User Designer

Have a listen to the talk Neil Gershenfeld from The Center for Bits and Atoms gave about Personal Fabrication (video, audio) at TED in 2006. If streaming media ain’t your thing there’s an old interview with him on The Edge.

You could also wander around the Fab Labs Out Reach website, which details efforts to bring “prototyping capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment.”

There’s never enough time for reading BUT you might want to dig into the deeply related “Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata” by John Von Neumann. Or Gershenfeld’s book “Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop — from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication”.

All this work on personal fabrication makes me drool. It brings together the fundamental tools people are going to need to design, shape and build anything to meet their needs and wants. Without this kind of basic research we cannot hope to have a future where everything is malleable.

I hope and expect that over time less technical knowledge and skills will be required to build. A lot of the tools mentioned in the personal fab space are complex - though not so complex they’re beyond people’s abilities to learn. Easy building tools are important because lots of people will want to build things that enable them to achieve something else. They won’t be inherently interested in the act of building.