I just read FAB, by Neil Gershenfeld, and he talks in that book (and in a fantastic talk from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conferece that’s available on IT Conversations) about how fabrication — making things — is changing from a “take things away” approach to a “build from constituent parts” approach. His model for fabrication is biological systems such as cells, where the cell machinery gets instructions from DNA via RNA and uses the instructions to build useful things like proteins from basic building blocks like amino acids.
Stepping into the realm of the man-made, this type of capability is one of the key targets for nanotechnology — building tiny machines that can build other tiny machines.
Companies like Nanosys, Nanosolar, and Konarka are starting to do this, in the photovoltaic panel space. They are building their solar cells molecule by molecule, to have the precise properties they want.
Bathsheba Grossman is a wonderful artist who is working in a similar way, using a 3-d printer to create her sculptures from designs she makes on a computer.
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