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Michael Stacey
The FAB LAB Network
A Global Platform for Digital Invention,
Education and Entrepreneurship
Can small manufacturing labs, with the tools and computing power to make
almost anything, infuse new ideas and possibilities into global solution networks
and give a boost to local entrepreneurship and job creation? That’s exactly what a
network of “Fab Labs” is aspiring to do by providing access to powerful manufac-
turing tools—including laser cutters, milling machines, and 3-D printers—to an
increasingly broad range of users at educational institutions and local community
centers around the world. Incubated at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA),
the Fab Lab Network now consists of 270 independent manufacturing centers in
70 countries around the world.
IDEA IN BRIEF
Fab Labs is a growing global network of over 200 small manufacturing workshops
that are bringing together computing power and relatively simple tools to make
nearly anything. Individual Fab Labs are open to a wider array of users than has
traditionally been the case in industrial design or even DIY communities, permitiendo
for a mix of entrepreneurial, investigación, and educational activities. By sharing a core
set of capabilities, projects started in one Fab Lab can be continued and modified
in others.
Fab Labs can be used to give entrepreneurs a low-cost space for designing and
building prototypes. They can be spaces where students engage in design and
technology education. And they can be centers of community-driven innovation,
where problems that governments and corporations have not addressed can be
solved using local materials—and those solutions can later be shared with similar
communities around the world.
Although it is a technology-driven platform network (as defined by the Global
Solution Networks Taxonomy), governance of Fab Labs is still extremely loose.1
Michael Stacey is a Research Assistant at the Social Research and Demonstration
Corporation in Toronto. He holds graduate degrees in Social and Political Thought
(York University) and Public Policy (universidad de toronto). His current research
focus is evidence-based education policy.
© 2014 Michael Stacey
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Some of the tools that make up a Fab Lab
Fuente: http://cba.mit.edu/media/pictures.html
Achieving its full potential may require facilitating collaboration across different
labs and types of users.
A DISTRIBUTED ENTREPRENEURSHIP REVOLUTION
It is now more than five years since the 2008-2009 economic crisis, which trig-
gered a global recession. The recovery—especially in Europe and most especially
for young people—has not been encouraging. Some of the effects—uncertainty in
the labor market and worsening outcomes for low-skilled workers—reflect trends
that have been developing over the past few decades, such as skill-based techno-
logical change, an increasingly global labor market, etc.. These are structural
changes in the economy. We have entered a more entrepreneurial world that
moves at an accelerating pace, and no industry or region can be sheltered from the
vicissitudes of creative destruction brought on by technology and globalization.
Much of this is to be celebrated, por supuesto, as technological improvements
allow us all to do more with less, and rapid economic growth in emerging markets
has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty.2 Even for those individuals
and communities that have been dislocated by economic and technological
cambiar, there are glimmers of hope and opportunity. En efecto, some of the same
forces currently buffeting labor markets—such as technological change in manu-
facturing and communications—also offer new possibilities to ameliorate the neg-
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The FAB LAB Network
ative impacts of technology and globalization. Fab Labs is one such example: a
global network of manufacturing laboratories, outfitted with tools that provide
manufacturing capabilities, which a generation ago would have taken a whole fac-
tory to house, and several kinds of engineering expertise to operate. A Fab Labs
tool set includes a laser cutter, a numerically controlled milling machine, a sign
cutter, a 3-D printer, and programming tools selected for relative ease of use—as
opposed to the most advanced technology. Fab Labs seek to combine entrepre-
neurial innovation, investigación, and education under a single roof.3
One application for Fab Labs is providing the tools for entrepreneurs (in both
developed and developing nations) to prototype their ideas at radically reduced
costos. While the Fab Lab facilities cannot produce at the scale that might eventu-
ally be optimal to satisfy demand, the advantage to entrepreneurs is in nimble
adaptability and simplicity. The collaborative and open-source ethos of Fab Labs
is meant to ensure that, while creators can retain rights to the inventions, as much
of the process as possible is shared so that others can build on and learn from the
trabajar.
With openness and collaboration in education as part of their mandate, Fab
Labs also create new possibilities in STEM (ciencia, tecnología, engineering, y
matemáticas) education in diverse contexts—from universities, high schools and
libraries, to grassroots community-driven labs. In doing so, another significant
structural economic challenge is addressed: the fact that 21st century jobs require
new skills and often continual upgrading of skills by experienced workers.
FAB LABS AS A GLOBAL SOLUTION NETWORK
El 270 Fab Labs around the world are representative of a surge in distributed
manufacturing capability with such obvious and tremendous potential that
attempts to evaluate it are bound to appear narrow.4 The network is a hybrid. Como
a model for personal manufacturing labs, it offers a platform, and it is also a
knowledge network (in that it builds on shared learning) and an operational and
delivery network (in that education has been part of its work since its inception).
Fab Labs are individually useful, but what makes them a promising Global
Solution Network is that their capabilities—and ultimately their impact on indi-
viduals, communities, and companies—are multiplied by collaboration and
shared innovation. Projects initiated at one Fab Lab can be adopted, modified for
local conditions, and improved upon by other nodes in the network. One such
example is the work that the House of Natural Fiber (HONF), a collaborative arts
space in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, is undertaking with Fab Lab Amsterdam. HONF
has worked for over a decade doing arts and empowerment workshops with reha-
bilitation patients. Through this work, the need for lower cost leg prosthetics
among poor communities was identified. Representatives from Fab Lab
Amsterdam visited HONF for an international media art fair that was held in
2008, and the idea of collaborating on low-cost prosthetics using locally available
materiales (en este caso, bamboo) was initiated.5 A Fab Lab specifically oriented to
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HONF low-cost prosthesis
Fuente: http://waag.org/en/project/fablab-yogyakarta-indonesia
prosthetics was established at HONF and the resulting project has combined
knowledge from HONF’s rehab clients, designers in both Yogyakarta and
Ámsterdam, and Kamerorthopdie, a Dutch prosthetics manufacturer.6
While the 270 individual Fab Labs have considerable autonomy, the Fab
Foundation at MIT plays a coordinating role and provides services that the inde-
pendent Fab Labs cannot obtain or afford on their own. Por ejemplo, the Fab
Foundation provides training to practitioners and helps with the set-up of new
labs. It also helps source hard-to-find manufacturing materials and maintains a
list of standards that individual Fab Labs are expected to meet in order to be
included in the network. These requirements are fairly minimal: a common core
set of capabilities, public access to the facility, following and signing the Fab Lab
Charter, and participating in the knowledge-sharing community of the global Fab
Lab network in some fashion (p.ej., collaborating on projects with other labs or
attending the annual Fab Lab Meeting).7
The Fab Foundation grew out of the MIT CBA—the site of the original Fab
Lab, and is closely tied to the people who helped the first Fab Lab branch out from
CON. As the number of grassroots Fab Labs grows, centrally coordinating their
efforts becomes more difficult but may occasionally be necessary. There does not
yet seem to be a consensus about how to strike the balance between top-down uni-
formity and anarchic diversity.
Broadly, there are two main areas where Fab Labs has the potential to solve
global problems. Primero, it provides access to spaces, herramientas, and expertise for entre-
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The FAB LAB Network
Fab Labs Amsterdam
Fuente: Waag Society, Arne Kuilman, 2012
preneurs to learn new techniques, collaboratively design, and quickly prototype
innovaciones. In many cases the problems that Fab Labs focuses on are in fact high-
ly localized and address needs that governments or markets have overlooked.
Once developed, sin embargo, they are often adaptable to markets and communities
around the globe. By sharing information across the network, tinkerers and users
around the world can adapt these innovations to their own local circumstances.
Por ejemplo, Fab Labs located in Norway, Afganistán, and Kenya contributed to
the development of a powerful open source tool for amplifying the reach of Wi-Fi
networks in developing countries.
Segundo, as the importance of having STEM-related (sometimes including
“arts” to make STEAM-related) human capital grows, Fab Labs represent a new
possibility for letting learners of all ages hone their technological skills. The ability
to turn ideas into useful goods is going to expand and deepen in the next few
décadas, and Fab Labs allow a head start on these opportunities, encouraging peo-
ple who might never have thought of themselves as tinkerers or makers before.
These two functions are overlapping and mutually reinforcing. Young people
who receive training in what personal fabrication can do are the most likely to
continue experimenting as they grow older. We examine these principle strengths
and the interactions between them in greater detail below.
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Michael Stacey
BITS AND ATOMS:
THE DIVIDE BETWEEN SHOP CLASS AND MATH CLASS
MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld never felt comfortable with the division of labor
in secondary and postsecondary education systems. He describes his experience of
being pushed away from shop class toward math classes in high school because he
was obviously intellectually gifted. “By the time I went to school, college-bound
kids like me had to sit in rather sterile classrooms, while the kids taking up trades
got to go to a vocational school that had all the cool stuff.”8 Writing about the rise
of personal manufacturing leading to Fab Labs, he suggests that as far back as the
Renacimiento, the educational world has been trapped in a rigid dichotomy between
the academic liberal arts and what might be called the “illiberal” arts of tinkering
and manufacturing.9 He thinks this division has been perpetuated at specific mod-
ern historical junctures, such as the birth of computer science as an academic dis-
cipline in the 1950s, which trapped computer programming in the precise world
of software, distant from the messiness of reality. When Gershenfeld founded
MIT’s CBA in 2001, it was his intention to muddy the waters between software,
información, and bits, Por un lado, and hardware, manufacturing, and atoms,
en el otro.
The realization that manufacturing labs could be useful to a surprising range
of people and projects came out of a course that Gershenfeld taught at the CBA,
titled provocatively, How to Make (Almost) Anything.10 When that course was
first offered, two unexpected things happened that have been definitive for the
direction that Fab Labs has taken. Primero, the course attracted hundreds of would-
be students—far beyond the small group of researchers Gershenfeld expected
would be interested in the tools at the CBA. Segundo, the projects people had in
mind were things that Gershenfeld had never imagined. “One made an alarm
clock that the groggy owner would have to wrestle with to prove that he or she was
awake. Another made a dress fitted with sensors and motorized spine-like struc-
tures that could defend the wearer’s personal space.”11 Taking these lessons to
corazón, Gershenfeld and a colleague decided to take the CBA’s tools out of the acad-
emy and into inner-city Boston. The result was the second Fab Lab, housed at the
South End Technology Center (SETC, a facility run by Mel King, an activist expe-
rienced in bringing technology to youth in underserved communities). At a cost
of around $50,000 for equipment and $20,000 for materials, they were able to
deliver manufacturing capabilities that would previously have been prohibitively
expensive into the hands of inner city students, who took to the machines just as
enthusiastically as the grad students.
Demand and serendipity pushed the project further still. Some of the girls
trained at the SETC came from Boston’s Ghanaian immigrant community. El
Ghanaian families saw the possibilities inherent in a Fab Lab and, through the ties
of their diaspora, pushed for a Fab Lab in Ghana.
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The FAB LAB Network
Fab Lab Boston: Sign built by student at South End Technology Center
Fuente: http://cba.mit.edu/media/pictures.html
NEW CONTEXTS FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION
As a result of the Boston inner-city experiment, the earliest Fab Labs facility out-
side MIT was established at the Takoradi Technical Institute in Ghana. Además
to holding classes for students of the institute, the Takoradi Fab Lab followed the
principles of the Fab charter and was opened to a wide range of public users, “from
street children to tribal chiefs.”12 Amy Sun, part of the team that implemented Fab
Lab in that Ghanaian location, noted that children were particularly interested in
learning how to use the tools available and in making products that they had envi-
sioned; she saw surprising significance in the children’s desire to make things as
simple as fluorescent pink keychains. Despite the fact that most of the students
had little ability with computers when they started, the children were dedicated to
aprendiendo. “Kids aren’t afraid to be wrong. Como resultado, by the time I left, Yo tenía 7- y
8-year-olds cutting and stuffing circuit boards and sort of understanding assembly
code and how to manipulate it.”13 This is illustrative of some of the educational
possibilities of Fab Labs, which are being explored by primary schools, comunidad
centros, and libraries around the world.
Professor Paulo Blikstein, Universidad Stanford, has been responsible for much
of the work in bringing Fab Labs into K-12 education in the U.S., trying to make
up for the deficiencies experienced by the young Gershenfeld in his frustrated
learning experience. He writes that the United States National Research Council
has been concerned about the disconnect between modern technology and K-12
public education in the U.S. since at least 1999.14 His work is grounded in peda-
gogical theory and developmental psychology dating back to the attempts by Jean
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Michael Stacey
Piaget and Seymour Papert to bring the Logo programming language to school-
children in the 1960s. Blikstein argues that children learn particularly well when
they build things that can be shared with others, bringing ideas into a public and
collaborative space—rather than privately examining them inside their own
heads.15
En 2008, as the Fab Lab network was gaining momentum, Blikstein launched
the FabLab@School project. Believing that schools needed to give manufacturing
and design education a space on par with athletics offerings, he worked to design
Fab Labs for schools that would break down preconceived notions of what and,
perhaps more importantly, who was involved in the traditional shop space. Says
Blikstein:
I realized that digital fabrication had the potential to be the ultimate con-
struction kit, a disruptive place in schools where students could safely
make, build, and share their creations. I designed those spaces to be
inviting and gender-neutral, in order to attract both the high-end engi-
neering types, but also students who just wanted to try a project with
tecnología, or enhance something that they were already doing with dig-
ital fabrication.16
The lack of facilities of this sort contributes to the need for what researchers
call the “STEM Pipeline.” Blikstein points out that of 3.7 million children begin-
ning elementary school in the U.S. each year, by 7th grade only 730,000 of them are
expressing an interest in science and technology, y solo 67,000 go on to achieve
engineering degrees.17 He cites recent studies arguing that the most important pre-
dictor of whether a student will go on to a career in a STEM field is actually
declared interest in science and technology in 8th grade.18 In spite of the fact that
social prestige and salaries in these fields are already very high, Blikstein says that
“we are running out of incentives to make people go into those careers and one of
the reasons is that it’s terribly boring to study those things.”19
Blikstein’s vision is being put into practice through the FabLab@School pro-
gram, being undertaken by the Transformative Technologies Learning Lab at
Stanford University.20 There are now five FabLab@School sites, three in Palo Alto,
one in Russia, and one in Thailand,, with future schools planned for Melbourne,
Australia and Mexico City.21 22 The schools are being used to conduct empirical
studies into the relative effectiveness of the FabLab@School initiative; early studies
have shown that hands-on, discovery-based learning has considerable positive
effects.23
PERSONAL MANUFACTURING AND
THE POSTINDUSTRIAL ENTREPRENEUR
Peter Troxler, president of the International Fab Lab Association, thinks that Fab
Labs are more important as examples of collaborative organizations than as tech-
nological bellwethers. He sees in them an explicit challenge to industrial-era hier-
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The FAB LAB Network
archical enterprise and the emergence of a new era of collaborative entrepreneur-
barco. Describing the decline of the industrial manufacturing model, Troxler notes
the mention of trends in the opposite direction. “Suddenly the term ‘re-shoring’ is
appearing in business books and lingo, companies experience that certain manu-
facturing activities that used to be off-shored to China, Taiwán, Korea, etc., son
being moved back to the U.S., Reino Unido, and all over Europe.” Troxler sees this as con-
nected to the “growth of very small companies consisting of only a few or only one
person.”24 Since Fab Labs allow people to create prototypes of inventions either on
their own or in collaboration, they are a prime example of ways in which some
manufacturing functions might be reclaimed for entrepreneurs by regions that
have seen industrial operations come and go.
It seems particularly appropriate that a Fab Lab specifically dedicated to entre-
preneurship should be located in Manchester, England—one of the cities where
modern industrial manufacturing was born, and one that has struggled to find an
identity as globalization has shifted large-scale manufacturing operations to lower
cost locations. The Manufacturing Institute, a charity dedicated to supporting
renewed manufacturing in the UK, funds the Manchester Fab Lab. They see Fab
Labs as making the connection between education and entrepreneurship. Eddie
Kirkby of the Manufacturing Institute describes the trajectory: “We’re trying to
build a ladder that takes people from a very young age, keeps them engaged as they
go through, and develops them into young entrepreneurs who can start new busi-
nesses.”25 Thus far, the greatest success of Fab Lab Manchester has been the inven-
ción, manufacture, and funding (through Kickstarter) of the Nifty Minidrive, a
storage device that fits into the SD slot of an Apple Laptop, agregando 64 GB of capac-
ity.26
A PLATFORM ALLOWING INVENTORS
TO RESPOND TO VERY LOCAL NEEDS
One of the things that surprised Gershenfeld about the initial projects undertaken
by his “How to Make (Almost) Anything” students has remained consistent as Fab
Labs have expanded around the world: the projects are highly individualized.
What Gershenfeld describes as the “killer app” of personal manufacturing is the
ability to design and build products for a market of one.27 While this aspect of what
Fab Labs can accomplish is unlikely to create the next billion-dollar innovation or
solve a global problem on its own, it is part of an encouraging technological trend
that has been growing for decades: the ability of consumers to become active par-
ticipants in creating the products they use. This is something Don Tapscott and
Anthony Williams addressed in their book, Wikinomics. They called it the rise of
the “prosumer.”28 The capabilities that serve a market of one can also be harnessed
to serve the market of a family, a neighborhood, or a village—and meet needs that
were unseen or deemed unprofitable by existing businesses.
In some ways the developing world is a more receptive location for personal
manufacturing than advanced economies; the divide between users, manufactur-
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Michael Stacey
ers, and tinkerers has never been well established in places where throwing out
and replacing broken machines was not a viable economic option. Gershenfeld
tells the story of S. S. Kalbeg, a food technologist PhD from Mumbai, who founded
Vigyan Ashram—a school in western India built on the principle of learning by
doing—which became the site of India’s first Fab Lab. Gershenfeld notes that, para
Kalbeg, growing up in a Mumbai suburb “there were no services—if his family
wanted electricity, or running water, or sewers, they had to provide these things
for themselves, which they did. He grew up not only learning how to build such
systems but also seeing engineering in the home as an opportunity rather than an
obstacle. If he didn’t like something, he fixed or improved it.”29 Coincidentally,
Kalbag had a similar experience to Gershenfeld’s when he began to succeed in
conventional schooling—he was frustrated by the fact that he seemed to be learn-
ing more practical knowledge at home, while at school he was never allowed the
chance to use his hands.
Vigyan Ashram became a proto-Fab Lab, offering private, low-cost technical
education to students who had dropped out of public schools, and also a home for
the businesses these same students would start as their innovations became ready
for the local market. Some of their initial innovations were economically priced
ground-resistance meters—admittedly designed by copying an existing product—
used to find water, as well as “Mechbulls”—tractors made from spare Jeep parts.30
When Gershenfeld visited the school in 2001, he found a place of bustling innova-
ción, but one where ambition and ability were held back by a lack of access to tools.
The additional capabilities Fab Lab has brought to Vigyan Ashram have been used
to design products that are cheaper and more basic than what is available else-
dónde, but also designed with local conditions in mind. The Fab Lab has allowed
them to construct things such as a machine for extracting oil from nuts and seeds,
and a machine for producing biogas from household kitchen waste.31 These frugal
innovaciones, responding to local needs, can be scaled up to satisfy the needs of
similar communities around the world. Por ejemplo, the Pabal Dome, an easy-to-
construct and earthquake-resistant bamboo geodesic house designed at Vigyan
Ashram, has attracted a great deal of attention from other parts of rural India.32
Sometimes the adaptation to local needs happens through collaborations
between different Fab Labs, each seeking to solve a local problem but sharing
experiences and thus contributing to the solving of problems around the globe.
One example of a project that several Fab Labs have undertaken collectively is the
search for low-cost Internet and Wi-Fi infrastructure. The project grew out of the
Norwegian Fab Lab, which was using a system of reflectors to send radio signals
around obstructing mountains—the purpose being to extend the distance at
which a shepherd could track sheep using radio collars.33 The Fab Lab in
Afghanistan built on the idea of extending connectivity by reflection, now called
Fab-Fi, and found a way to dramatically increase the power of Wi-Fi routers. Con
the Norwegian reflector design and modified store-bought routers, they can now
beam Wi-Fi connectivity across several miles where it previously could only reach
across a living room.
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The FAB LAB Network
Pabal dome
Fuente: “In Pictures: Vigyan Ashram,” BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pic-
ture_gallery/05/south_asia_vigyan_ashram_/html/3.stm
What does this have to do with the kind of small-scale manufacturing Fab
Labs facilitate? The designs for adapting conventional routers and building reflec-
tors are shared, open-source, and can be made out of a variety of materials, allow-
ing adaptation to local conditions.34 The project has since been replicated by the
Fab Lab in Nairobi, Kenya, as a for-profit enterprise to deliver low-cost Wi-Fi
access.35 A project like this spans different kinds of users and problems—from the
needs of a single shepherd, to a community, to entrepreneurs delivering a lower
cost service than their competitors. In each of its iterations, it is built on the work
of a slightly different problem-solving activity that preceded it.
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Fab-Fi reflector
Fuente: http://cba.mit.edu/media/pictures.html
THE CHALLENGES OF OPEN-SOURCE HARDWARE
Personal manufacturing, and especially 3-D printing, has recently been the subject
of a tremendous amount of hype and an equal amount of suspicion. The idea that
the tools to make (almost) anything could be placed in (almost) anyone’s hands is
fertile territory for both utopian and paranoid speculation. These technologies
present legal challenges to areas from intellectual property to gun control.
Concerns have been raised, Por ejemplo, that unrestricted access to 3D printers
could make it easy for individuals to freely replicate the designs of popular con-
sumer items. But most emblematic of this concern over personal manufacturing is
the furor that erupted in 2013 after University of Texas law student Cody Wilson
printed and distributed blueprints for the Liberator—a functioning firearm.36
Others, such as former Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, tener
pointed out that claims of a looming firearms crisis are somewhat beside the point
in a world where guns are already widely available.37 Gershenfeld points to another
alarming example, two of his students made master keys to luggage padlocks with-
out having copies of the originals, by taking x-rays of the locks.38 Anderson himself
acknowledges that the legal issues surrounding personal manufacturing and intel-
lectual property will take decades to sort out.39
A role that might be taken on here by the Fab Foundation or some other body
is that of a policy network. Analogous to the work that Creative Commons has
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The FAB LAB Network
done for the world of open-source software, open-source hardware needs to cod-
ify norms and establish best practices around fair use, which will protect the rights
of innovators without stifling innovation. More urgently than with software, por-
haps, Fab Lab users need a unified voice to represent the interests of designers and
users with legislators, as there is a real danger that incumbent businesses and secu-
rity zealots will join forces to unduly limit the potential for collaborative innova-
ción. Recent history is replete with such examples. Considerar, Por ejemplo, cómo
proprietary software vendors attempted to undermine open source alternatives, o
the way the recording industry tried to quash MP3 audio-encoding technology in
the early days of digital music distribution.
LATERAL POWER VERSUS CENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE
Though Fab Labs has its historical roots in a university—a model of industrial-era
hierarchy—Gershenfeld and others at the Center for Bits and Atoms have not
attempted to exercise strict executive control over the goals and techniques
employed by Fab Labs. De hecho, the Fab Foundation has recently loosened strictures
on the need for a uniform set of machines, moving toward “an evolving inventory
of core capabilities.”40 There has been a similar relaxing of the insistence that all
Fab Labs be of similar size. En cambio, there is a new understanding that Fab Labs
might be created with as little as $10,000 in initial investment.41 This attitude demonstrates a level of trust and a concern for fundamentally voluntary interac- tions that is rare even in the world of cooperative networks. As the number of grassroots Fab Labs—those started outside of educational or government institutions—grows, it remains to be seen what form these “center- periphery” relationships will take. Por un lado, individuals in the community have resisted attempts to impose centralized governance models, including efforts by the International Fab Lab Association created by Gershenfeld and Peter Troxler to adopt a more robust coordinating function.42 At present, the International Fab Lab Association, a democratic association open to anyone inter- ested and/or involved in the Fab Labs community, mostly serves to promote per- sonal manufacturing and provide visibility to the growing number of Fab Labs around the world. Más recientemente, the Fab Foundation has created controversy among some of its grassroots members by accepting a $10 million donation from
Chevron.43
Por otro lado, there is longstanding concern among Fab Lab participants
that too little of the collaborative potential of Fab Labs is being successfully
exploited.44,45 This is a role in which both the Fab Foundation and the International
Fab Lab Association could render themselves indispensable, especially given their
reputational credibility to manage relationships with large donors that could help
fund investments in community-building infrastructure. The continually dimin-
ishing costs of personal manufacturing mean that there is little chance of grass-
roots Fab Lab activity slowing down. al mismo tiempo, vigorous competition
(from other personal manufacturing models, such as Makerspaces and
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Michael Stacey
TechShops) will ensure that labs have the freedom to move on to other models or
redes, should the Fab Foundation and the International Fab Lab Association
prove to be insufficiently open to network members’ concerns. In this climate,
there could be considerable advantage to offering collaboration incentives to tap
the true potential of the platform.
IMPLICATIONS FOR NETWORK LEADERS
“There is nothing better than to have sophisticated users.” In an interview with
economics professor and blogger Russ Roberts, venture capitalist Paul Graham
gave this advice to companies wanting to leverage their user base in designing new
products: “Put something out there right away. Then your users will tell you what
the product should have been.”46 Being able to engage with prosumers is of partic-
ular significance to networks built around platforms. The kinds of problem solv-
ing that your platform might enable are not strictly determined by the design of
the platform itself—only users can determine those possibilities. For Fab Labs,
some of the potential uses, such as spillover between educational and entrepre-
neurial activities, have been demonstrated in local contexts but have not yet been
sufficiently explored. There is an opportunity to find soft solutions, or to use
incentives in a non-coercive way to encourage collaboration across different types
of users. The Fab Charter already mandates access to the public; the Fab
Foundation could take this further and mandate that users dedicate time to teach-
ing after they have reached a certain level of expertise. In the past, Gershenfeld has
used his reputational capital to exhort the network to move in various directions,
from starting the International Fab Lab Association to the current challenge to
build houses using Fab Labs, which he has made a theme for 2014 FAB10 confer-
ence in Barcelona. Enhancing the network’s capability to share and collaborate
would seem a logical next step.
Give your network a narrative for the future. Neil Gershenfeld’s extremely
ambitious vision of where Fab Labs are going is grounded in experience that pre-
dates the Center for Bits and Atoms. Gershenfeld sees the Fab Labs as evolving in
four stages, beginning with a Fab Lab as a small workshop, moving toward the
moment when a Fab Lab is capable of building all the Fab Lab machines itself, y
finally moving toward complete digital production, when materials will be capable
of storing the blueprints for their construction within themselves.47 Eventually,
along the model of the DNA building blocks of living tissue, Gershenfeld theorizes
that the differences between hardware and software will be rendered obsolete.48
This can sound fanciful to the non-expert, but it is an extremely compelling
metaphor for the problems that Gershenfeld sees in traditional manufacturing and
innovation. By seeing Fab Labs as part of a larger trend toward reducing the hur-
dle between ideas and their realization, it becomes easier to think about the range
of problems they could play a part in solving and to imagine their progress into
the future.
Act as a bridge between old and new economies. Platforms typically attract a
234
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The FAB LAB Network
Fab House Barcelona
Fuente: http://cba.mit.edu/media/pictures.html
plethora of users from different stakeholder groups. This can cause conflict, semejante
as when the anarchist-tinged hacker community becomes suspicious of sharing a
network with organizations funded by big oil companies. The challenge of bridg-
ing this cultural divide cannot be ignored. Networks that want to mobilize the
decentralized expertise of the talented crowd need to find ways of coordinating
that are not seen as threats to individual autonomy. It could be appropriate for the
Fab Foundation to attempt to exercise a bit more centralized influence through
incentives and soft power, without catastrophically jeopardizing grassroots partic-
ipation. Peter Troxler has suggested what, alternatively, might be needed is a deep-
ening of democratic decisionmaking. Without being able to pinpoint a single solu-
ción, Troxler acknowledges that, from a practical standpoint, the key is that deci-
sions be made in ways that are perceived as fair.49
Recognition by established corporate and government players is something
young networks should celebrate, while remaining sensitive to the possibility of
alienating the grassroots participants. It can also create opportunities by bringing
the expertise of university-funded researchers to the same workshops at which
children from low-income backgrounds are “playing” at meeting local needs.
Keep track of what you learn—and share it. Open-source culture is a partic-
ularly vibrant response to Joy’s Law (named for Sun Microsystems founder, Factura
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Michael Stacey
Joy): “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone
else.”50 A network formed around a platform has an especially great incentive to
remain porous in relation to the contributions of outsiders. Like a knowledge net-
work in many ways, it gains strength from building on the innovations of its users
and ensuring that a culture of shared expertise eliminates the need for duplication
of effort across the network. The work done at any particular node could con-
tribute to surprisingly diverse projects for other users.
Use the whole range of human motivations to harness talent. The realiza-
tion that people respond to many motivators—not simply maximization of nar-
row economic advantage—is as old as the study of economics itself. Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments includes a detailed study of how deeply human
beings are affected by the values and opinions of their peers, and how diligently
they strive to earn the admiration of others. Fab Labs are part of many new models
of organization experimenting with people’s willingness to volunteer their time
and relinquish traditional property rights over some portion of the fruits of their
labor. This does not mean that standard forms of compensation are becoming
obsolete. Particularly among extremely highly skilled individuals, sin embargo, addi-
tional forms of motivation, such as the chance to work on personally meaningful
projects and the opportunity to display ingenuity in the company of respected
colegas, are proving capable of accomplishing more than was traditionally thought
possible—Smith’s 250-year-old insight notwithstanding. En efecto, it is these diverse
motivations that make the Fab Lab network a growing force in solving global
problemas.
1. Don Tapscott, “Introducing Global Solution Networks: Understanding the New Multi-stake-
holder Models for Global Cooperation, Problem Solving and Governance,” gsnetworks.org,
2013. Available at http://gsnetworks.org/introducing-global-solution-networks/.
2. “2013 Human Development Report,” United Nations Development Programme. Disponible en
http://hdr.undp.org/en/2013-report.
3. Center for Bits and Atoms, “Fab Lab FAQ,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Disponible en
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/faq/.
4. Fab Foundation, “Fab Labs,” accessed 24 Marzo 2014. http://www.fabfoundation.org/fab-labs/
5. “Fab Lab Yogyakarta,” House of Natural Fiber Foundation, Available at http://www.natural-
fiber.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=163&Itemid=85
6. Alex Schaub, Deanna Herst, Tommy Surya, and Irene Agrivina, “Fifty Dollar Leg Prosthesis,"
Open Design Now, Available at http://opendesignnow.org/index.php/case/fifty-dollar-leg-pros-
thesis-alex-schaub-et-al/
7. Fab Foundation, “What Qualifies as a Fab Lab?” Available at http://www.fabfoundation.org/fab-
labs/fab-lab-criteria/.
8. Neil Gershenfeld, Fab: the Coming Revolution in Personal Manufacturing, Libros Básicos, 2008, 31.
9. Fab, pag. 34.
10. Neil Gershenfeld, “How to Make (Almost) Anything: The Digital Fabrication Revolution,"
Asuntos exteriores, 91 (2012): 58.
11. Gershenfeld, “How to Make.”
12. “MIT Fab Labs Bring ‘Personal Fabrication’ to People Around the World,” National Science
Foundation press release 04-112, National Science Foundation, Agosto 31 2004.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100425.
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The FAB LAB Network
13. Michelle Delio, “Ghana Gets a Fab Lab,” Wired, Septiembre 9 2004. Available at
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/09/64864?currentPage=all.
14. Paulo Blikstein, “Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education: The Democratization of
Invention,” FabLabs: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors 2013.
15. Blikstein, “Digital Fabrication.
16. Blikstein, “Digital Fabrication.
17. Paulo Blikstein, “FabLab: Neue Lernformen,” Speech: Bremen, Junio 15, 2012, YouTube.
Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7UDYQBaRhs.
18. Adam V. Maltese and Robert H. Tai, “Pipeline Persistence: Examining the Association of
Educational Experiences with Earned Degrees in STEM among U.S. Estudiantes,” Science
Educación 95, No. 5 (2011).
19. Blikstein, “FabLab.”
20. Transformative Technologies Learning Lab, “About FabLab@School.” Available at
https://tltl.stanford.edu/about/fablabatschool.
21. “About FabLab@School.”
22. Anna Kuchment, “A High School Lab as Engaging as Facebook,” Scientific American
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/budding-
(Noviembre
scientist/2013/11/29/a-high-school-lab-as-engaging-as-facebook/
2013). Disponible
en
23. Kuchment, “A High School Lab.”
24. Peter Troxler, Interview with Michael Stacey, Marzo 25 2013.
25. Andrew Sleigh, “Visiting Fab Lab Manchester,” Make, Abril 24 2013. Available at
http://makezine.com/2013/04/24/visiting-fab-lab-manchester/
26. “Visiting Fab Lab Manchester.”
27. Gershenfeld, TED Talk.
28. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes
Everything, Portfolio, Penguin Group, 2006.
29. Gershenfeld, “Fab.”
30. Gershenfeld, “Fab.”
31. Vigyan Ashram, “Kitchen Waste Biogas Unit,” Vigyan Ashram, Abril 10 2012. Available at
http://vigyanashram.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/kitchen-waste-biogas-unit/.
32. “In Pictures: Vigyan Ashram,” BBC News. Disponible en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/south_asia_vigyan_ashram_/html/3.
stm.
33. Gershenfeld, Fab.
34. FabFolk Global Projects, “FabFi Technical Summary.” http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/techsummary/.
35. FabFolk Global Projects, “What’s a FabFi?” http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/.
36. Andy Greenberg. “3D-Printed Gun Creator Cody Wilson Lands Quarter Million Dollar Book
Deal,"
en
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/01/22/3d-printed-gun-creator-cody-wilson-
lands-quarter-million-dollar-book-deal/
Disponible
Enero
Forbes,
2014.
22
37. Oliva Solon, “Chris Anderson: 3d Printing Is a Terrible Technology for Making Guns,” Wired,
Marzo 7 2013.
38. Gershenfeld, “How to Make (Almost) Anything.”
39. Solon, Chris Anderson.
40. Massimo Menichinelli, email communication to Michael Stacey, Marzo 22 2014.
41. Peter Troxler, email communication to Michael Stacey, Marzo 23 2014.
42. Troxler, email.
43. Jose Perez de Lama, “Digital Fabrication and Free Culture: One More Minor
Becoming?”Available at
http://htca.us.es/materiales/perezdelama/txts/2013_diff_engine_fab/difference_engine_digi-
tal_fabrication_v3.pdf, pag. 8.
44. Shara L. davis, “United States Fab Lab Network Strategic Plan Document,” Elyria, Ohio, Público
Instituto, Lorraine County Community College, 2012. Available at
Services
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Michael Stacey
http://usfln.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/US-Fab-Lab-FINAL-Report-3-6-12-PDF.pdf
45. Ton Ziljstra, “The Failings of FabLabs,” Dutch FabLab Foundation, Septiembre 29 2013.
http://fablab.nl/2013/09/29/the-failings-of-fablabs/
46. Paul Graham, interview with Russ Roberts, Econtalk, Library of Economics and Liberty,
Agosto 3, 2009. Disponible en
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/08/graham_on_start.htmlhttp://cba.mit.edu/media/pic
tures.html
47. Diez, Personal Fabrication, 463
48. Gershenfeld, Fab.
49. Peter Troxler, email communication with Michael Stacey, Abril 11 2014
50. Karim R. Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta, “The Principles of Distributed Innovation,” Innovations
2, No. 3 (2007)pag. 97.
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