Neil heads MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. He teaches a course called “How to make (almost) anything.”

As an example, he shows Kelly Dobson’s class project, a scream body. You scream into it in public spaces. It muffles the scream entirely, and then you can release it at a more appropriate space. Very funny. Another made an alarm clock you have to wrestle with to prove that you are awake. He says the liberal arts originally were about learning to control the means of expression; the Trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric and logic. The “illiberal” arts had to do with making things. Now his students are hijacking the tools of making for personal expression.

They’re putting into the field experimental fab studios, all around the world. For about $20K, you get a fab that can make (almost) anything. This helps to get over the “fab divide.” He shows a video of street kids in Ghana who woulodn’t leave their local fab lab. In rural norway they’re making mesh networks for monitoring animals… [Technorati tag: etech]

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