"fab labs" (either fabulous, or fabrication, as you wish).

Edge: PERSONAL FABRICATION: A TALK WITH NEIL GERSHENFELD: "In one of these labs in rural India they're working on technology for agriculture. Their livelihood depends on diesel engines, but they don't have a way to set the timing. The instrument used in your corner garage to do that costs too much, there is no supply chain to bring it to rural India, and it wouldn't work in the field anyway. So, they're working on a little microcontroller sensor device that can watch the flywheel going by and figure out when fuel is coming in. Another project aimed a $50 Webcam at a diffraction grating to do chemical spectroscopy in order to figure out when milk's going bad, when it's been diluted, and how the farmers should be fairly paid. Another fab lab is in the northeast of India, where one of the few jobs that women can do is Chikan embroidery. The patterns are limited by the need to stamp them with wooden blocks that are hard to make and modify; they're now using the lab to make 3D scans of old blocks and 3D machine new ones."

This is fantastic stuff, simple practical and open. The notion of personal fabrication is set for huge growth. Chatting recently with a colleague who predated punch cards he referred to his children who have no fear of technology and just get on with it, making things work together rather than figuring out why they work. As engineers we often need to fully understand how something 'hangs together' before we will trust it, but our inability to command or grasp the variety of fields that technology touches now becomes a limitation. We simply can't understand everything! But like our children we need to just get on with it, make things work and get to grips with the new literacy that is cheap open commodity hardware and software.

The work of the fab labs will have fabulous effects in developing countries who simply see possibilities and don't' fully need to understand the whole history or background design, just the principals. In stead of asking "How did that work", they will ask "How can I make it work for me".