Fab Lab

A significant amount of my waking hours is spent on the FabLabs. A FabLab is a present-day approximation of machine that is at least a decade from existance. My advisor, Neil Gershenfeld, calls this machine a "personal fabricator", a machine that can loosely make most things. Sort of like those many-in-one machines that Sears sells for garage shops, but the fabricator would work a little more like a Star Trek replicator.

For me it started in the winter of 2002 when I was brought to India to work on a diesel engine timing device. My eyes were opened to the amazing possibilities when people in primative places have access to highy precise tools and access to the collective knowledge of engineers and scientists through history. I left my job and moved across the country to work this vision.

In the summer of 2004 I travelled to Ghana in West Africa to install the first FabLab in Africa. What an experience! Take a look at some photos of the Ghana FabLab and a short video of one of our young FabLab stars making a circuit board. In summer 2005 I returned to Africa to install a lab in Pretoria, South Africa, then returned again in January 2006 to install yet another lab in Soshanguve, South Africa, making a total of three labs in Africa.

Today there are labs in Costa Rica, Norway, India, (Boston) USA, Ghana, and South Africa. We get hundreds of requests from all over the world, the explosion of interest requires a globally-cohesive response. The major challenge has shifted from showing that the fab lab concept is viable to figuring out how to successfully scale-up.