Manufacturing gets Absolutely Fabulous

By Peter Day Presenter, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service

Professor Gershenfeld wants a measured and modified world

Dropping in on the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is always baffling, entertaining, exhilarating and frightening, not necessarily in that order.

MIT is awesome enough, but the Media Lab is the striking place where academics detached from the daily grind interact with the future, helped by young recruits of dazzling intelligence, and financed by some of the biggest companies in the world.

Media Lab people have constantly explored the significance of the great shift to digital which has accompanied the Lab's evolution under its founder Nicholas Negroponte.

It is a huge change, which we early 21st century earthlings now tend to dismiss as self-evident or over-hyped.

But much more is still to come, if Professor Neil Gershenfeld is right.

Bright people

Professor Gershenfeld is a self-confessed tinkerer who has fallen on his feet.

Computer science is one of the worst things thing that ever happened to computers or to science, because it prematurely froze a notion of computing on what was possible in 1950 Professor Neil Gershenfeld

When I first met him at MIT ten years ago, he was part of the 'Things That Think' project, working on ideas such as the wearable computer.

We shook hands, and with the hand shake, two computers in our shoes (powered by walking about) exchanged business card information with each other, using the electrical contact of the handshake to do so.

On another visit, Professor Gershenfeld showed me what he insisted was a working quantum computer, the holy grail machine that will one day (it is claimed) make today's PCs look as clunky as a crystal radio set.

But now Professor Gershenfeld has something else on his mind.

Since 2002, he has been running a department called the Centre for Bits and Atoms (a typical touch of MIT haughty simplicity there).

Professor Gershenfeld set it up as a cross-MIT department to harness many skills inside and outside the Media Lab confines to use the most modern equipment to enable people to make things.

Bright people that is, who are not manufacturing specialists.

New digital revolution

Early sessions were mobbed by student tinkerers driven to find a way of expressing themselves.

As the work continued, Professor Gershenfeld discovered he was embarked on a great endeavour: he describes it as breaking down the barriers that went up in the Renaissance (he says) between thinking man and hands-on, doing, man.

Continuing to explore this dichotomy, he explains:

"Computer science is one of the worst things thing that ever happened to computers or to science, because it prematurely froze a notion of computing on what was possible in 1950."

That is, it prevents computers moving boldly into the physical world.

"Despite the digital revolution in information, fabrication is still analogue," he says. (Deep breath) "What's emerged here at the Centre for Bits and Atoms is the recognition that that we're just at the edge of a new digital revolution: the digitisation of fabrication. Not computers that control tools, but computers that are tools, that work in a similar way to the way proteins programme the human body."

Inventor's factory

The idea is that in 10 years or so, everybody will have access to a three-dimensional copier in every office or den, as ubiquitous as is the printer or copier at the moment.

At the moment the price of a mini fab is $20-$30,000 (£15-£20,000).

You take a handful of high precision machines and put them together in a big van or a small room: a laser cutter for 3-D parts; a copper sign cutter that makes flexible circuits and antennas; a tiny cutting tool that works down to millionths of a metre that makes circuit boards and other precise parts; programming tools to make tiny processors for less than $1 to make radios and modems, glued together with special software so that all the machinery works as one machine.

But this is more than just a rich world toy: throwing new light on the much worried about digital divide between rich and poor, Professor Gershenfeld says.

"If you're a farmer in a village, you don't just need information on a computer screen, you need to measure and modify the world. You need to bring the means for technology development to the masses, not just information."

The inventor gets his own factory, what has taken until now mass production reconstructed round a market of one, personal prototyping.

Now you might think that this was a rich person's fantasy, and rich university's toy.

But so much federal money backed the Centre for Bits and Atoms that it had to take its work out into the community.

Poor parts of Boston got first sight of the mini fab, but soon it escaped across the world.

And some of the first people to encounter it were the Indian village inventor involved in the Honeybee network; I wrote about it last time.

Work in Progress is the title of this exploration of the big trends upheaving the world of work as we steam further into the 21st century; and it is a work in progress, influenced and defined by my encounters as I report on trends in business and organisations all over the world.