Whoever you are, whatever tools and devices and skills you may have, whatever components and raw materials you have access to, there will be a set of things that you can make, and a set of things that you can’t.
And then you get a recipe.
The recipe tells you how to use what you already have available to build a tool or device that can help you fabricate more kinds of things. The recipe may be involve lots of steps, but each step is one that you can take from where you currently are. Once you have built this tool or device, it increases the set of things that you can make, and decreases the set of things that you have to source from elsewhere.
With the new device, you can follow even more recipes to make more devices.
There will still be components that are much more efficient to fabricate at larger scales, and there will be cases where increasing scale actually improves ecological impact and sustainability, but generally speaking fabricating what you need from what you have locally available is the way to go.
Another aspect of this landscape is reuse. There is a vast supply of commodity computer hardware that is one or more generation out of date and therefore considered a “throwaway” item by our current capitalist system. These devices are often readily available in second hand markets. So it is fortunate that these same devices that would be hard to fabricate ourselves are already available to reuse after being discarded.
All of this means that our recipes must be flexible, able to incorporate whatever you have to hand. For instance, a recipe for a CNC table machine might call for a drill or laser or other cutting tool, and should be able to accommodate different shapes and sizes of such tools. Or you might have a 3D printer recipe for which the default design has a main control board using an Arduino-class chip, but all you have available is an old thin client with a USB port. Or a random single board computer running an old version of Linux.
What does a recipe look like? My instinct is that we need to use a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable, and that can be compiled into instructional booklets and/or videos as well as sequences of instructions for automated devices to follow. A good recipe will contain modular subsystems that can be individually replaced or swapped for different options, depending on what is available or on what is needed. It will have a customizable parts list or bill of materials, allowing you to estimate cost and feasibility. It will have a list of prerequisite tools and/or skills that are needed for fabrication.
Most of all, a recipe must be able to be remixed as needed. Others must be able to alter your recipe, to improve it or tailor it to their own needs. So we’ll need computer design tools to help that to happen.
What recipe would you most like to see? What would it help you to build?
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