Access to Tools

Discussion

Dianna Pfeiffer:

"The driving concept behind the creation of Fab Labs was to provide ordinary people access to a small scale workshop with a number of flexible digital fabrication and computing tools in order to explore “the implications and applications of personal fabrication...” (Gershenfeld 11) Initiated by Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, Fab Labs are neither run nor maintained by MIT (all except for the Mobile Fab Lab), rather the idea for their setup, and in part the means for enabling supporting partnerships is the core of MIT’s involvement with Fab Labs today. As of this writing, there are approximately 34 Fab Labs globally, a number of which are located in developing countries.

These small-scale workshops are organized on a charter system, where one of the key factors in their success is their method for creating and distributing collectivized knowledge for making. Gershenfeld described this as also being a component of his MIT course ‘How to Make (Almost) Anything.’ In effect, necessary information is pulled in by the student as needed, rather than pushed from the instructor. The Fab Lab charter refers to this as: “you can use the Fab Lab to make almost anything (that doesn’t hurt anyone); you must learn to do it yourself, and you must share use of the lab with other uses and users. Training in the Fab Lab is based on doing projects and learning from peers; you’re expected to contribute to documentation and instruction.”

The basic Fab Lab setup usually includes a laser cutter, a sign cutter, a small, precision CNC milling machine, sometimes a larger CNC router, and always the tools for programming processors and micro-controllers. Some of the first Fab Labs around 2002 were put together with tools costing a total of between $20,000 and $50,000. The Center for a Stateless Society has put the cost of outfitting a Fab Lab using open-source tools such as the Fab@Home 3D printer, between $2,000 and $5,000 total.

Other tools a Fab Lab might include, and which significantly increase its cost, are a 3D scanner, 3D printer, plasma cutter, water jet cutter, and CNC lathe or multi-machine.

When Gershenfeld was actively engaged developing the early Fab Labs, he described how he looked at what the Fab Labs were doing: Possession of the means for industrial production has long been the dividing line between workers and owners. But if those means are easily acquired, and designs freely shared, then hardware is likely to follow the evolution of software.

Like its software counterpart, opensource hardware is starting with simple fabrication functions, while nipping at the heels of complacent companies that don’t believe that personal fabrication ‘toys’ can do the work of ‘real’ machines. That boundary will recede until today’s marketplace evolves into a continuum from creators to consumers, servicing markets from one to one billion.

It is this continuum of producers coupled with varied means of distribution that will likely influence the role of designers in the future by offering new avenues for their evolving practice. As Gershenfeld has helped to establish with Fab Labs, in order for this change to occur, these tools not only need to be accessible to a wide range of individuals, but in a manner in which they may play, experiment and explore without immediate commercial constraints on their activities." (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-12152009-131820/unrestricted/Pfeiffer_DV_T_2009.pdf)