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Setembre September Septiembre 2014
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Cincia ciutadanaCitizen science
Ciencia ciudadana
GaudPoeta de la pedra, eri de lart
Poet of stone, artistic hedgehog
Poeta de la piedra, erizo del arte
Entrevista / Interview
Neil A. Gershenfeld /Vicente Guallart
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Editorial
2
The self-sufficient city
On the inside cover, twoimages of the
Manufacturing Athenaeumin Les Corts, the firstcentre opened in
the
framework of theBarcelona Fab City project.On page 1, on the
left, the
second of these manufacturing
athenaeums in operation,in Ciutat Meridiana.
The two images on thispage are of the
manufacturing laboratoryfor the Institute for
Advanced Architecture ofCatalonia, and on the next
page, the Citilab inCornell.
Photos: Albert Armengol
This September we commemorate the tercentenary of theend of the
War of the Spanish Succession. During the longmonths of the siege
of Barcelona, the city displayed remark-able self-sufficiency and
civic organisation in its resistance.Three hundred years later,
that heroic Barcelona, which hadenough self-confidence to concede
and save itself fromdestruction, is an open city that has surpassed
all manner ofphysical and psychological barriers. As a city that
hassuffered sieges and bombardments throughout history, itdoes not
base its strength on trying to defeat external forcesor relying on
them, but on its ability to generate its ownresources. Indeed, if,
as the saying goes, every countrymakes its own war, then every city
makes its own market.Nevertheless, and despite its status as an
open city,Barcelona is living, paradoxically, under the pressure of
anew siege.
This is not a military siege, but an economic one: underthe
banner of globalisation, its industry has been disman-tled and
production has shifted to developing countries. AsMIT professor
Neil Gershenfeld said in an interview for thisissue of Barcelona
Metrpolis, the factory productionmodel of the 19th and 20th
centuries has given way to aservice economy and led to a situation
where products areimported and jobs exported. Our current crisis is
largely aresult of this economic siege.
The notion of an economic siege takes us back to theparadigm of
the self-sufficient city, as described so well byVicente Guallart,
chief architect at the Barcelona City Coun-cil and promoter of fab
labs and digital manufacturing asso-ciations. The challenge for
cities in the 21st century isbecoming productive again, says
Guallart. Now, more thanever, our self-sufficiency needs to be
connected, global.Replace self-sufficiency with sovereignty, and
you get asentence with a viable political solution for the city and
thecountry. The challenge, then, is to move from the model ofa city
that receives products and generates waste to a differ-
ent model in which information comes in and goes out.
Aninnovative city is one that allows its citizens to think
glob-ally and produce locally, affirms Gershenfeld.
Hence, Barcelona is not immune to global sieges. Like allbig
cities in the world, it must be prepared for threats suchas climate
change, which may bring a multitude of naturaldisasters, and
terrorism. It is not enough for a city to behighly self-sufficient
if it doesnt belong to a network thatenables it to establish
universal protocols. After all,connected self-sufficiency offers
greater protection againstglobal collapse. Nor is it a coincidence
that Barcelona hasbecome the world capital of urban resilience, one
of thefoundations that must allow the smart cities of the futureto
enjoy greater energy self-sufficiency and be in a positionto cope
with energy blackouts caused by accidents or sabo-tage.
However, a smart city is not just a city with sensors.Being a
mobile capital and having protocols to make it asmart city will be
useless without science and public in nova-tion. It is not enough
to create apps that merely integratepeople into the smart cities of
the future. We also need apublic that is open and ready to
participate, and above allprepared to share in innovation.
No wall will help us deal with these threats. It is
not,therefore, a question of building new barriers, but quite
theopposite. Only through imagination and public cooperationwill we
be capable of overcoming the sieges of the future.
Marc Puig i GurdiaDirector of
Communications andCitizen Service
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44
Bernat Puigtobella
A conversation withNeil A. Gershenfeld and Vicente Guallart
Think globally, fabricate locally
Neil A. Gershenfeld is a professor at MIT and the head ofthe
Center for Bits and Atoms at the same technologicalinstitute, a
sister lab to the MIT Media Lab. His researchstudies are
predominantly focused in interdisciplinary stud-ies involving
physics and computer science, in such fields asquantum computing,
nanotechnology, and personal fabri-cation. Gershenfeld is one of
the most prominent advocatesof the notion of personal fabrication
and has been an inspi-ration for many scientists and engineers
working in fab labstoday across the globe.
Vicente Guallart, for his part, is the Architect in Chiefof the
City of Barcelona and the founder of Barcelonasnetwork of fab labs.
Guallart is the author of The Self-Suffi-cient City (Actar
Publishers, 2012), a luminous book on thefuture of the city,
reviewed in this issue of BarcelonaMetrpolis. We have interviewed
them during the 10thInternational Fab Labs Conference and Fab
Festival, cele-brated in Barcelona.
Mr Gershenfeld, you claim that the digital revolution hasnot
come out yet to the physical world. We are going nowfrom
programming bits to programming atoms. We havereached the first
stage of the digital revolution, but we haveyet to move to another
level. Where are we now?Neil A. Gershenfeld: There is a very
precise historical anal-ogy that shows where we are now. As
computers evolved,we first had mainframe computers, followed by a
second-ary stage with mini computers, and after that came thehobby
computer, and finally the personal computer. So thatwas the history
of digitising communication and computa-tion. We are retracing that
history now for fabrication indifferent stages, so in an initial
stage you would have themain frames of fabrication, that is, the
big machines andfactories. We are in the minicomputer era of
digital fabrica-tion.
So the fab labs work today like the minicomputers, andthe
minicomputers were the moment in history when the
Growing numbers of people live in cities and are increasingly
connected, butonly productive societies will be able to decide
their future. A plan has beenimplemented in Barcelona to place
technology within everybodys reach, allowing the community to work
together.
INTERVIEW
Photo: Pere Virgili
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Interview
45
Internet was invented. Now fab labs are working onmachines that
make machines, so fab labs make fab labs(those were the hobby
computers) and the research we aredoing is leading up to the
personal fabricator. That is still aresearch project one machine
that can make anything but the historical lesson is: You didnt have
to wait 20years from the invention of the PC before you could
startusing the internet. So the revolution is here today. Thereare
still many years to work on the technology, but the revo-lution has
already arrived.
Mr Guallart, in your book The Self-Sufficient City, youmake a
striking assertion: The Internet has changed ourlives but it hasnt
changed our cities, yet. How will thedigital revolution change the
way we live now?Vicente Guallart: The architecture of cities is the
last tochange when society undergoes a transformation such asthe
one we are experiencing now. We usually build our ideaof society
according to the technologies we have at hand ata given time and
place. In the 21st century we are all glob-ally connected, and
thanks to the Internet we have gainedaccess to all sorts of
information generated around theworld. This information will enable
us to produce our owngoods in a self-sufficient way. We are not
there yet, but wewill be able to produce locally only if we are
globallyconnected. So, we sense that a big change is looming on
thehorizon but it hasnt happened yet. We see that we live in
adifferent way and use technologies in a new way, but theway that
cities work with the idea of fabrications, the waywe produce food,
the way we recycle materials All thesepoint to a larger change, so
we are waiting to see the tech-nologies that will transform our
cities. For now, we can seethat the way we move around and the way
we produceenergy is going to change in the near future. N.G.: Today
our cities import goods and produce trash thatwe can only partially
recycle. We are still immersed in thePITO model (Product In, Trash
Out) but we are movingtowards a new model in which the flow of
information willbe the key. The DIDO model (Data In, Data Out) will
enableinformation to flow so that production can be based
locally.If we decrease the flow of matter, the flow of
informationwill increase.
How is this change going to come about?V.G.: In the city of the
near future, all houses and businesseswill necessarily be connected
to the Internet. The city ofthe future should be a metropolis of
neighbourhoods, whereeverybody should be able to walk to work or
have a bakeryor a swimming pool or a fab lab within walking
distance.Barcelona is implementing a plan to have a fab lab for
everydistrict and thus create a public network of fab labs in
orderto make technology accessible to everyone.
It has been said that the first fab lab at MIT appeared as ifby
accident. How did it come about? N.G.: From CBA and MIT the answer
is very narrow. We hada big grant from the National Science
Foundation and theyasked us to show the social impact of the
research and wehad no idea, so we just set up a lab as a
requirement for thegrant, and then they have been doubling it for
ten years
since. Barcelona has been one of the earliest and biggestand
most important labs for this history because the cityhas a fabulous
tradition of design and 50% youth unem-ployment. There is this
great knowledge base, and thenthere is this broken economy. What is
happening here in fablabs in Barcelona and in this international
meeting is reallyprofound it is actually creating a new economy
that chal-lenges the fundamental assumptions about how the econ-omy
works and so on, all over the world, and Barcelona is areal leader
in this. Digital fabrication leads to personal fabri-cation, which
is leading to a new economy.
Vicente, how has the MIT lab shaped Barcelonas fab lab?What sort
of inspiration...N.G.:Well, let me correct the question. We started
it at MIT,but Barcelonas lab is bigger than MITs. The notion of
fablabs has been invented by the world. MIT was a little seedand we
are still involved, but what goes on in fab labs is theresult of a
global community collaboration. V.G.: In our case, Neil has always
said that MIT is a safeplace for strange people. So we are some of
those strangepeople that engaged in thinking how to invent the
future. Ihave some previous experience with digital production,
butwe realised that if we were not able to work in
collaborationwith other people, we would never be able to
produceanything and would be reduced to consumers. We createdour
lab, and our Master of Advanced Architecture arosewhen we could
work with Neil to create the Media HouseProject together. The idea
of a fab lab is having a communitywith which you can share ideas
and solutions while you usethe same kind of technology, and from
that point of view weare trying to learn as much as we can from
MIT. We comefrom the Cistercian tradition, which springs from the
MiddleAges, when monasteries replicated each other. We decidedto
replicate ourselves in other laboratories, here inBarcelona, but
also in Lima and Addis Ababa, so we canbecome a kind of proactive
partner with the fab academy inorder to make the revolution
possible.
Fab labs in Africa. Valentina, an 8-year-old girl in ruralGhana,
can do something by herself that we currently needdifferent people
to assemble... Now three students at MITare scaling innovation done
by an 8-year-old in Africa... N.G.: The bigger lesson is not the
students at MIT, whichafter all fits a few thousand people. They
are bright andinventive, but they are only a few thousand, whereas
in theplanet there are a few billion. What is driving the lab
storyis that you find exactly the kind of profile of bright
inventivepeople in rural African villages or above the Arctic
Circle.The existing advanced education industry does not reachthe
brain power of the planet. So its not changing MIT, butscaling MIT.
We are finding people all over the world butthere is no place for
them, and this is the gap fab labs aretrying to fill.
So what can fab labs do for democracy today?V.G.: We are in a
global crisis that affects both the way wework and the way we
organise ourselves. We are movingtowards a world in which people
will live mostly in citiesand will be more and more connected, but
in the future only
On the previouspage, from left toright, Vicente Guallart, Chief
Architect of the CityCouncil and founderof the Barcelonanetwork of
fab labs,and Neil A. Gershenfeld, professor at the
MassachussettsInstitute of Technology (MIT)and director of
theCenter for Bits andAtoms.
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Interview
the countries and cities that are productive will be abledecide
their own future. This is why the city of Barcelonahas decided to
create a plan similar to the one that wasdeveloped 100 years ago
with the libraries. Recently I wasat the Boston Public Library, and
at the entrance there is amotto that says FREE TO ALL, which is an
invitation toopen the knowledge of academics to all citizens. Until
now,technology was closed to universities and we have decidedto
open it to everyone. This is why in Barcelona we aredeveloping a
plan to set up a laboratory in each district inthe same way that we
have libraries, schools, health centres,etc. We work to make
technology accessible to everyone,we create a network that allows
the community to worktogether... and this is fundamental to grant
people the rightto decide their future for themselves. Today many
peopleare calling for a revolution, but we are already making
arevolution, empowering the citizens, allowing them to havethe
tools to connect with other people and to share knowl-edge. We also
want to empower cities, because often citieshave collapsed, not
only economically but also intellectu-ally when confronted with the
question, What to do next?In the 50s, after the Second World War,
the economy wasbeing pushed forward by democracy, mostly in
America,and we were all growing together. Today, though, the
moneyis coming from places that are not very democratic, likeChina
or Russia or the Middle East... so we need to inventother ways to
manage the economy in order to empowerand to connect economic
growth to democracy.
What are the current main obstacles that make cities resist-ant
to change, or contrary to the emergence of new cities?It seems that
the logic of big companies is that people aremeant to consume
rather than to create technology...N.G.: No, thats not exactly the
problem. Remember thatwhen the personal computer appeared, the
leadingcomputer companies all failed because they considered PCsa
toy; they did not see them as a threat. In the same way,
biggovernment or big business are not threatened becausethey see
fab labs as toys; they dont understand them. Thebiggest challenge
for fab labs is not confrontation but organ-ization: building an
organisational capacity. What Vicenteand his colleagues have done
is profound. They have essen-tially taken over running the city to
build that capacity.There arent direct obstacles The hard part is
to build theorganisational capacity to support this revolution. So
wehad to spin off a fab foundation and a fab academy to helpsupport
this growing network, and projects like the oneVicente is leading
in Barcelona are building the civic infra-structure. Its a real
invention: he is inventing new ways toorganise the city around a
new notion of infrastructure. Andso thats the limitation, sort of
inventing a new city, becauseif anybody can make anything, how can
you live, work andplay?
In an article published in Foreign Affairs in 2012, you saidthat
the hype for 3D printers can be compared with theinterest that
newspapers showed for the microwave oven inthe 50s, when it was
seen as a substitute for cooking. Nowwe know that microwave ovens
have improved our lives, butthat we still need the rest of the
utensils to cook. The fab
labs would be the kitchen and the microwaves would justbe the 3D
printers.N.G.: The research we are doing at my lab at MIT is to
takeall the tools in a fab lab and merge them in a very deep
way,fundamentally structuring the properties of materials.Today, in
a fab lab like the Architecture Institute inBarcelona, the 3D
printer may actually be the least-usedtool. There are bigger
machines that involve much morecomplex processes. Right now there
is a bit of hype in themedia about 3D printers, but it is silly
because the articlesare written by journalists who dont even
actually use them.There is a revolution today, which is digital
fabrication,which means turning data into things and things into
data,and the 3D printer is a small corner of that big space.
In Barcelona we have marked 300 years since the siege.You might
have seen the show M.U.R.S. by La Fura delsBaus. The idea of the
siege is relevant to the rise of fablabs, since you aim to create
cities that become more self-sufficient, as Vicente Guallarts book
title points out. If weare to be under siege, we should be prepared
to produceour own goods...V.G.: The original title for the book was
The ConnectedSelf-Sufficient City. The ideal is not to be isolated.
The waywe are connected with others is different from the way
wewere in the past. The question is to empower local produc-tion.
Basically because we must do it in order to be leadersof our
future, but we will only be able to do this if we areconnected to
the world. N.G.: Barcelona is under siege today. The economy
isbroken; people far away take your money and your jobs. Youare
under siege. Its today.
How do you envision the city of the future?N.G.: Think globally,
fabricate locally.V.G.: The city of the future will be
multi-scalar, because thecity of the future will be a network of
cities. We will all beconnected, and this implies that we will live
in differentplaces at the same time somehow. The city of the future
isa metropolis of neighbourhoods. The future is not having arich
centre and a poor periphery, but a city in which manyneighbourhoods
are empowered and have the right facili-ties in order to be able to
produce nearly everything.
How many things are you wearing that you have
producedyourself?N.G.:When you came to this interview I was working
on theinternals of the software that controls the machines thatmake
machines the engineering processes. One of thethings that most
excites me is the workflows, so I am wear-ing this laptop. The
software in here is what I make. I ammore interested in the
workflows in the lab rather than theproducts of the lab. So thats
what I wear.
And you Vicente, what are you wearing that you haveproduced
yourself?V.G.:What I wear is myself...N.G. (interrupting): No, no,
I can answer for you. Its thecity. Look at this hall, look at
Barcelona full of fab labs. Ithink the answer for Vicente is he is
wearing Barcelona.
46
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Past
Todays financial, environmental, social and political crisesare
the result of a production model that has been forgedover a period
of more than a hundred years. This model isbased on oil as a source
of energy and a raw material, onmass production and on a
standardised global economicsystem. Modern industrialisation feeds
on the naturalresources of Africa and the Americas, on oil from the
MiddleEast and on cheap labour in Asia.
Today, the technology, resources and administrativeorganisation
of our cities (generally based on models thatemerged in very
different economic, social political, envir -onmental and
technological conditions decades and evencenturies ago) are very
nearly obsolete, while our currentlevel of consumption is
threatening their sustainability forfuture generations.
The model that shaped the industrial city put produc-tion
centres right at its heart and absorbed much of therural
population. Later on, manufacturing left the city andmoved
thousands of miles away, which led to an increase inconsumption of
fossil fuels, reduced work opportunitiesand worst of all separated
consumption operations fromproduction processes. Cities have turned
into vast rubbishfactories and their survival depends on the
technology thatis produced far away. They are the physical
manifestation ofour current consumption-based model.
Cities (which are mankinds most complex creation, thescene of
most of our interactions and where the biggestchallenges for the
future lie) need technology to work, toprovide their inhabitants
with conveniences and to meet
their needs. But, as well as this, they need to innovate
andcreate their own technology to share with other urbancentres; to
develop solutions by way of the city and itspopulation.
From arts and crafts to globalisationIn medieval cities, most
manufacturing took place withinthe city walls. The purpose of
craftsmanship was to meetlocal demands and needs, and only after
they were met wasthere any connection with other settlements. After
that,industrialisation drove a rift between the
manufacturingprocess and the reality that surrounded it.
Manufacturingthen expanded to accommodate regional, national
andglobal interests and even a standardised production systemthat
eventually created what we see today: a person in NewDelhi uses the
same microprocessor in his or her computeras a person in Buenos
Aires, Cape Town or Washington. But,actually, people in different
places do not have to use thesame cups or tables, the same toys or
tools. In the case of akitchen utensil, this may not be that
important, but itbecomes more so when it concerns public lighting
in thecity, the transport system or the furniture in our
livingrooms. Most of these objects and solutions were designed
tosuit a different environmental context and different users.They
fit into a common pattern that makes up a global aver-age; a
standardised kit made for consumerism.
The military industry has developed much of the tech-nology that
we consume today and that defines our dailylives. The two world
wars gave us tools such as microwaves,
48
Toms DezDirector of Fab Lab Barcelona
From fab labs to fab citiesThe goal of the Fab City project is
to develop a fully productive city whoseinhabitants share their
knowledge to solve local problems and set up newbusinesses and
education schemes. Barcelona already has two
manufacturingathenaeums which take inspiration from this
philosophy.
Eva Vzquez
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49
compact cameras and personal computers. Later on, theCold War
gave birth to the Internet when Vint Cerf and hiscolleagues
designed a system of interconnected nodes tomaintain a flow of
information in the event of a nuclearattack. The Internet has
turned out to be the most influen-tial recent invention of all,
shaping the way we live, shareand produce.
Vicente Guallart, Barcelonas Chief Architect, recentlywrote a
book called The Self-Sufficient City (2014) inwhich he develops the
idea that a multi-scalar approachbased on the convergence of ICT,
urban planning and ecol-ogy will change our current city model,
just as it waschanged a hundred years ago by the oil industry and
massproduction. The industrialised model is in crisis and we arenow
transitioning towards the development of new toolsthat will
redefine and reshape our reality. Giving the publicinformation and
production tools appears to be a key factorin this process,
according to Guallart: The regeneration ofcities following the
model of connected self-sufficiency canonly be meaningful if people
are allowed to have morecontrol over their own lives and more power
as members ofa social network.
ICT provides new forms of participation in decision-making that
affects daily life. We can access open code toolsand platforms and
use them to report irregularities andcrimes, share an event, give
our neighbourhood a new voiceor build relationships with our
community. In 2012 a mediatrend was spurred by the fascinating case
of Martha, a nine-year-old British girl who took photos of her
school lunches,shared them on her blog and raised awareness of
childrensnutrition. But as well as using existing tools in the form
ofwebsites, apps and other traditional formats, public involve-ment
in taking responsibility may soon be altered by theintroduction of
tools to create tools.
A global brain for local actionFab labs are digital fabrication
laboratories equipped withstate-of-the-art technology,
democratising access to produc-tion and invention. What started as
a participationprogramme at the Center of Bits and Atoms (CBA) of
theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has turnedinto a
global network of people, projects and schemes thatshare an open
philosophy when it comes to digital produc-tion.
These laboratories provide the means to be inventive sothat
anybody can achieve practically anything: gettingresults is what
counts. The labs in Lyngen, Norway, came
about because of a project to monitor lost sheep; in India,they
were set up to develop filters to measure the amountof fat in milk;
in Detroit they began as a scheme to createurban kitchen gardens on
empty plots of land, and so on.
In fact, the success of the first fab labs surprised every-one,
including their founders. As CBA Director NeilGershenfeld once
remarked, Its all a big accident, on thecentres providing a
community in Boston with a set of toolsand machinery as part of its
social responsibilityprogramme. Over the first decade of this
century, fab labsbegan to spread to Ghana, Norway and India, and
then toBarcelona, Amsterdam and other cities across the
world.Today, there are almost 350 labs in more than 40 countriesand
on every continent. They share the same stock ofmachinery and the
same processes, linking up through theInternet and videoconferences
to form one of the largestcommunities of creators in the world.
The productive city: Barcelona 5.0Today, our cities import goods
and produce waste. Theslogan From PITO to DIDO (PITO: Product In,
Trash Out;DIDO: Data In, Data Out) proposes a new model based
onproduction inside the city, on recycling materials and meet-ing
local needs through local inventiveness. With the newDIDO model, a
citys imports and exports would mostly bein the form of bits
(information) and most of the atomswould be controlled at the local
level.
This is the Fab City project: to develop a fully produc-tive
city made up of citizens who share knowledge to solvelocal problems
and set up new businesses and educationschemes. The Fab City
concept is a vindication of the ideaof the citizen as the true
centre of knowledge, the start andend point of a chain that links
together researchers, univer-sities, industry, commerce, the
government, etc. Its aboutproducing locally, using both
cutting-edge and basic tech-nology, and sharing it to drive the
development of new solu-tions at any given moment, anywhere in the
world.
Imagine productive neighbourhoods equipped with digi-tal
fabrication laboratories (fab labs) that, in turn, are linkedup
with other neighbourhoods and cities across the world toexchange
know-how and solve community problems relat-ing to things such as
public lighting, playgrounds, environ-mental conditions, energy
production, food production andeven local production of goods. They
use waste as a rawmaterial, recycle plastic to do 3D printing or
use old house-hold appliances to produce new devices.
Barcelona is one of the cities committed to developingthis new
model. The Fab City project in Barcelona plans toopen several fab
labs, at least one in every district, over thenext few years. The
first one opened a year ago in the pros-perous district of Les
Corts. This was recently followed byanother in Ciutat Meridiana, an
area on the periphery of thecity based on a 1960s model of urban
development withhigh-rises and high levels of youth unemployment.
The thirdone is soon to be set up in Barceloneta.
Fab labs provide themeans to be inventive sothat anybody can
achieve
practically anything:getting results is what
counts.
Citizen science
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Dossier: past
50
The appearance of new tools and technology in our dailylives has
transformed what we learn and how we learn it.Up until the 1960s,
most work took place in computerlessoffices: the materials used in
universities were printedand the average business did its
accounting in notebooksall filed away on shelves. In the 1970s,
computers startedto be accessible for small and medium enterprises
andorganisations, necessitating new skills from employees.Finally,
in the 1980s, they became widely popular, reach-ing every
household. In the early 1990s, most schools inthe Western world
introduced them into their classroomsand libraries, and learning
how to use word processors orimage editing software began to form
part of any normalcurriculum. But as most of us know, this job
model (aperson in front of a computer) is now obsolete; the
finan-cial crisis of 2008 was maybe just the start of a
massivecollapse of the system.
It seems that the work first, rest later mantra hasbecome
completely invalid, as has the time is money equa-tion, which we
use to quantify and qualify what, how andwhen we do things. Most
unemployed people currently havetime but lack money; the meltdown
of the system is dueprecisely to the fact that nothing moves
without money, acondition that we try to cure with willpower. The
Internetgives us access to high quality courses on computer
science,neurology, physics and electronics as well as
simplercourses on Photoshop and programming languages such asC and
Python (Codeacademy, Kahn Academy). Learning isno longer linked to
a formal institution: anybody can get it,anywhere, at any time and
free of charge. In the same waythat we learn to use Word, Excel or
PowerPoint, we will
learn to do 3D modelling, operate a laser cutter andprogram a
microcontroller. These new skills will determineour power to
influence the way reality is shaped, as we willhave access to the
tools that do it.
Recently, a number of media organisations havereported on the
importance of learning to program or writecode. According to the
BBC, learning code could becompared to learning Latin two thousand
years ago; andfurthermore, to learn code is to forge a new way of
thinking.Not only coding, but also using moulding and software
scan-ning tools, and any other skill that allows us to connect
thephysical with the digital world, will become compulsorytopics in
schools, universities and curricula.
Technology and the human factorA once-shuttered warehouse is now
a state-of-the art labwhere new workers are mastering the 3D
printing that hasthe potential to revolutionise the way we make
almosteverything (Barak Obama. State of the Union Address,
12February 2013). President Obama was referring to 3D print-ing as
one of the main drivers of todays production model,but this view
may be somewhat simplistic. 3D printing isjust the tip of the
iceberg; personal and distributed manu-facturing is much more
complex and it could take yearsuntil we can print objects that are
fully functional.
Neil A. Gershenfeld said in his most recent article in
themagazine Foreign Affairs (2012) that the 3D printing fevercould
be compared to the media coverage of microwaves inthe 1950s, when
it was considered a substitute for the entirekitchen. Microwaves
improve our lives, but we still need allthe other kitchen utensils
to prepare more complex dishes.Fab labs can be compared to the
kitchen, and 3D printers tothe microwave. Instead of food, what is
made in these labsare new inventions at a speed that is faster than
that ofindustry and universities.
3D printing on its own may not change the world, but itis the
spark that sets off a much wider-reaching movement.We appear to be
facing a new era of history in which crafts-manship is given new
mediums and tools with which tocreate, collaborate and produce
technology. It seems thatthe human factor is the only thing that
has remained thesame, because most of the processes we talk about
todayhave formed part of a previous period of human history.What is
really changing are the means we use to carry outthese processes
and how we connect things that previouslyseemed incompatible.
The coming years will be a time of transition, crucial tothe
building of what will probably be known as the SecondRenaissance or
the High-Tech Middle Ages.
Towards a second Renaissance
Arts and crafts work uses new mediums and tools to create,
collaborate and produce technology.
One of the Digitalmanufacturing
machines from FabLab Barcelona, in
the Poblenou neighbourhood,available to the
Masters students ofthe Institutefor AdvancedArchitecture
for use in theirprojects.
Albert Armengol