Making anything and everything

Posted Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 10:19 PM
Modified Wed, Dec 4-, 2005 at 04: 2 PM

On the heels of my last post about rapid prototyping machines, an excellent new audio clip of Neil Gershenfeld's talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference is up now at ITConversations.

Gershenfeld (of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and author of FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication and When Things Start to Think) claims that the next wave of innovation is not of computation but instead fabrication.

I've always been a DIY kind of gal myself but it's hard not to ignore the rising popularity of people wanting to make their own things using every day, accessible objects: ReadyMade magazine, Make magazine, Hack a Day, etc.

And it's so interesting that Gershenfeld talks about how his students consistently document their own work via blogs for personal learning every year. (Hey, that sounds familiar...)

So in effect, they turn around and teach each other; a peer-to-peer, open source learning network.