Tag Archives: MIT
Fab Lab of the Week: Massey University Centre Hosts New Zealand Event
This week’s featured Fab Lab is Massey University’s College of Creative Arts and the Affect Research Centre, which is hosting a seminar in Wellington, New Zealand in collaboration with the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.
Fab 8 NZ is the 2012 incarnation of the annual international Fab Lab meeting, bringing field practitioners and laboratory researchers from the international Fab Lab network and beyond, for a week of hands-on workshops and a one-day public symposium on the principles and applications of digital fabrication. For designers with some basic maker experience, there’s also a two-day “Fab Foo”, a chance to rub shoulders with the best in the world.
Expect talk on a mind-boggling array of subjects, from prototyping in outer space to 3D printing of human organs.
Among those attending the conference will be Fab Lab founder Professor Neil Gershenfeld, Director for the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. Professor Gershenfeld has been named one of Scientific American’s 50 leaders in science and technology, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/FP as one of the top 100 public intellectuals.
Fab Labs were originally initiated as an outreach project from MIT, and provide widespread access to a modern means for invention through 3D printers that can make almost anything, and can be put to use in communities, businesses and industries around the globe.
Fab Labs have spread around the world from inner city Boston to rural India, incubating projects like solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.
Via idealog.
Fab Lab of the Week: Fox Valley Technical College in Wisconsin
This week’s featured Fab Lab is at the Fox Valley Technical College in Wisconsin.
The FAB LAB (Fabrication Laboratory) is a unique Learning Center that enhances student classes and provides for an outreach program in the Fox Valley. Local schools join the fab lab in creating and constructing projects that relate to their curriculum and learn science, technology, engineering and math along the way. FAB LAB’s give students the opportunity to connect and collaborate with other fab labs around the world.
The FAB LAB concept was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Dr. Neil Gershenfeld and documented in his book “FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop.” In the summer of 2007, the FAB LAB at FVTC became the 17th in the world.
The FVTC FAB LAB team researched Gershenfeld’s work at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MITand began planning how to set up a FAB LAB at the college. In 2005, the team developed a customized approach to adapting the FAB LAB concept for FVTC, which included global consultation and digital fabrication technology to create almost anything.
Thanks to the partnership with MIT, FVTC FAB LAB users have the ability to link with students and experts worldwide via Web video access to Norway, South Africa, India, Barcelona and other locations. Other partners also include Century College in Minnesota and Loraine County Community College near Cleveland. Inventors, students and businesses can share knowledge to collectively learn from successes and failures.
There is a critical need for Wisconsin manufacturers to become more innovative, efficient, and flexible and future employees will need the knowledge of digital fabrication, the FVTC FAB LAB is taking a leadership role in innovation. Our future economy in Wisconsin and beyond depends on leveraging the power and innovation of leading-edge technologies found in the FVTC FAB LAB. Wisconsin is home to 24 statewide manufacturing driver industries, many of which depend on some form of fabrication (per Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership-WMEP research).
This Fab Lab hosts an Alaris Objet 30 and Stratasys 3D printer, among other equipment.
You can see the FVTC Fab Lab in the video below.
Fab Lab of the Week: Wanger Family Fab Lab at the MSI Chicago
The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago houses a state-of-the-art digital fabrication laboratory called the Wanger Family Fab Lab, a small-scale workshop for computer-based innovation, design and fabrication. The Fab Lab allows you to dream up, design and make almost anything you can imagine using cutting-edge software and equipment, including 3D printers.
MSI’s Wanger Family Fab Lab is one of about 50 such labs worldwide. They began as a community outreach program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and have spread worldwide to rural India, Africa, Europe and across America. All Fab Labs share software, equipment and core capabilities, so that people and projects can be shared among all sites. Fab Lab users engage in problem-based learning and hands-on fabrication, becoming innovators of new projects and prototypes for limitless use and application.
MSI’s Fab Lab offers the Dream It, Design It, Fab It! program for Museum guests. Interested teens in our Science Achievers youth development program learn advanced skills and have developed prototypes of activities that are featured in Museum exhibits. Shortly after the Fab Lab opened In 2007, MSI hosted Fab4, the Fourth International Fab Lab Forum and Symposium on Digital Fabrication.
The Museum is currently hiring a Facilitator for the Wanger Family Fab Lab.
The Fab Lab Facilitator will be responsible for delivering dynamic programming in the Fab Lab for Museum guests and other program participants. The Facilitator will be responsible for learning and developing proficiency with several consumer design software applications and machinery in the lab. The Facilitator will also support the Fab Lab Manager and Programs Coordinator in leading Lab tours, and facilitating school-group and community group programming in the Lab.
The video below shows the Fab Lab from the point of view of a tricopter during a science achiever program.
Fab Lab of the Week: Fayetteville Free Library in New York
This week’s featured Fab Lab is the Fayetteville Free Library in upstate New York, which recently received $250,000 from the New York State Library Construction Grant to build out its facility. Senator Dave Valesky announced the funding at the library. Syracuse.com covered this announcement:
The lab and center will provide the community with access to technologies that are not currently available to the general public, and also will provide an “incubator” for individuals and small businesses.
Entrepreneurs will be able to work together, find resources to help develop ideas and get professional assistance.
A Fab Lab is a collection of machines linked by software that allows users to make things. In Fayetteville’s Fab Lab, it means using something called a Makerbot, or 3D printer that fits on a desktop.
Fayetteville Free Library’s website describes the motivation of the center:
The Fayetteville Free Library is excited to announce the addition of a new public service—the FFL Fab Lab. What exactly is a fab lab? According to Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and author of Fab: the Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, a fab lab is “a collection of commercially available machines and parts linked by software and processes developed formaking things (Gershenfeld, 12).” At the foundation of the FFL’s Fab Lab will be a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3D printer, made available to the library through a generous donation from Express Computer Services.
Via Syracuse.com.
Industry Leaders Discuss Consumer 3D Printing Market [Video]
Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O’Reilly Media, hosted a panel on consumer 3D printing at the MIT/Stanford VLAB in April.
3D Printing is poised to become a part of our daily lives, allowing consumers to make things in a new era of mass customization. Once an expensive technology used by engineers, 3D printers today print car bodies, medical and dental prosthetics, high-fashion shoes and much more. Layer by layer, 3D printers deposit material to build up one-of-a-kind products, even with complex internal shapes.
Virtual marketplaces, cheaper printers and cloud-based consumer software are transforming the 3D Printing ecosystem, bringing the technology within the reach of everyone. With a current market size of $1.3 billion, the 3D printing industry is set to explode to $3.1 billion by 2016, according to industry consulting firm Wohlers Associates.
Join us and our industry leading panelists to understand business models and see the technology in action.
Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen joins leaders from 3D Systems, Autodesk, and London College of Fashion, and MAKE Magazine in the video below.
