3 Questions: Neil Gershenfeld and the spread of Fab Labs
Ten years ago Neil Gershenfeld, professor of media arts and sciences and the founder and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), began an outreach project that has grown into a global program for empowering local invention, engineering education, and entrepreneurship. He developed self-contained fabrication shops equipped with the latest rapid-prototyping equipment — laser cutters, computer-controlled milling machines, 3-D printers, and so on — that could be easily installed anywhere in the world. Since then, hundreds of what came to be called Fab Labs have been installed in dozens of countries, and last August thousands of the labs’ users and operators gathered at MIT for a 10th-anniversary conference. MIT News asked Gershenfeld to describe the growth and impact of this project. Q: I understand that the core of the Fab Lab idea has to do with the concept of digital fabrication. Just what is digital fabrication? A: The first computer-controlled...