BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Background

Fab Lab Barcelona, part of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, supports a variety of educational and research programs at various scales of human habitat and needs. It is one of the more than 1,000 fab labs found in approximately 60 countries. This global network was created with the extensive support of academia as an outreach project of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and further supported by the Fab Foundation - affiliated with CBA - which facilitates the development of regional capacity-building organizations and the accessibility of technology and digital fabrication tools to all. The fab lab defines itself as a personal digital fabrication workshop for artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, amateurs, and other professionals of all ages, primarily serving community organizations, educational institutions, and nonprofit concerns. It has strong partnerships with public and private entities.

In Essence

Fab Lab Barcelona is a general fabrication lab (please refer to glossary for definition) that serves as a center for research, production, and education. As a fab lab, it provides at low barriers to entry a wide range of fabrication tools that are needed both for prototyping and for testing new technologies or arts and crafts products. This space does not influence the sort of products fabricated on-site; it just makes it and its tools accessible so that members of the community can develop products at different scales, and it charges a service fee rather than a membership fee. In addition, Fab Lab Barcelona provides access to mentorship, acceleration, and training services. It invites the creation and fabrication of ideas and products that have a positive impact on society and improve livelihoods. It takes part in developing projects and products at various scales, ranging from smart devices for improved data collection to new labs testing systems and models of self-sufficiency. 

Impact

Fab Lab Barcelona extends the tools, the knowledge, and the financial means to educate, innovate, and invent using technology and digital fabrication. It seeks to catalyze the entrepreneurial community by supplying the broader community with the resources to advance ideas and products that can have positive implications for the greater interest of the future of society and the environment. It does not specify the range of the products to be created but rather provides its users with access to advanced tools, knowledge, and talents, thereby creating indefinite opportunities for collaborations and innovative projects to be developed. It reduces barriers to entry by having no membership fee, sustaining itself instead through service fees.

Fab Lab Barcelona stands out for the various educational platforms it generates and helps maintain. These help sustain a quality of talent while also enriching the broader community and developing a way to introduce to them entrepreneurial ideas. Fab Lab Barcelona also serves as the headquarters of the Fab Academy, a platform of education and research that turns every fab lab into a classroom, creating further opportunities to reach out to the larger community and teach new generations about the principles, application, and implications of digital manufacturing technology. Furthermore, it works toward scaling up the impact of fab labs in the urban environment through the Fab City project, which was started in 2011 and aims to shift activities toward dynamic and applied research in collaboration with companies, other universities (through EU-funded programs), and the city council. 

In Practice

Project in Focus

Smart Citizen (https://smartcitizen.me) is a platform to generate participatory processes of people in cities. Its objective is to connect data, people, and knowledge, thereby serving as a node for building productive and open indicators and distributed tools to enable inhabitants to better communicate about their own cities. The project was co-founded by the director of Fab Lab Barcelona and further grew within the space. The fab lab provided the space, knowledge, contacts, and materials needed for Smart Citizen to form. Today, Smart Citizen is su- pported by the European Union through Horizon 2020 programs (that is, EU-wide competitively awarded public funds); it has also received innovative project awards in the Smart City Expo and World Congress in Barcelona.