Fabbers and the Internet —
     21^st-Century Product Fulfillment

     The Internet is a network of instant gratification, but it is limited to communicating information products. The Internet today cannot serve for delivery of physical products. If the Internet is used for ordering a physical product, that product is delivered by 20^th-century technologies of trucks and airplanes.

     In other words, the Internet today is all about bits, not atoms. Bits are the ones and zeroes of digital information. Atoms are the tiny units of physical materials. On the Internet today, there is no connection.

Figure 8.13. Vivid image of Internet distribution presented by a recent television commercial for UPS. One segment in the commercial shows a young boy ordering a football online and, after peering inside expectantly for a few minutes, catching the ball as it literally pops out of the family “fabber.” [Courtesy United Parcel Service]

     In the future, a new kind of Internet appliance will allow people to download the digital description of a product and have that product made immediately and automatically. This appliance is called a digital fabricator, or “fabber.” Fabbers use 21^st-century technology to translate digital product data into physical goods. The data can be transmitted over the Internet and the product “fabbed” at any local node. Fabbers are the link between old-fashioned, industrial-era manufacturing and the coming magic of nanotechnology.

     Digital fabbers transact the magic of producing physical products from digital information, of getting atoms from bits!

     A fabber is a three-dimensional printer. It renders 3-D digital data in solid material. On the Internet, with broadband access, a fabber is an appliance for recreating artifacts and delivering products directly into the user’s office or home. Fabbers transform the Internet from a network of information into a network for physical delivery of real products.

     Today’s fabbers are not yet up to “fabbing” just any product a customer may desire. Today’s fabbers work in simple plastics or low-strength metals and are limited in their building precision. But technology developments are underway that will bring about fabbers to rival the magic of the fictional Star Trek “replicator.” Tomorrow’s fabbers will make fully functional products with moving parts and integrated microcircuitry.

     While fabbing of consumer products in people’s homes is off in the future, today’s limited fabbers have become important in high-value, time-critical, business applications. For example,

• Automotive engineers fab concept models of new car designs. Months can be taken out of the development schedule by using fabbers to quickly validate design concepts.
• Aerospace engineers use fabbers to manufacture low-volume, flight-ready hardware for the Space Shuttle, Space Station, and fighter aircraft, eliminating the cost and delays of expensive tooling.
• Surgeons use fabbers to model patients’ bone structure before taking scalpel to skin. The ability to practice a complex procedure in advance on a plastic model has saved lives while making surgery go faster and cost less.
• Digital artists fab sculptures that cannot be made in any other way.

Figure 1. Although too expensive for routine use, digital fabbers have been found to pay for themselves quickly. Fabbers are used today by large automotive, medical, packaging, and other manufacturing companies, as well as in scientific and educational applications.

     As valuable as they are, today’s fabbers are big, expensive machines costing between $45,000 and $800,000. They typically use toxic chemicals or powders as feed materials. They are like the old mainframe computers of the 1960s that needed a temperature-controlled environment and specially trained operators.

     Despite their high cost and complexity, today’s fabbers have been widely accepted among the leading manufacturing companies of the world as an indispensable tool for new product development. Many companies that own fabbers today have experienced a return on their initial investment in less than one year.

     But the market for fabbers today is severely limited by three factors: speed, cost, and convenience. Today’s fabbers are too slow, too expensive, and too cumbersome to make their way out of the industrial laboratories where they are now used.

     The opportunity exists to create a whole new market for digital fabbers that grows the industry from its currently limited base to a much larger audience. This will be similar to the transition of computers from mainframes to PCs, with the faster speed, lower cost, and easier-to-use products penetrating into vast new markets.

Digital Manufacturing

Manual, Analog, and Digital Fabrication

     Ancient peoples manufactured their homes, weapons, and artifacts using hand tools to manipulate their materials in manual procedures. A knife was used to carve shapes in wood. Blocks of stone were assembled with mortar to make stable buildings. Potters formed globs of clay into beautiful vases.

     There are three basic ways to give shape to physical materials:

Figure 1.6. The three fundamental fabber processes.

• Subtractive. Starting with a solid block, material is removed a piece at a time to form the desired shape. Carving is the primary example of subtractive fabrication.
• Additive. Material is built up from smaller units into the intended shape. Masonry, the construction of walls and buildings from blocks of stone, is an additive process.
• Formative. Without either adding or removing anything, forces are applied to various points of a pliable material to give it a specific shape without adding or removing material. A potter shaping clay by pushing on it with her fingers is using formative fabrication.

     All manufacturing fabrication is done by one or a combination of these three basic techniques, whether we are talking about ancient, manual work or modern, automated processes.

     The first techniques for automating fabrication of physical shapes were analog processes that copied the shape of one object to form another. The primary example of analog fabrication is molding, in which a fluid or pliable material is poured or pushed into a cavity where it solidifies, taking the shape of the cavity. If a mold can be reused many times, it allows many copies of a product to be manufactured easily by creating the shape only once in the form of the original mold. In some cases a mold can be used only once, but the mold is made out of a material that is much easier to work with than the material used to make the final product in the mold.

     Analog fabrication allows the same categorization into three basic fabrication techniques. Molding is a formative analog process because it works by applying forces to the sides of a material without adding or removing material. There are also subtractive analog techniques that work like a pantograph, following the shape of an existing object to determine the pattern carved into a solid block of supplied material.

     Molding processes have created economies of scale that are a major reason for the huge advance in popular wealth since the industrial revolution.

Figure 1.17. Examples of additive fabbers. Clockwise from top left: SLA-250 by 3D Systems, Genisys by Stratasys, Z 402 by Z, ThermoJet by 3D Systems, ModelMaker by Sanders.

     Building on the history of manual and analog fabrication, digital fabrication works by first encoding the shape of the desired product in a numerical form, and then using this code to control the operation of sophisticated, automated equipment to give shape to the raw material. As with analog fabrication, digital fabrication can be either subtractive, additive, or formative. Even before the appearance of computers, techniques were discovered for digitizing the shape of helicopter rotors and using the resulting numeric code to control the machining of those shapes. This earliest form of digital fabrication was called “NC (numerically controlled) machining.” With the advent of computers, NC was followed by “CNC (computer-numerically controlled) machining,” in which the numerical code was stored and could be manipulated in a computer.

     In the late 20^th century the first additive digital fabricators, or fabbers, appeared. The leading additive fabber was and still is the stereolithography apparatus (SLA) by 3D Systems of Valencia, California. This highly sophisticated machine works by scanning a laser beam across a succession of layers of liquid photocuring resin. Where the laser beam strikes the resin, it turns solid, determining the shape of the growing object. Stereolithography is an automated and fine-scale version of the ancient technique of masonry, where the bricks in this case are tiny droplets of cured resin instead of stone blocks.

     In addition to stereolithography, numerous other techniques have surfaced for additive fabbing. For information on the variety of technologies and commercial fabbers, visit www.fabbers.com.

The Tools of Digital Manufacturing

Figure 1.13. The tools of digital manufacturing: CAD, scanners, fabbers, and the Internet.

     While fabbers play the central role, the full story of digital manufacturing is actually the interplay of four technologies:

• 3-D CAD (computer aided design) is the basic tool for creating and changing the design of a product. CAD programs today are quite technical tools, but at their most fundamental level they are just fancy 3-D drawing programs, the 3-D analog of programs like Corel Draw and PhotoShop. CAD has been getting much easier to use and much less expensive in recent years and this trend will continue. Also, new user interface tools, like the 3-D mouse, 3-D displays, and voice input will make these programs still easier. At the same time, those common drawing programs (Corel, PhotoShop, etc.) will add 3-D features and capabilities until CAD will cease to exist as a separate category and will merge with the category of 3-D graphical drawing programs.
• 3-D scanners are like the 3-D version of inexpensive scanners that people use to put photographs into their computers. But instead of just reading the 2-D contours of a picture or document, 3-D scanners digitize the whole 3-D shape of a solid object. Moreover, while some scanners are limited to reading the exterior shape, there are others that use X-rays or other techniques to scan inside and out, reading internal structure as well.
• Fabbers. As discussed above, a fabber (digital fabricator) is a “factory in a box” that makes things automatically from digital data. It takes a design created in 3-D CAD or captured by a 3-D scanner and turns it into physical material. Like a scanner, a fabber is a computer peripheral. It’s like a computer printer, but instead of printing an image on a flat sheet of paper, a fabber makes a real, 3-D product.
• The Internet ties together CAD computers, scanners, and fabbers around the world to form a globe-spanning mesh of communication that can transform a design in Philadelphia into a product in Paris, or take a statue in Bangladesh and produce a replica in Buenos Aires.

The Market for Fabbers

Figure 1.20. The fabber market. The 5,500 digital fabbers in use today are expensive, complex machines operated in centralized corporate facilities. But a million users of 3-D CAD today have everything they need to plug a fabber into their own computers, as soon as one is available they can afford. Millions more professional engineers and designers will find it necessary to use fabbers in the future to remain competitive. [Data from Wohlers Associates, Dataquest, and US Department of Commerce.]

     The established market for fabbers consists of those companies that have purchased the expensive and complex machines available today. According to Wohlers Associates, 5,500 fabbers have been sold around the world since the first SLA was shipped by 3D Systems in 1988. These products range in price from $45,000 to $800,000 and they require special facilities and a technically trained staff to operate them. They are generally installed in centralized facilities and serve multiple users. It is estimated that over 50,000 engineers and designers are generating most of the work of these 5,500 machines. Dramatic advantages have given many users payback times of under one year, and the market grew at over 40 percent per year through the early and mid-1990s. But the high capital and operating costs are holding back continued growth.

     The immediate market for fabbers is defined by the number of people using 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) software. 3-D CAD is the basic tool that drives demand for fabbers, just as word-processing software drives demand for computer printers. Users of 3-D CAD are fully equipped to use a fabber, if only there were a fabber they could afford. In the meantime, they are frustrated by needing to communicate their designs on flat computer screens or paper printouts. Estimates of the number of professional 3-D CAD users around the world vary from 800,000 to 1.3 million, as stated by market watchers such as Orr & Associates, Dataquest, and Wohlers Associates. The market has been growing rapidly and is expected to exceed three million users by 2005.

Figure 1.21. Fabber price vs. market penetration. The advent of fast, affordable, and easy-to-use fabbers will spur the acceptance of fabbers by greater and greater numbers of technical users, as well as a host of new users from nontechnical professions.

     The potential market for fabbers is still much greater than today’s 3-D CAD users. Manufacturing companies are under increasingly intense pressure to improve the product development process. Fabbers are their most important tool because fabbers allow manufacturers to iterate and test trial designs quickly and economically. Recent Dunn & Bradstreet figures show 396,000 hard-goods manufacturers in the United States alone, ranging from two-person garage operations to General Motors. They make automobiles, aircraft, computers, furniture, toys, medical equipment, consumer products, office equipment, and many other products totaling $3 trillion per year in value, according to the latest Economic Census by the US Department of Commerce. Around the world, companies in this category employ between five and ten million manufacturing engineers and product designers. Just as computers have become a common office tool for almost all professions today, in coming years engineers and designers will use fabbers on a day-to-day basis and will not be able to get by without them.

     Beyond the market of engineers and designers, a new class of fabber-capable 3-D graphics software has recently appeared that is suitable for use in nontechnical professions and by nonprofessionals. Already today, fabbers are in regular use by pioneering architects, scientists, surgeons, educators, sculptors, and others. Peddie Associates predicts the market for PC-based 3-D graphics software will grow to 79 million users, or 46 percent of the total number of PCs, by 2003. In the long term, mainstream 3-D graphics tools are likely to become standard in Microsoft Office and other major software suites. This will make fabbers accessible to virtually all users of computers, and will drive up the demand for fabbers dramatically.

Coming Capabilities

     A whole set of new opportunities arises when we fab products additively. In subtractive and formative fabrication we carve or mold an existing material supplied in bulk form. But in additive fabrication we are literally creating new material as we build up the product. There are several levels of new capabilities that arise in this way.

     Internal structure. At the simplest level, additive fabbing allows our processing to determine not only the external shape of the product, but the internal structure as well. Instead of specifying that we want a 3-centimeter-diameter sphere, for example, we can describe whether the sphere should be solid or hollow or be constructed of concentric rings of various materials. Perhaps we would like the interior to be a scaffolding-like web of struts or a foam of octahedral cavities. These kinds of details used to require a complex series of individual manufacturing steps if they were possible at all. Additive fabbing presents the possibility of producing such structures automatically with only the requirement of a valid digital description and a supply of the appropriate raw materials.

     Mechanisms and circuitry. If we can form internal structure, then that structure can include void regions that provide clearance for individual parts to slide over each other. This capability was first demonstrated with the “gear tree” fabbed on the Cubital Solider in the early 1990s. The gear tree is a structure of twelve interlocking gears, all fabbed simultaneously in place on their axles, that rotate in unison when any one of them is turned. In the future we can expect to see advanced fabbers making complex machines, such as clothes washers, computer disk drives, automobiles, and space vehicles. In addition to moving parts, products like these require integrated electronic microcircuitry, which will also be enabled as additive fabbing is advanced to working at finer and finer scales.

     Novel materials. What is a material? There are only 92 naturally occurring species of atoms in the world, plus about a dozen more man-made varieties. Different kinds of materials arise from combining these different atoms, first at the level of molecules, and then combining those molecules in a limitless variety of organizational schemes. New materials, such as plastics, intermetalics, and composites, were among the miracles of the 20^th century. But these materials were always made in bulk form. Additive fabbing gives us the opportunity to tailor material properties to individual geometrical locales of a product, to fab distinct materials side by side, and to create heretofore unknown materials by combining raw species in new ways. The resulting operational characteristics of 21^st-century products are literally unimaginable from where we stand today.

     Nanotechnology. The holy grail of digital manufacturing is Eric Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology, fabbing all manner of products literally atom-by-atom. No one can predict exactly when this dream will come true, but it is definitely on the horizon and approaching more and more rapidly with further advances in additive fabbing.

Impact

     The advent and proliferation of digital manufacturing will have as profound an impact on society and economics as any other technology in history, including the steam engine of the 19^th century and the automobile, telecommunications, and the computer of the 20^th. Here is a brief discussion of some of the primary ways fabbers and digital manufacturing will change the world.

Undoing the Industrial Revolution

     The industrial revolution led to the greatest growth in personal wealth in history. This came about from the economies of scale allowed by centralized manufacturing. Large factories expanded the standard of living and the wealth of vast numbers of people by making huge numbers of products inexpensively. Yet this wealth has come at the cost of people’s individuality. In our modern world we can have almost any product we can imagine, as long as it’s the same product that everybody else is imagining.

     Digital manufacturing will reverse the centralization of manufacturing and undo the sameness imposed by the industrial revolution. With small, inexpensive fabbers in offices and homes around the world, products will come to be manufactured directly in the places where they will be used. New economies of scale will come from the proliferation of fabber technology, the ready availability of fabber materials, and the Internet distribution of product data. People will be able to have whatever product they want, whether it’s the same product as a million other people or something completely different, something that no one has ever thought about before. Fabbers will be able to make the entire variety of products output by centralized factories today, plus a whole new class of previously impossible products.

     With digital manufacturing, the world will return to making products in the community. There will no longer be any reason to buy, for example, a car manufactured in Detroit, Stuttgart, or Tokyo, when instead we can have a car made to our individual specifications just as economically in a local facility.

Restructuring Labor and Employment

     Repeatedly throughout history, advances in technology have seemed to replace the need for people. The 14^th-century invention of the long bow, with its rapid firing rate of twelve per minute and its long range of some 200 yards, incited a papal ban because it was thought to allow a small band of malcontents to wreak the devastation once only possible with the force of a massive army. (The pope did not realize that his ban would create a market for gunpowder, already invented 100 years earlier but still little known at the time.) Four hundred years later the Luddites, a band of unemployed weavers, set fire to the steam-powered factories they blamed on taking their jobs. And in 1957, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn starred in Desk Set, a movie about a company whose introduction of a computer appeared to threaten the jobs of the clerical staff.

     While Desk Set was giving voice to the fears of many Americans about the loss of jobs to computers, IBM was making plans for a new generation of computers—the System/360—whose production would later require hiring 60,000 new employees to staff five new plants. The new positions were largely skilled or professional jobs under modern working conditions and paying top wages or salaries.

     Over and over again, the same pair of conditions has played out with the introduction of radical new technologies:

• People who define their work value by a specific skill or trade (whether the person was a 14^th-century swordsman, an 18^th-century weaver, or a 20^th-century office clerk) can indeed find their value eroded or completely wiped out by new technology.
• People who are willing to learn new skills and explore new opportunities are likely to find better paying, more pleasant, and more interesting work that has been created by the introduction of the new technology.

     Many skills and trades will be obsoleted by digital manufacturing. By the middle of the current century, there will be no mainstream market for injection molding toolmakers or investment casting pattern makers or for workers to man the assembly lines that the tooling and patterns feed today. In the much shorter term, sometime between 2005 and 2020, the profession of hand model making will disappear. Trained CAD operators who use only 2-D software will be unemployable by 2005. By 2010, even people who are trained in 3-D CAD will find no jobs as CAD operators because by that time 3-D graphics software will have become part of the normal office environment and everyone will be using it. In all manner of industries, the market for certain skills will evaporate, such as furniture maker, shoe last maker, Hollywood prop maker, etc. Entire sectors of less skilled support labor positions, such as warehouse worker and truck driver, will find their ranks progressively declining over the first five decades of the 21^st century.

     It is significant that these jobs will be disappearing during a time that the world is experiencing a dramatic rise in entrepreneurialism. More and more people are becoming interested in self-employment, and digital manufacturing creates whole new business opportunities for them. So we are likely to find that the disappearance of many jobs will lead not to people taking new types of jobs, but starting up new businesses. The operators of these new businesses will oftentimes use the tools of digital manufacturing to compete nimbly with their former larger-company employers.

     The modern concept of employment began with the industrial revolution. Prior to the advent of large factories, most unindentured people worked independently and sold the fruits of their labors in the marketplace. Digital manufacturing creates an opportunity for a modern version of that style of commerce to reign again. This is another way in which digital manufacturing can be seen to be undoing the effects of the industrial revolution.

The New Inventor Class

     Sometimes the use of a new technology can grow by a self-reinforcing chain reaction, analogous to a nuclear explosion. This happens when the use of the technology creates improvements in the very same technology. An excellent example of this phenomenon is found in the development of computer software.

     When Bill Gates wrote the first BASIC compiler for a microprocessor in the 1970s, he did it by simulating the behavior of the processor on a larger, faster computer. The new software he created then became a tool that allowed other computer enthusiasts at the time to create still more software. The same was true of the DOS and Windows operating systems developed by Gates’ company, Microsoft. Each version of these operating systems was an increasingly sophisticated tool that built on the foundation if its predecessor and became the platform for entire new generations of still more sophisticated software. Later, the Mosaic browser was built on the Windows platform and its descendant Netscape then became the platform for another explosion of creative development by legions of amateur and professional programmers writing Web sites around the world.

     Digital manufacturing will produce a similar chain reaction in the development of physical products. What computers do for the manipulation of information, fabbers do for the manipulation of physical material. A fabber is a platform for the development of new product designs, new mechanisms, and ultimately new processes for manipulating physical materials. When high school and college students gain access to fabbers, as Gates used the computers at Lakeside Prep School and Harvard University, we will begin to see an explosion in the invention of new product concepts on a scale never before seen in history. The individuals starting small businesses discussed in the previous section will offer new product designs for sale on the Internet, and many of these new inventions will become the foundations of still newer concepts. Some of these inventions will provide modest but sufficient livings to their originators; others will create astounding fortunes on the scale of the Internet billionaires of the 1990s. And many of these inventions will be improved and entirely new techniques for fabbers, which will become platforms for still more invention.

Changes in the Value Chain

     The impact of fabbers on the economy can be compared to the way the Internet has affected the value chain for distribution of products. In the industrial era, which we still live in but is coming to its end, goods pass through many hands on their way from where they are made to the person who is going to own them. The Internet eliminates the need for many of the intermediaries between manufacturer and customer. Manufacturers like Dell Computer have created a new paradigm of direct distribution, which not only reduces the cost and time to fulfill orders, but also allows for effective feedback between the manufacturer and customer. While the Internet makes it possible for manufacturers to deal directly with their customers, it also allows for intermediaries (Web portals) in cases where they can bring added value to the distribution.

Fig. 8. Impact of the Internet on the value chain of product distribution. The Internet eliminates the need for a train of intermediaries and enables a more direct connection between producer and consumer with the opportunity for enhanced interaction.

     Just as industrial distribution involves layers of intermediaries between the manufacturer and the customer, industrial production involves layers of processing between the concept and final realization of the product. Digital fabbers eliminate the need for the intermediate steps, allowing new concepts to be represented directly in solid material, which may be a prototype or the actual final product, depending on the requirements for materials, accuracy, strength, etc. In fact, the distinction between what is a prototype and what is a product becomes less meaningful because a particular design may be fabbed and used for a period of time, then redesigned and refabbed for further use. Then each iteration is both a useful product and also a prototype of the next iteration.

Fig. 9. Impact of digital fabbers on the value chain of manufacturing production. Digital technologies eliminate the need for a train of intermediate processes and enable a more direct route from concept to production with the opportunity for continuous iteration of product improvements.

     The fabber’s elimination of steps in the production of material goods, together with the resulting iterative loop that allows for constant improvement, is analogous to the Internet’s elimination of intermediaries in the distribution of products and the resulting improved communication between manufacturer and customer. The fabber’s impact on society and the economy will, for this and other reasons, be as profound as that of the Internet, if not more so.

First Feasible Space Habitation

     If the European settlers had had to take with them the lumber with which to build their homes and factories, the American colonies would never have been feasible. The United States was able to get started because the continent was carpeted with the most important raw material needed for construction: wood. The settlers took with them axes and saws and hammers and barrels of nails, the tools and supplementary materials that were used to shape the forests of America into buildings, towns, and ultimately a powerful nation. But it was critically important that the basic raw materials were readily on hand in the new location.

     People wonder why, after more than a dozen successful Apollo missions, NASA didn’t continue to send more people to the Moon and eventually build a colony and a civilization there. But the reason is easy to see. The Apollo missions were self-contained living stations, like the ships that carried the explorers and later the settlers from Europe to America. In order to advance beyond temporary missions, we would have needed to build permanent homes, laboratories, observatories, and the rest of a productive infrastructure.

     Ironically, however, just as America was rich in the raw materials needed for growth, the Moon also is blanketed with the most important raw materials needed for modern construction-not wood, but iron and aluminum. The lunar soil consists largely of a fine powder of pulverized rocks rich in these and other important minerals. The problem was that in 1969, as the world waited to see what NASA would do to carry on its extraterrestrial magic, there existed no analog for the European settlers’ axes and saws and hammers.

     NASA had no way to work the Lunar soil as a construction material without transporting huge smelters and mills that could transform those raw minerals and give them useful shape and structure. The transportation costs of such massive equipment were prohibitive, as were the costs of transporting adequate construction materials to build a colony. So the dream of inhabiting our celestial neighbor slipped through our fingers.

     The answer to the challenge of space habitation lies in digital manufacturing and fabbers. Just as the European settlers’ axes, saws, and hammers allowed them to shape the raw materials at hand, fabbers, properly designed and configured to work with the indigenous Lunar regolith, will take the soil and form it into blocks, pipes, and hand tools that will allow astronauts to build their homes, laboratories, observatories, and other structures needed to sustain life and initiate Lunar commerce.

     Digital manufacturing will not only transform the life and work of mankind on Earth. It is also the enabling technology that will for the first time make it possible for people to venture off the planet to expand our civilization into the rest of the universe.

Glossary

     Below are given definitions of terms used in this paper. For more detailed information on fabbers, visit www.fabbers.com.

     Fabber (“digital fabricator”) Internet appliance that translates digital data into physical products. Also known as additive fabricator, automated fabricator, 3-D printer, rapid prototyper, RP machine, desktop factory, personal factory, God machine.

• Industrial fabber Large, expensive fabber for use in lab or plant.
• Studio fabber Table-top fabber suitable for office use.
• Personal fabber Compact, inexpensive fabber suitable for home.

     Fab Verb meaning “to make in a fabber.”

     Rapid prototyping Using fabbers to make models of new product designs. The first big application of fabbers.

     Rapid tooling Using fabbers to make molds and dies. The second big application of fabbers.

     CAD Computer-aided design. A computer program used to design products.

     3-D CAD A special kind of CAD which allows the user to design in 3-D instead of making 2-D drawings of different views of the product. This is the essential tool needed to use a fabber.

     CAD ASP CAD application service provider. An Internet-based service that allows people to design products in their Web browser without having to own the CAD software.

References

Burns, Marshall, Automated Fabrication, Prentice Hall, 1993, www.Ennex.com/AutofabBook.asp.

Fu, Ping, Moving Toward Mass Customization-The Power of 3D Information Technology in Desktop Engineering, October 1999.

Gladieux, Sean; Hunt, Elaine; et. al., Direct Manufacturing by Fabber-A Sequence of RP-ML Discussions, www.fabbers.com/RP-ML/thread.asp?thread=mfg.

Stevenson, W. David, Mass Customization (or: Made in Boston-One at a Time), in Seeds: Online Environmental Strategy Ideas, 1998, www.StephensonStrategies.com.

     If you found this interesting, you’ll also want to read:

• The Origins and Direction of the Fabricator Revolution, the farthest-reaching discussion of future fabbers, including “accretive fabrication,” modeled on the growth of biological systems.
• The FAB–ulous Fabber!—How to Profit from the Next Technology Revolution, slides from an exciting presentation on how fabbers are used in industry, medicine, and business.