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As a follow-up to my emachineshop post a few weeks ago, there's a great article in the September issue of Wired (on your newstand now, not yet online) about mini fabrication labs popping up all over the place. These labs use the latest in affordable, computerized tools to build one-off devices and parts. Author Clive Thompson interviews eMachineShop founder Jim Lewis and uses the eMachineShop software to create his own one-off guitar to test the process. The author also discusses MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld's worldwide network of fab labs and spends some time inside Saul Griffith's California-based SquidLabs.
While the equipment isn't cheap, it's not as much as you'd think. Everything in the shops discussed in the article - vacuum formers, laser cutters, milling machines - could be bought for between $50,000 and $100,000. Further, software like eMachineShop makes using the tools possible for anyone. After each one of Gershenfeld's mini labs opened, people showed up to create an amazing array of things. Among the samples in the article:
- A Norwegian sheepherder built GPS-enabled tags for his flock
- An Indian businessman created and electrode-driven device to measure the fat content of milk
- A Boston teen created a motion-detector security system for her dairy.
The real kicker here is that Moore's Law is rapidly driving down the cost, and driving up the productivity, of fabrication. Gershenfeld predicts that within a decade or so we'll be able to make almost any household part or repair with a $1,000 desktop device - the realization of the Star Trek Replicator.
The implications for this - the idea that the cost of prototyping is dropping to near zero and tools for design will be understandable and available to anyone with high school-level computer skills - are profound. Today the market is for one-offs - things no big company will make. But in the future this may well replace the R&D and design departments at many, even most, product companies. What has begun to happen to software - small, innovative (and often open source) software companies spring into existence to be quickly bought by big behemoths who can no longer innovate on their own - could well become the norm physical products. Have a better idea for a derailleur shifter on a bike? Prototype it on your own. Designed a spiffy new fuel injector nozzle to drive up fuel mileage? Crank out a few and see if they work.
There will likely never be anything as cost effective as mass production, and there will remain a need to understand materials science, engineering, etc. But today the understanding isn't enough. You need access to massive amounts of capital to test and develop new products. It's this accumulation of capital that allows big corporations to make the rules about what is saleable, profitable, and appropriate. In the future your knowledge of some basic engineering principles combined with a good idea may be all it takes to completely remake a product category. That has to be a scary idea for big corporations everywhere.
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