Fablabs and Fab10 Festival, Barcelona

Text: Bálint Botzheim

The history of the movement named fablab started in MIT Center for Bits and Atom laboratory which was founded in 2001. Its founder and manager is Professor Neil GershenFeld, and the slogan of the movement is as follows: „Give ordinary people the appropriate tools and they shall create most extraordinary things”. This motto is materialized in as much as anyone can use digital production technologies (e.g. CNC, 3D printer) in the fablab community lab which are otherwise rather expensive, and as such are only available to industrial users as a rule. Fablab combines them with the basic concepts of the do-it-yourself movement. The scale is variable, and ranges from the tiny little things (as big as jewels) to the prefabrication of buildings. Thanks to the precisely definable working model we may meet in fablabs all over the world. Several universities have their own digital workshops, which are equipped similarly to fablabs, but do not necessarily operate within the framework of an open system. Of them the most excellent ones are Barcelona, Delft, Zürich, Stuttgart, and the AA school. Based in Barcelona, IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) has also joined the fablab network. This is where Fab Academy is located: it was launched in cooperation with the MIT as a centre of the globally extended educational network. According to their credo, Planet Earth is a classroom, and fablabs are the classes where education takes place.