Fab9 Yokohama – Personal Fabrication as the Dawn of New Renaissance

Since 2007, Latin America has incorporated a set of emerging techniques promoted under three initiatives: a) from the experience of Master and Doctoral students who return to their home countries and promote their experience, b) from the external academic experience that goes towards the region, and c) from self-learning. These experiences are developed in an academic area, unlike Europe or the U.S., where they were promoted from and to professional practice, with varying degrees of implement...

In this paper the author outlines the theory, method, and preliminary findings of a six-week ethnographic study among the "makers" in FabLabs in Japan, concluded on August 16, 2013. The project aims to describe the "maker" community in order to show in ethnographic detail how new technical tools can create new social outcomes, particularly new pathways to innovation. The theoretical framework draws on Edmund Leach and Martin Ortlieb's conception of cultures as amalgams of customary practices,...

Digital fabrication is the core of a system that reveals the importance of experiential learning and making things with one's own hands and ideas. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), and leader of the international fab lab movement, is bringing a revolution to every individual by working to allow them "to design and produce tangible objects on demand, wherever and whenever they need them. Widespread access to these technologies will challenge traditional model...

To manufacture anything in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) requires the same creative "maker" sensibility that is valued throughout the fab lab community. This presentation will draw upon research in one of Africa's largest informal industrial communities to explore the past and future of grassroots manufacturing, and examine how fab labs might be integrated into these communities. With over 80,000 technical artisans, auto-mechanics, and purveyors of related supplies, Ghana's Suame industrial cluste...

Practices related to open source hardware and software, open design, and digital fabrication are increasingly affecting the way things are designed and produced. These issues are having an impact on the way technology-driven innovation is generated, and in particular on the process of designing innovative products and services, which designers and prospective designers are not completely aware of. Within this process, community-driven platforms and spaces dedicated to electronic prototyping a...

Since 2010 Happylab in Vienna is Austria's first and so far only Fab Lab. With currently about 1,000 regular users and a growth rate of 1 to 2 users daily the demand in the metropolitan region of Vienna is clearly visible. Key to this development is the combination of professional equipment and low-threshold access. Besides low cost this includes regular welcome evenings for first-timers as well as training courses for the machine usage. Our goal is to provide Fab Lab infrastructure throughou...

As digital design and fabrication is being pulled more and more into mainstream formal education, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive framework for inspiring, training and supporting educators in curriculum development, integration and alignment, and for assessments that measure mastery of acquired skills, cognitive development, and content knowledge. We, the Fab Foundation and the Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM (TIES), are working with innovators and educators who are acti...

FabLabs, hackerspaces, makerspaces or collective personal fabrication laboratories-workshops are multiplying in Europe and in the world with a common ideal of shared know-how. This paper presents the results of my first year of PhD. My research draws on Anthropology, Aesthetics and Design. It is based on an international field survey that explores how the history of those "third places" (Oldenburg, 1989) defines a new technical and social paradigm. In order to study as closely as possible how...

The internet has become a globally accessible space for people to create and innovate together, regardless of their physical location, geographical boundaries or cultural backgrounds. More importantly, it is proving to be a suitable context for open collaboration on a global scale. However, even in this seemingly ideal context, designing and the implementation of design solutions in the open source paradigm remains challenging. This paradigm does not provide organizational structures that sup...

The studied layout of successful creative spaces in design practices, artist studios, fabrication spaces, and corporate ideation spaces have led us to the following hypothesis: Gathering the tools for active ideation and fabrication in a single place enhances the product outcome of a design process. This hypothesis will be tested in a Space dedicated to Innovation and Creativity, built at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The design of this space will stem from further investigation of on bo...

Practices related to open source hardware and software, open design, and digital fabrication are increasingly affecting the way things are designed and produced. These issues are having an impact on the way technology-driven innovation is generated, and in particular on the process of designing innovative products and services, which designers and prospective designers are not completely aware of. Within this process, community-driven platforms and spaces dedicated to electronic prototyping a...

Digital fabrication machines such as laser cutters, milling machines and 3D printers are now receiving phenomenal attention. This paper positions the Social Fabrication movement within the theoretical framework of the Information Society using the InfoSocionomics framework developed by Shumpei Kumon. The authors argue that the 'social' dimension of digital technology has become the key driving factor in recent years and that the movement is better characterized as 'Social Fabrication' rather ...

The project to developed egg incubator is undertaken at Vigyan ashram fab lab. The lab used traditional fabrication tools and tools for digital fabrication to make this egg incubator. This is designed and developed mainly by rural youth dropped out of the school. It demonstrates, how if proper tools and environment is provided. It empowers individual to solve their own problems. Modern poultry industry is run by big corporate with big hatcheries of huge capacities. It results in exploitation ...

In this presentation, we would like to examine the role of mechanical reproduction in music at the age of personal fabrication by taking an example from our recent project "cutting record - a record without (or with) prior acoustic information". In 1923, László Moholy-Nagy, master at the bauhaus, proposed to produce a record without prior acoustic information. After nine decades, we realized the idea with a help of standard vector graphics software (e.g. Adobe Illustrator) and cutting machine...

Digital fabrication tools such as 3D printers and laser cutters, and electronic prototyping platforms such as the Arduino have recently emerged and numerous physical works such as chairs and desks or electronic devices have been proposed. For many such items, the source code, parts, tools, blueprints, circuit diagrams and construction logs are published openly in a manner that resembles the culture of open source software on the Web. gitFAB is a web service that aims to facilitate duplicating...

Fab Labs aim for projects to be shared within the global network. Yet the number of shared projects is small for various reasons – sharing is the responsibility of individual users who may encounter various barriers to sharing, and the rapid growth of the network rendered informal ways of sharing ineffective. Creating a central repository has failed on several occasions. Fab Labs often choose their own website as the primary repository for their project documentation, also known as FabMoments...

Arte Programmata (Programmed Art) is the definition given to the works of a number of Italian artists active during the early 1960s who produced artworks based on kinetic and optical effects. The definition was introduced by Umberto Eco in 1962 for an exhibition held at the Olivetti Showroom in Milan. Exhibitions of artworks from interactive art pioneers feature issues related to the reenactment of old technologies, with maintenance representing a big challenge to preservation and haecceity. ...