Visit to the Fab Lab

     On January 23,2013 Professor Marianne Klimchuk, Professor Kurt Vega and I (Sandra Markus) visited the Fab Lab at the Marymount School on the Upper East Side of New York City.

     For those of you who are new to the "Fab Lab" concept--The Fab Lab program was started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the Center for Bits and Atoms in 1998.In short, it is a digital fabrication lab. The concept was popularized by Neil Gershenfeld who taught a class called "How to make (almost) anything" at MIT, which offered students the opportunity to use the tools in the lab to build and create. When he first launched the class, he anticipated 10 students, yet over 100 showed up. Students were motivated by the desire to make things that they wanted, but did not yet exist. Their products ranged from alarm clocks that needs to be wrestled into turning off to a portable space for screaming.(my personal favorite).

     From its first incarnation, Fab labs has spread from inner-city Boston (South End Technology Center)to rural India to South Africa to northern Norway.These labs share a common mission to provide access to modern tools for invention.Fab labs have been credited with solving local problems, such as affordable cable access in rural India to developing instruments to locate water.

All fab lab share core machinery, so that the labs can collaborate and share projects. Some of the machinery that we saw were:

Replicator 3-D Printer

3-D Printers Maker-Bot

Laser-Cutter 

ShopBot

Vinyl Cutter

Marymount's Fab Lab's Director, Jaymes Dec faciliates the experiential hands-on learning process. In addition to learning fabrication skills, the students learn programming skills to integrate into their prototypes. This idea of "learning by doing" stretches back to Dewey, the father of progressive education.

The art of tinkering and learning how to prototype is considered one of the fundamental skills in 21st century learning.

     The Fab Lab reflects a growing movement in education to integrate hands-on learning projects into the curriculum.This is an environment that supports peer-to-peer learning  DIYers, makers and tinkerers are all part of this growing passion for conceptualizing,creating and building. The interdisciplinary nature of the fabrication technologies integrates design skills, basic science, engineering and technology education. 

To learn more about Fab Labs watch:
http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs.html

3-D Printing is currently being used in fashion--as we can see from the images above that were taken at the Voltage Fashion Collection being presented at Paris Fashion week