Fab Labs make manufacturing personal
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ARGONNE, Ill. (Oct. 12, 2007) — To build a treehouse, you'll need a
hammer, some nails, and a tolerance for splinters. To print treehouses, however,
you'll probably need a Fab
Lab.
Argonne National Laboratory, in conjunction with the University
of Chicago, recently helped to launch a Fab Lab at Chicago's Museum
of Science and Industry,
and others may soon arrive both on site and at several locations in greater
Chicagoland.
Conceived by Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center
for Bits and Atoms (CBA) in 2002, Fab Labs – short for fabrication laboratories – support
the burgeoning field of "personal manufacturing" by providing non-technical
laity as well as engineers with access to the tools and knowledge necessary
to create products that satisfy their individual needs.
Each Fab Lab uses open-source software programs developed at and provided
by the CBA to run a group of off-the-shelf, though sophisticated and expensive,
tools: laser cutters, miniature milling machines that print circuit boards,
jigsaws with a precision of a millionth of a meter and a few others. Instead
of cranking an Allen wrench or turning a screwdriver, newly minted inventors
need only write a bit of computer code and press a couple of buttons to create
their devices. Other users can then take the code used to create these products
to make perfect replicas, or they can tweak the instructions and create an
original design.
Although the Fab Labs currently in operation use common tools and software,
the devices that they have produced vary widely from lab to lab. In rural northern
Norway, a shepherd started a Fab Lab in order to build wireless tags for his
sheep so he could keep track of them as they grazed, and eventually converted
his lab into supplying wireless technology for his town. Likewise, at an old
Hindu hermitage outside of Pune, India, students have built everything from
temporary bamboo shelters to gears for photocopiers using Fab Lab technology.
"If you look at Fab Labs around the world, the products that they have
made represent individual or community needs and not the needs of the originators
of the Fab Labs," said Harold Myron, director of Argonne's Division of
Educational Programs.
Although no definite arrangements have been made, Myron hopes to bring a Fab
Lab to the Argonne Information Center within the next several months, which
will then be accessible primarily to touring school groups. Ideally, he said,
Argonne, the University of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry would
then jointly promote the creation of roughly five to 10 "storefront" Fab
Labs throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.
"I don't think we're going to have one on the Magnificent Mile, but we
can have them in schools, in disadvantaged communities, in the suburbs, in
rural areas and at museums," he said. The projects at these Fab Labs could
satisfy artistic, technical, commercial or educational needs.
"Here's a chance to recover the spirit of 'if you can think of it, you
should also be able to make it,'" said Argonne director Bob Rosner. "This
is a lesson located at the very heart of thinking about where our country will
be – not just in the 21st century, but even further in the future as well."
Since users at the roughly one dozen Fab Labs – located from Boston to South
Africa and Costa Rica to Japan – share so much of their hard- and software,
the potential exists for expanded collaboration between inventors, said Argonne
computer scientist Ian Foster. "Fab Lab is a dynamic network of grass-roots
efforts of people learning by doing, so there's potential for cross-fertilization
of ideas about approaches, designs and techniques."
As head of the joint Argonne-University of Chicago Computational
Institute,
Foster hopes to link the isolated Fab Labs into a united virtual community.
The key to doing so, he said, lies in the grid computing technology that he
and his colleagues developed at Argonne. Grid computing has already been adopted
by a number of companies and organizations that rely on collaborative problem
solving – for
example, some hospitals have used grid computing so that specialists can examine,
diagnose and even treat patients at other hospitals in real time.
Fab Labbers can use grid computing technology to explore the synergies between
their different projects in much the same way, according to Foster. "We
want to reduce the barriers to collaborative innovation, and that means allowing
people to share information, talk to each other or access design tools without
regard to distance."
Myron shared Foster's excitement at Fab Lab's potential to create a global
learning and creative community. "By using grid computing, we can all
access an international cross-current of ideas," he said. "The true
beauty of it all is that the Fab Labs in places like The Netherlands and in
South Africa are brought here, while at the same time we're brought there."
Although Argonne will have a large stake in promoting the spread of personal
manufacturing," Foster said, "end users will feel most directly
the benefits from the expansion of Fab Lab technology. There are many interesting
and, in some cases, tricky differences between different Fab Labs. But in
every case we're empowering people by giving them the ability to create truly
impressive things."
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology.
The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic
and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne
researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities,
and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific
problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for
a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed
by UChicago
Argonne, LLC for
the U.S.
Department of Energy's Office
of Science.
By Jared Sagoff
For more information, please
contact Eleanor Taylor (630/252-5510 or media@anl.gov)
at Argonne.
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