Category:Digital Fabrication

Digital fabrication is a new kind of industry, enabled by emerging technologies, for turning digitally-stored designs into useful physical objects.

The aim of the Open Ecology movement is to catalyse a digital fabrication revolution, one that combines the industrial revolution and the digital revolution.

Digital fabrication is flexible. This allows for one machine to fulfil many roles and reduces space and resources. Whereas industrial mass-production required a different factory for every type of product, flexible, digital manufacturing allows the same set of tools to be use to make any electromechanical device you care to name. Flexibility makes it worthwhile to invest in your own fabrication tools; only industrialists would invest in a tool that makes the same thing over and over again, but a tool that can respond to one's needs is a tool that it is useful to have in your home.

Digital fabrication is decentralized. It is no longer necessary to have large factories

Digital fabrication is free.

Digital fabrication is cheap. Once a person has fabrication machines, they can do create a car, a mobile phone, agricultural equipment or whatever at the cost of raw materials. The standard industrial supply-chain greatly inflates the price of manufactured goods. If you buy a commercially-manufactured computer, your dollar has to cover the costs of mining the material, shipping the material to China, running the machines, labour, marketing, more shipping, and mark-ups by several retailers. Digital fabrication, by empowering people to manufacture their own wealth in their backyard, cuts out all those extra costs and reduces the cost to just energy plus information plus raw materials. Energy comes free from the sun and information comes free from the Internet, so the only cost is raw materials.

Digital fabrication is customizable.

Digital fabrication empowers the poor. Housing, medical equipment, agricultural equipment, electronics - let's assume that it would be a good thing to provide poor people with these things. How are we to do it? You can consider it as being possible in two different ways. One is to manufacture the goods in wealthier places and ship them over. The other is to manufacture them on-site where they are needed. Of these two solutions, only the second one creates local economic stimulus, teaches technological skills and makes communities economically self-sufficient.

See Neil Gershenfeld's introductory talk on the subject.