factory by SuperBanana · · Score: 3, Informative
    The whole point of factories is efficiency via spreading capital investment across a greater quantity of product. If fabricators become cheap enough for personal use, the factory ones will get cheaper, which means that they'll still make things cheaper and better than you can. They have more money for better equipment, trained staff to produce a high quality product, etc.

    Fabrication and prototyping has always been more expensive than manufacturing. That will not change simply because lots of people are infatuated with devices that take hours upon hours to construct, and make very poor looking "plastic" things made out of globs of goo stuck together.

    I like TED as much as the next guy, but more and more of it seems like a whitewash, style-over-substance dog and pony show.

    --
    Please help metamoderate.
  2. Re:Embedded Video? by MindStalker · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/90
    Is a working video

  3. Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact by MindStalker · · Score: 4, Informative

    Watch it, its mainly about fab labs they set up in 3rd world countries where people are inventing brand new things on their own. Its not about mass production is about unlimited customization.

  4. Re:Embedded Video? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Working version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n-APFrlXDs

  5. Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact by oliderid · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem with this video is that it looks to much like an Apple marketing show. But he is brilliant IMHO. If Americans don't want him, he is more than welcome in Europe :-).

    Well here is a brief summary:
    He presented several new concepts and Fab labs. Fal Labs vulgarize sciences and technologies. His thesis is that non-technical people have technical skills too. The goal of a Fab lab is to provide an environment where they can create their own stuffs. he cited several examples, including children who produced a more efficient design than MIT engineers for a very specific task/tool. But well English isn't my native tongue, so I suggest you to watch the video clip. Anyway it looks like a very interisting approach but he was too "selling his stuffs", it wasn't an objective approach.

    Then there are also several concepts and proofs of concept (such a pity that he didn't provide more information). Most of them were related to "the code won't be abstract anymore". Basically your code becomes a "real" thing.

    For example students have used molecules as bytes (?). The idea behind this experiment is when you compile...Your compiler would produce molecules. The ultimate goal would be to use all these complex molecules as instructions, then as functions to program "living things" or complex material. Well I really wonder how the debugger and the compiler will look like :-). Anyway it truly looks like the final stage of "Object oriented" language :-).

    It is really interesting (IMHO), sure it is mainly about "ideas" but interesting ideas.