Open Source Architecture by Carlo Ratti

Author:Carlo Ratti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780500343067
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

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Open Source Gets Physical:

How Digital Collaboration Technologies Became Tangible

Instead of talking about it, I’d give people the tools. This wasn’t meant to be provocative or important, but we put together these fab labs…and they exploded around the world.

Neil Gershenfeld, “Unleash Your Creativity in a Fab Lab”, 20061

On a blustery New England day in 2001, a knot of MIT researchers scurried across campus, down the staircase of building E14, and into a basement lab that thrummed with the energy of warm machines and white-hot ideas. They were part of a group of MIT students, professors, and researchers – including some of the adjunct editors and authors of this book – who for years spent their nights in a space with no official title but “the basement.” The underground space was a haphazardly assembled fabrication lab with a single goal: to create. Here, a hacker mentality launched ideas into physical space, with an assortment of laser cutters, vacuum formers, 3D printers and hypersonic waterjet cutters. It was a well-kept secret, the kind of equipment treasure trove that DIYers inhabit when they dream. Quite literally – the basement lab was in use at all hours of the day and night, and the people keeping an around-the-clock vigil became a close community of fabrication-minded innovators.

Close…and closed. As he observed from his office next door, Professor Neil Gershenfeld was concerned that this had become a secluded cult of fabrication. He was bothered by the limited accessibility of such a remarkable creative resource. An opportunity like this one – the almost limitless potential of using fabrication technology to jump out of binary and into physical space – should be open and free. Tools should be in the hands of whoever would use them, and Gershenfeld suspected that such willingness might emerge on MIT campus. He was gripped by the notion of construction as education: “‘Constructionism’ is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge rather than by having information ‘poured’ into their heads…people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots).”2 Gershenfeld imagined that the basement lab, or something like it, would be the crux of a fabrication-empowered learning model.

Determined, now, to realize an idea that was beginning to take shape, the group of students, faculty and researchers who had coalesced in “the basement” began collecting as many resources as possible – tools and machinery scattered about the MIT campus – and simultaneously orchestrated a collaboration between the Grassroots Invention Group (GIG) and the newly minted Center for Bits and Atoms. Within a matter of months (not to mention kickstart funding from the National Science Foundation, NSF), fabrication at MIT had gone from – literally – an underground operation, to become one of the most exciting programs at MIT: a digital fabrication laboratory, known as the “Fab Lab.”

In broad strokes, the Fab Lab explored the relationship between digital information and its physical manifestation.

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