In 1998, Gershenfeld started a class at MIT called "How to make anything". Gershenfeld wanted to introduce expensive, industrial-size machines to the technical students. However, this class attracted a lot of students from various backgrounds: artists, architects, designers, students without any technical background. In his interview to CNN, Gershenfeld said that "the students... were answering a question I didn't ask, which is: What is this stuff good for? And the answer is: Not to make what you can buy in stores, but to make what you can't buy in stores. It's to personalise fabrication". Gershenfeld believes that this is the beginning of a new revolution: digital revolution in fabrication that will allow people to fabricate things, machines on demand. Gershenfeld has presented his course on "How to make anything" at the Association of Professional Model Makers 2010 Conference. This class later has led Gershenfeld to create Fab lab in collaboration with Bakhtiar Mikhak at MIT. Gershenfeld feels very passionate about this project, as he believes that teaching kids how to use technology and create it themselves will empower the future generations to become more independent and create technology that each individual community needs, not a technology that is currently available on the market. Fab labs have spread around the world, having been established in the remotest of places and countries. In his interview with Discover magazine on the question what personal fabrication might be useful for, Gershenfeld said, "There is a surprising need for emergent technologies in many of the least developed places on the planet. While our needs might be fairly well met, there are billions of people on the planet whose needs are not. Their problems don't need incremental tweaks in current technology, but a revolution". As well as "How to make anything" class, Gershenfeld has started teaching the following classes: "How To Make Something That Makes Anything", "The Physics of Information Technology", "The Nature of Mathematical Modeling". Gershenfeld has been a keynote speaker at the Congress of Science and Technology Leaders.
Research
Neil Gershenfeld and his students have done an extensive amount of research. His research was published in Science as well as in The American Physical Society journal. Amongst many is the research on Experimental Implementation of Fast Quantum Searching, Microfluidic Bubble Logic research, Physical one-way functions.
