Personal Fabrication

One more note on Gershenfeld's work. While the dream of personal fabrication is the goal of MIT's CBA, it might be more useful to focus on commercial fabrication. Social engineering suggests that the goal should be local, commercial fabricators. This minor nod to centralization enables the purchase of a greater range of equipment (and materials), expert process control/mx, and safety. The bulk of the demand would likely flow through social Web sites that share/improve/refine designs (the drive to make these tools easy would probably centralize the demand, despite the hyper-localization of the production).

The reason this is interesting to me is that I am currently operating (having built it), a system that regularizes the output of hundreds of commercial printers around the world for just-in time/place manufacturing (commercial grade printing still contains large amounts of craft work, which we are wringing out of the process). The process of personal fabrication is similar and would require a platform like the one we built to regularize output along 6 sigma lines regardless of how hyper-localized it is.

Comments

[tim302]

John,
So you're thinking of something like the rent-a-machine-shop model? Where people can go and pay for time on the machines? I think there is a guy in Santa Clara who was running something like that , but for woodworking stuff.

I have heard this model has been used in Japan for car guys , since they have space issues.

[James Bowery]

Since the 70s the semiconductor fabrication facility trend is toward ever larger wafers for the economies of scale that provides. This is starting to produce some really horrendous startup costs for semiconductor fabrication facilities that have to create clean room environments for millions of square feet.

It makes me wonder why there hasn't been more emphasis placed on mass production of fabrication equipment for smaller wafer diameters. It seems there is a great potential for mass production of semiconductor fabrication equipment for small diameter wafers that could give rise to largely self-replicating semiconductor fabrication facilities.