Neil Gershenfeld - Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution

Bhutans biggest constraint in promoting Gross National Happiness (GNH), our development philosophy, is its heavy reliance on imports at the end of long supply chains. Designing Reality shows that digital fabrication can overcome this constraint by allowing us to fabricate locally while thinking globally and being true to the principles of GNH. We look forward to Bhutan becoming not just a Fab City, but a Fab Country.

Tshering Tobgay, prime minister of Bhutan

Providing universal access to digital fabrication is one of the most important challenges and opportunities of our time. Designing Reality is a manual describing what it is, why it is important, and how to get there.

Congressman Bill Foster, PhD

In this mind-altering book, the Gershenfelds envision a future of making things thats not dominated by big factories and powerful companies. Instead, its centered around local innovators using powerful tools to design and build the realities they want. If this sounds good to you, heres the blueprint for making it happen.

Andrew McAfee, scientist, MIT, and coauthor of The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd

Ordinary people can now create objects with almost arbitrary levels of complexity, in large part because of the Gershenfelds insights and leadership. Designing Reality is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand this revolution and its implications.

Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and coauthor of The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd

Designing Reality is more than a deep look into the future of making things, its a sobering (yet entertaining) reflection on how we will need to design society to accommodate the wholesale changes that these technologies are certain to bring. The Gershenfelds have fused their talents to provide a clear picture of how digital materials will come to pass, while addressing the needed transformation in the social sciences if we are to avoid uneven distribution of the benefits. The book offers a highly probable account of a future where error-correcting self-assembly will allow anyone to make (almost) anything.

James A. Warren, physicist and director of the Materials Genome Program

Also by Neil Gershenfeld:

Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktopfrom Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (Basic Books, 2005)

The Physics of Information Technology (Cambridge University Press, 2000)

When Things Start to Think (Henry Holt and Co., 2000)

The Nature of Mathematical Modeling (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Time Series Preditions: Forcasting the Future and Understanding the Past (with Andeas S. Weingend) (Westview Press, 1993)

Also by Alan Gershenfeld:

Game Plan: The Insiders Guide to Breaking In and Succeeding in the Computer and Video Game Business (with Mark Loparo and Cecilla Barajes) (MacMillan, 2003)

Also by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld:

Inside the Ford-UAW Transformation: Pivotal Events in Valuing Work and Delivering Results (with Daniel Brooks and Martin Mulloy) (MIT Press, 2015)

Multinational Human Resource Management and the Law: Common Workplace Problems in Different Legal Environments (with Matt Finkin) (Edward Elgar, 2013)

The Human Side of Enterprise, by Douglas McGregor, annotated edition; updated and annotated by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld (McGraw Hill, 2006)

Valuable Disconnects in Organizational Learning Systems: Integrating Bold Visions and Harsh Realities (with Kevin Ford) (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Lean Enterprise Value: Insights from MITs Lean Aerospace Initiative (with Earll Murman, Tom Allen, Kirkor Bozdogan, Hugh McManus, Debbie Nightingale, Eric Rebentisch, Tom Shields, Fred Stahl, Myles Walton, Joyce Warmkessel, Stanley Weiss, and Sheila Widnall) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002)

Knowledge-Driven Work: Unexpected Lessons from Japanese and United States Work Practices (with Michio Nitta, Betty Barrett, Nejib Belhedi, Simon Chow, Takashi Inaba, Iwao Ishino, Wen-Jeng Lin, Michael Moore, William Mothersell, Jennifer Palthe, Shobha Ramanand, Mark Strolle, and Arthur Wheaton) (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Strategic Negotiations: A Theory of Change in Labor-Management Relations (with Richard Walton and Robert McKersie) (Harvard Business School Press, 1994)

For our parents, Gladys and Walter, who designed our reality

Imagine: The year is 1965. Gas is thirty-one cents per gallon. The Beatles have just released the album Help! The Watts riots are raging in Los Angeles. The Sound of Music is leading at the box office. Digital Equipment Corporation introduces the PDP-8, the first computer to use integrated circuit technology, for eighteen thousand dollars.

Youre sitting in a packed coffee shop in San Jose drinking a cup of joe (venti half-sweet no-foam caramel macchiatos have yet to be invented). The only open seats are at your table. A group enters, talking animatedly. Theyre all holding the latest issue of Electronics magazine and are clearly bubbling over with excitement. One of them asks if they can sit at your table. Sure, you say.

You listen in as the groupresearchers, it turns out, at a nearby semiconductor companytalk excitedly about an article in the magazine. What theyre saying seems completely far-fetched. Theyre talking about how, one day, computers will be small enough to fit in a pocket or be worn like a watch. How these personal computers will be as powerful as a mainframe computer. How, in the near future, all these computers will be connected, enabling anyone, anywhere, to access, manipulate, and share information with anyone, anywhere.