Fab23 Bhutan – Designing Resilient Futures

MINCETUR Lab is a laboratory created by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism of Peru (MINCETUR) to promote innovation, creativity, and sustainability in the tourism sector through the use of digital technologies, public innovation, creative economy, and science and technology. The lab aims to foster collaboration among stakeholders in the tourism industry, close digital gaps in the sector, leverage Peru's cultural and creative assets, and promote research, development, and innovation...

The paper describes the potential benefits of developing larger urban citizen oriented projects as a series of smaller workshops in cooperation with local maker spaces and FabLab initiatives. The approach is demonstrated in a case study of the Potulná Alej (PA) project developed by the Maker Institute (MI), a Prague based non-profit maker organization. Evolution and benefits of schemes have changed in maker spaces (MS) and FabLabs (FL). Examples of the definition of MS and its mixed missions...

How will Bhutan develop its grassroots green hydrogen research capacity without creating material dependencies from external trade partners? Learning from recent experiments in Indonesia, this paper proposes a low-cost, local, inclusive roadmap with specific design and engineering principles for the constitutional monarchy.

Re:public Inc. has been leading the Satsuma Future Commons (SFC) project in Satsumasendai City since 2019, aiming to co-create sustainable futures for cities through cross-sector collaboration based on Circular Design principles. Our BambooScape project focuses on repurposing abandoned bamboo forests and creating new structures using bamboo resources. This paper explores the importance of the project in fostering a sustainable city. Japan has seen a significant growth of bamboo forests, posin...

The present study evaluates post-pandemic European makerspaces and FabLabs. The aim is to analyse the spaces and the main actors, to find out the conditions of operation and technological adaptation that currently exist. By being closer to the users, managers, and technicians, we know the proposals they make and recognise their needs. Their technological contributions enable the prototyping of ideas and ventures, or facilitate and improve access to technology for professionals, makers, and ot...

We live surrounded by electronic devices of increasing complexity, usually having short lifetime and high environmental impact. How can we, from fablabs, contribute to reduce this waste of resources? What role should we play in such a “resource-consuming” environment? We describe how within a collaborative environment and with few technological resources, many electronic devices (or furniture, or clothing, or vehicles) can be repaired, improved, and reused. We describe what we co...

Living architecture offers a means to make at architectural scale without the environmental impact of conventional construction. Along lightweight, temporary scaffolding structures, trees are guided into form. Prominent examples are the living root bridges in Meghalaya, India, just South of Bhutan. During monsoon times, under the world’s heaviest rainfall, these bridges transform from constructions of deadwood into living organisms. This paper advocates for the establishment of dedicat...

This paper examines the experience of integrating electronic circuit design and fabrication to support the creation of ecologically relevant design propositions in an undergraduate design studio. The authors describe the implementation of a new curriculum for a nine weeks course, developed as a collaboration between Fablab Shanghai and the Ecology and Cultures Innovation Lab of the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University. They explain how they used hands-on tutorials and experie...

This paper describes a pilot design process for STEM education, going beyond the traditional STEM focus to incorporate digital fabrication, disciplinary and transversal skills, project-based learning pedagogy, an Understanding by Design curriculum development process, and cross-school capstone approach for elementary school students. The approach provides a holistic, integrated approach to STEM education, incorporating communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-s...

National governments and international donors fund challenge competitions to foster and guide innovation, but there is little evidence on the economic return to such investments in entrepreneurship and R&D. We conduct an ex-ante benefit-cost analysis to project the economic return on the 2023 Fab Bhutan Challenge. On the Challenge benefits side of the analysis, we draw from scientific studies covering five topics: crop yield improvements from climate adaptation (for Challenge 1 in Sarpang...

This year is the National Tsing Hua University's anniversary, our FAB LAB FBI team used Digital Fabrication to develop a “Light Stick” to celebrate Tsing Hua's birthday. We held the activity “How Tsing Hua Can You Be?” Every student could hold a Light Stick to design a slogan representing Tsing Hua's spirit. This system as an “Air Printer” that can text or patterns in the air. The Light Stick utilizes the Persistence of Vision, combining Interne...