Short for “fabrication laboratory”, a fab lab is an automated
manufacturing appliance that produces solid objects using raw
materials (shredded plastic, silicon, wood chips, etc.) and computer
instructions. Best thought of as a 3D printer, a fab lab could one day
take the power of fabrication out of the manufacturing industry and
put it into the hands of businesses and eventually consumers. Since
the cost of raw materials would be negligible, a fab lab could drop the
cost of manufacturing to the cost of power and the design only.
In late 2004, the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms created a fab lab
consisting of three Linux PCs, a laser cutter, a combination 3-D
scanner and drill, a numerically controlled X-Acto knife, and a
handful of RISC chips. It has successfully fabricated not only simple
plastic products such as eyeglass frames and action figures, but also
electronics such as small radios and computers. Funded by Degussa AG,
a large German manufacturing and construction company, Behrokh
Khoshnevis of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has spent 2003
onward developing a system intended to construct a full-size, 2,000
square-foot house with utilities embedded, all in under 24 hours.
In the near future, fab labs might be used to eliminate costly
assembly lines and produce cheap products of consistently high
quality. Mass produced fab labs could be distributed in developing
countries to leapfrog centralized industral infrastructures and enable
localized consumer markets. File-sharing communities, much like those
that exist today for music and movies, could emerge surrounding the
demand for free fabrication designs. This could prompt numerous legal
battles and a change in the way we look at intellectual property and
patent law.
One day, it might become possible to create a fab lab so flexible that
it can manufacture any conceivable product under a certain size,
including other fab labs. Hypothetical fab labs that build products
from the atoms up, using molecular scale machinery, have been called
nanofactories. When the cost of a fab lab drops low enough that they
are affordable to the typical consumer remains unknown, but when that
time comes, it is certain that the world system will change
significantly.