A roundup of the top news On 3D Printing brought you from February 25 to March 3:

Monday, February 25

• Nokia and MakerBot Showcase 3D Printing at Mobile World Congress

Tuesday, February 26

• 3D Printing Pen 3Doodler Raises $1.8M on Kickstarter from 20K Backers

The world famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain was the life work of genius designer Antoni Gaudi. Construction started in 1882 and will not be completed until 2028. It is a massive structure featuring incredible towers, rich detailed facades, and complex architecture.

In the museum, one can see how Gaudi’s original designs are developed into full glory. 3D printing is one key tool workers use to prototype Gaudi’s designs at a model scale.

The shop hosts two ZCorp 3D printers which can create the intricate models shown in the photo, as small as 1:2000 in size.

Discharged binder solution cartridges are left on the side of the workshop.

It’s incredible to think that Gaudi designed this building without the use of these modern tools, whereas today’s designers rely on them to ensure the quality of their work.

This week’s featured Fab Lab is the Digital Fabrication Boot Camp in Barcelona, a program designed to immerse students in hands-on experience to learn, among other technologies, 3D printing.

The newly created Master in Interaction is hosting 8 students from different backgrounds, who will lead a new line of research at IAAC and Fab Lab Barcelona. All IAAC students have access to the Fab Lab machines and equipment, to produce their projects and to learn and interact with the Fab Lab spirit and team. In this sense, the digital fabrication BootCamp for the MAI students has been an intensive experience to introduce them to digital fabrication techniques, through the organization of 3 exercises:

• Making things move: using the laser cutting machine to design, prototype and fabricate mechanisms which generate or translate movement.
• Glowing molds: the idea of this exercise was to design and produce molds in polyurethane foam which have been casted with transparent resins, in which lightning features should be embedded.
• Dynamic scanning and printing: introduction to different 3d scanning methods to 3D print a customized object.

Here is a video from the boot camp posted earlier this week.

More details available at Fab Lab Barcelona.

Fab Lab: Barcelona and Smart Cities: are we seeing societal change by way of democratization of manufacturing?

In an interview with Tomás Diez, director of the Fab Lab Barcelona project, the question was posed:

How can cities solve the need of providing more and more diverse services, in a scenario of cutting budgets, while taking advantage of the opportunities that “fabbing” bring to us? At the Fab City… how do you think that having a neighborhood fab lab would change people’s lives?

The response was quite profound:

This proposal consists on a fab city made up of an interconnected community of neighborhood fab labs. The venues’ goals would be to encourage entrepreneurship and interest in innovation that have already been present in Barcelona throughout centuries. As they see it, bringing factories back to cites will lead us through a new industrial revolution where production methods and social bonds will be transformed.

Read more in the full interview.

Barcelona image used under Creative Commons from Moyan_Brenn.