Fab by Neil Gershenfeld
Fab by Neil Gershenfeld
Written in 2005, Gershenfeld peers into the future and sees child-operated 3D printers and a need for user-level design software capable of spec'ing to that printer. With a bit of ingenuity, this can take some kids from LEGO-mindstorms to making their own designs real.
The parrots loved it (a system to see their human, see other animals, listen to music, or use a drawing program written for them). After all, as social and intelligent animals they have very real and often unmet communication needs. As a population, they've been underserved by information technologies...
Manufacturers of cell phones and laptops have already sold their products to every two-legged creature they can find...
What homebound pet wouldn't want to be able to use technology in the home as their owners do, to play games, watch videos, and communicate with friends?
This way of working (Frank Gehry's complete CAD specification of a building down to its material components) proved to have a number of advantages. Most important, it made it possitlbe to build buildings unlike any that had come before, because they were limited only by the properties of the materials rather than by the difficulty of describing the designs. But it also turned out to be faster and cheaper to build this way. The Barcelona fish went from preliminary design to construction in just six months, beating the planned construction schedule and budget...
Ultimately, the introduction of engineering design and production tools into architecture challenges the whole division of labor between designing and constructing a building. Once Frank has made a model, he effectively pushes a one-hundred-million-dollar print button...