Monday, April 02, 2007

De Kijk van Van Dyck: Fab Lab

I saw Neil Gershenfeld last week at Technopolis inaugurating the first 'Fabrication Lab' or 'Fab Lab' in Belgium.

A Fab Lab is a small scale workshop with the tools to make almost anything. This includes technology-enabled products generally perceived as limited to mass production.

The Fab Lab program is part of the MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) which broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation.

The striking thing about the Fab Lab is that it points to the undisputable fact that the future will be digital, more than ever. The Fab Lab also makes technology easily accessible for common people like me and you. Gershenfeld talks about the 'personal fabricator', in analogy with the 'personal computer'.

If you have some 18 minutes of time you can have a look at a speech of Gershenfeld about "Life after the digital revolution", where he talks about some of his projects at MIT, among which the Fab Labs.

Or, read all about it in this week's column.

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