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regular people, and perhaps consequentially, none of these scenarios imagine a role
for home fabrication outside of fi lling a set of already well-understood utilitarian
needs.
It shouldn't be surprising that many of our visions of the future of fabrication are
focused on utilitarian applications. Home fabrication allows people to rapidly iterate
prototypes, to easily replace damaged parts, and to facilitate hands-on learning and
create communities of Makers. These are signifi cant capabilities, and they have the
potential to be highly disruptive. The history of the personal computer followed a
similar trajectory, with computers initially being viewed through primarily utilitarian
lenses. However, we believe that there is a lot of room for our other two motivations—
pleasure and expressiveness—to play out in home fabrication, in ways that haven't
been fully envisioned yet. In this scenario we explore one possible future for expres-
sive and pleasurable home fabrication.
Throughout
Makers
, Doctorow champions the fabrication system of the Ride as
a source of
emergent
meaning: he cultivates a political stance in which outsider
communities built on ingenuity and appropriation are morally superior to mainstream
consumer culture. A narrative can be found within the ride, but it is explicitly an
emergent, non-authored one, coming out of the “collective unconscious” of the
Maker community who builds it piece by piece, vote by vote. Bottom-up phenom-
ena like the ride and hacked replicators are shown to be superior to the empty
corporate-entertainment complex embodied by Disney. In this regard, he is faithful
to the values arising in contemporary Maker communities. But by characterizing
(and valorizing) replication technology as a tool, Doctorow is ignoring a much more
interesting role for this technology. Relegating the
Disney in a Box
system to the
status of tool is like relegating a topic to being only an instruction manual and not a
novel; it is like saying that computers are only good for engineering, math, and
science but not art, games, or communication.
The core insight of Doctorow's
Disney in a Box
example is that the objects that
it creates carry meaning—that it is a system for telling stories. The fabricators he
envisions regularly produce new models for their users—models that convey a story
designed to be communicated and distributed through the medium of fabrication.
Networked fabricators can be used to syndicate material objects—to communicate
stories through material objects. When viewed in this light, 3D printers are not just
a tool: they are a new communications platform. Home fabrication technology isn't
just a powerful tool: it's also a medium.
Understanding 3D printers, laser cutters, and home milling machines as com-
munication technology is a profound leap away from the utilitarian and towards the
playful and the aesthetic. This is a critical step in the evolution of home fabrication,
in the same way that playful and artistic uses of computers were critical to the
growth of personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s. While Makers, hackers,
designers, engineers, and artists already have a myriad of uses for home fabrication
technology, it is still hard to make a case for the everyday use of these devices
among the general public. This parallels the ways in which early computers were of
critical importance to scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, but of little use in
the home. The powerful number crunching capabilities of computers could not drive
