Discussions on Austin Fab Lab
Eric Hunting
idea on the setup of the lab might be of some interest to readers here.
_________________
It seems to me that it may be smart to prioritize a bit on the
facilities setup and operation before you start delving into more
sophisticated projects. Just about everything one might want to do
starts with establishing a user and support community around your lab.
So it makes sense to focus first on how that is setup and run as a
resource for that community.
I'm guessing -based on a rough estimation of your personality- that
you probably don't want to be bogged down by micro-managing this lab
when you have projects of your own to work on. So the best approach is
likely the one that 'automates and delegates' as much of its day-to-
day maintenance as possible. In this context, the more I think about
it the more the Clubhouse/Aussie Mens Shed model seems to make sense
because of how it off-loads some responsibility to a group of users
and makes a lot of maintenance and support asynchronous. Key to this
is that 'key club' concept I mentioned earlier.
Now, there are a few definitions of a 'key club' so let me clarify
which one I'm referring to. First there's a high school student
service program of Kiwanis. (why they picked that particular name
seems strange to me given the other definitions...) Then there's the
'key clubs' that grew up around 'swingers' clubs. This may be a bit
before your time -the phenomenon was dying when I was a kid but was
well known to my older relatives. Swingers clubs, as you may know, are
wife-swapping clubs that seemed to emerge in the post-WWII period. Key
clubs were a variant of that where someone in the swinger group would
periodically hold a party and everyone would put their spare house
keys in a bowl or jar. The women would all leave for their respective
homes first, then as the party wound down the men would take a key at
random from the jar and go spend the night in that home. Our
grandparents led interesting lives... (though quite how they figured
out whose house went with what key always puzzled me....) The kind of
key club I'm referring to is almost as risque in history but offers a
practical model for managing group facilities. These key clubs
originated in the days of Prohibition (though in other variant its
probably goes back much farther in history) and were a kind of private
members-only 'speakeasy' where each of the members held personal keys
to access the club discretely through some nondescript back-alley
doorway. The strategy was also used by brothels and is not uncommon in
the world of espionage and organized crime. It proved to be a somewhat
redundant and inefficient means of security given that it was still
necessary for staff to be on-site in these places anyway and personal
recognition by staff and the use of fake 'front' businesses a better
safeguard against police. However, the symbolism caught on in other
areas, particular later mans club franchises. Playboy started out as a
key club that spread into a franchise of mens clubs before turning
into a soft-porn publishing company and for a long time maintained a
special key club membership system.
Now, this concept has some practical uses. If you want to share a
facility with a group of people who may be using it at any hour of the
day or night (remember the sort of nerds we're talking about here...)
but don't want to staff the place continuously like a store, a member
key-holder system is a good way to manage this. Using a clubhouse
model for the the lab, you can fully 'vett' your lab members according
to their reputation or backing by group members than entrust them each
with a key -a digital card type most likely- that lets them enter and
use the lab at any time and digitally 'check out' supplies from the
lab stockroom. You have a specific set of rules of conduct and
maintenance for members to follow and you can track this by keeping
tabs on who was in the lab over any period of time -as they must 'log
out' of the lab with the key when they leave. This lets you greatly
automate much of the management of the lab while creating a very
casual impression of its use among members.
Now, let's think about this clubhouse model a bit more. Basically, the
idea is that you run the lab as a club on a simple monthly or annual
membership basis. Monthly or annual use fees are used to financially
support the lab and additions/upgrades can be added to it by group or
individual donation -though ideally through member sweat-equity in
making the stuff you need. This is a very adult-oriented approach
compared to typical academic-linked Fab Labs where they are being host
in some educational institution and used like a campus lab. You, of
course, can host children's activities under specific adult member
supervision and 'sponsor' student access in cooperation with area
schools. (ie. the school pays part or all of membership fees for
select students) But in general this would function as an independent
organization supported by its users -unless you think you can swing
some serious academic grant money. Think Fab Club as opposed to the
more campus oriented Fab Lab.
I'm starting to really like the Aussie Mens Shed model of communal
workshops. I don't think that the "place for men" thing will fly in
the US. But the way those workshops are setup, as a kind of industrial
clubhouse, is pretty smart. Because most Fab Labs are on campuses,
they don't think about the facility beyond the workshop. Fab Labs can
be small and very specialized in space because they have a campus
grounds with other facilities to 'spill over' onto. But when you're
off-campus you need to think a little more about the creative
atmosphere of the place. Mens Sheds are designed to deal with the
issue of remoteness, since a lot of them are located in rural and
suburban Australian communities where people have to drive some
distance to visit the place. So they are designed as places you go to
spend the day, or a whole weekend. That's why some of them even have
guest rooms on a second floor. This is something that occurred to me
thinking about that idea for a Native American Fab Lab. These
reservations are huge and remote. It can be a days drive from one to
the other. So I realized that, if it couldn't parasitize something
like a community center, it might need more things on-site. I suspect
that, in Austin, you're probably looking at a somewhat similar
environment. The lab is going to be a few hours drive away for some of
its users and so it needs to function as a place you can spend a whole
day. So I suggest a facility design that combines the elements of the
Fab Lab with the elements of a typical college student lounge. On one
side of the place you have your workshop and stock room. On the other
side (or a second level -some of these light industrial buildings come
with a loft for offices or enough ceiling height to put in free-
standing mezzanines) you have a lounge with couches, desk space, white
boards, bulletin board, library shelves, a kitchenette, a first aid
station, and other stuff members might want for comfort sake. Remember
that I mentioned the idea of subletting space for snack vending
machines? I was thinking about the student lounge. Look at how
important the kitchenette, the coffee machine, and the guy charged
with being the club coffee maker are in the Mens Shed culture.
This lounge would be especially important as a conference room as you
would periodically have to hold management meetings with the whole
club membership and member recruitment and 'orientation' meetings. It
would also serve as a good backdrop for Maker video creation and for
news media interviews, if that happens. Sometimes people might even
want to hold a party there. It's also important as a conference space
for group projects. You would most-likely have the place wired for
Internet with WiFi all over. Academic Fab Labs often have a shared
bank of computers. That makes sense in the school setting, but I think
most adult Makers are 'power users' who will prefer to carry their own
personal computing environment around in the form of laptops. So quick
connectivity matters more there and instead of shared PCs, things like
a presentation big-screen TV and CAD sized monitors they can plug into
as needed. This lounge can be as elaborate as your club members like.
It can even go the whole guest room route. (Japanese Capsule Hotel
units work in many contexts) You can also consider different levels of
privacy and sound isolation. I recall it was Chiat Day in California
that was buying polar expedition huts to use as indoor conference
rooms in their open-plan office environment. Think about Andrea
Zittel's Wagon Stations and indoor Escape Vehicles. But you don't have
unlimited space and I don't think it really needs to be that
elaborate. If the group can make its own furniture or you have a good
Goodwill store in the area, you're on the right track. It just needs
to offer a quieter environment than the workshop, add a sense of fun
to the place, and provide access to snacks and light meals. (stock up
on the instant ramen, frozen pizza, and MREs) Again, remember that
Mens Shed coffee machine? I think some of your first practical
projects might actually be an OS coffee machine, Slurpee machine, and
pizza oven! And note that there is a lot of Maker activity that's
better suited to a kitchen than a workshop. And think about the old
Texas tradition of the community BBQ.
With this basic division of space, you organize the lab around noise;
a quiet side where the lounge is and the noisy side where the biggest
and loudest machine tools are, along with garage door access for
supplies and equipment delivery and for moving out big artifacts.
Maybe your building has a truck dock already. Whole partitioning of
the building space isn't always necessary to control sound. Free-
standing noise partitions are a possibility as is the use of free-
standing enclosures.
Flexible space is another important consideration, again, because you
don't have the luxury of a campus to spill over onto. A workshop area
should ideally have an open space big enough to drive a car into
(sometimes you will...) that can be quickly utilized in different ways
such as by setting up folding tables and chairs (Sams Club has these
excellent height-adjusting PE tables), putting down some rubber mats
or plastic pallets, etc, And it should, of course, have a direct path
to any garage doors. Setting up a 'round table' conference in the
workshop will be important for hosting workshops on technique or
introducing the use of new tools as well as for aiding more group-
oriented and hand-labor-intensive activities, like very small run kit
assembly/packaging. There are, again, a lot of possibilities how to
use fixtures with this flex space, such as using floor or ceiling as
storage space for tables and such. We'll need to know more about the
specific building and its physical layout to get into details.
Now let's consider the stock room. The size of this and its overhead
in terms of operating costs and member fees depends on how much stuff
the club would want on-hand. Existing Fab Lab inventory lists are only
suggestive and it looks to me based on simple assumptions of what the
different fab tools commonly work with. It's also focused on teaching
so some of its materials priorities differ a bit from what most Makers
are using day to day. The practical inventory, however, is going to be
determined/adjusted by the patterns in member use according to what
things they tend to make. There can be varying priorities here from
place to place and in different mixes of people. The basic strategy
for stocking the lab is figuring out what materials the group tends to
use the most so the lab can achieve a savings for the group buying in
bulk. This takes some experience because, as I said, it will vary with
the group. In an earlier forum post I mentioned the idea of
repurposing point-of-purchase/inventory software to help automate the
lab supply. This is another place where that key club idea comes in.
You can use the same digital access card people use to access the
facility through electronic locks as a check-out card for materials
which are labeled with bar codes. So a person can go into the stock
room, fill up a tote box with the stuff they need, then swipe their
card at a check-out station, and scan the items with a cheap wand-type
bar code scanner just like using a self-check-out system in a
supermarket. You can then bill them for materials use, if you use that
pay-as-you-go model, or just keep track of the flow of materials so
you know what needs to be restocked at any time. Very much like how
the military does it, though they've been using RFID on everything
lately. Many of these systems will even automate re-ordering from
networked vendors so even that can be automated. Mind you, this would
work in the kitchen too...
Next, let's consider a web site. You've been thinking about
sophisticated web based systems for project management. But let's
consider the simpler web site used as an Internet representation of
the Fab Lab itself. It would have four roles; web presence and PR for
the Fab Club, bulletin board functions paralleling those of the
physical bulletin board in the club lounge, lab resource archive, and
administrative remote data management. The first role is simple
enough. You have a nice front page, a blog and picture gallery for
club members, and the usual Who and What are we and FAQs. The second
role is easily handled by a simple web forum and e-Calender/scheduler
that lets people message the group, ask for advice when no 'leaders'
are around in the lab, report broken stuff and other problems, and
schedule group activities. The third role is based on creating a
continuously updates web-based version of the Lab Manual. The Lab
Manual would start by collecting and copying all the users guides that
come with tools and putting them in plastic page protectors in a three-
ring binder. Added to this would be the lab conduct rules, use notes
about the tools, and then eventually photographic technique guides to
each of the tools. The on-line Lab Manual mirrors this and is updated
more frequently. A wiki system might be suited to this, if a simple
web page structure isn't enough. That would let all the members add
notes associated with each thing in the lab and might serve as a more
structured alternative to using a simple web forum to post problem
messages. The fourth role is associated with the network systems
maintenance, security system, and inventory management. It's a private
web gateway to allow you, as administrator, to check on network
systems status and problems, look at the member access logs, maybe
look at some security web cams in the lab, and keep track of the
inventory management system from wherever you happen to be. Later on a
fifth role might be added to this web site; group project management.
This would elaborate the community calender with a full-blown web-
based project management system for member organization of group
projects. This software already exists in various forms so you
shouldn't have trouble finding something to start with. But it's
elaborate software that takes some training of members to use. This
system would allow members, dispersed over any area on the globe, to
start collaborating on the planning and setup of group projects before
they meet in the Fab Lab itself. This could be one of the more
powerful software tools in the facility and could work toward
combining the efforts of multiple labs around the world. And you can
start with what's off the shelf while you look to develop more
advanced systems.
As for specific projects, you already know my priority as it's the
same as yours; the fully open source suite of fab tools. I'd also like
to see the ToolBook cooperative founded. But, clearly, your initial
priorities for the facility are outfitting it and recruitment of
members to use it. Once you have a stable core of members, you can
start proposing and promoting among them the important projects. The
ToolBook project could evolve out of this by its acquisition of media
production facilities (focused mostly on digital photography and video
frequently using the lab as a backdrop but with some dedicated space
of its own) to aid the Fab Club members in making multimedia material
for their own self-published books and entries to the Maker blogs and
podcasts like Make and Instructables. If a critical mass of interest
in producing Maker media is apparent, then you could see about
shifting ownership of the collective facilities to a member-owned co-
op publishing corporation as I've described and proceed from there.
Initially, I don't think you need something that formal just to run
the lab by itself.
If you think about the outfitting of the lab as initial project
priority then you can easily define these projects in terms of
specific furnishings for the lab and equipment you would rather make
than buy. Since you're bootstrapping things a bit here, you can't be
quite as refined with these early projects but if you already have a
good core set of tools at hand, you should be able to produce some key
furnishings. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest you get a copy
of the old Box Beam Sourcebook, Ken Isaacs' How To Make Your Own
Living Structures, Nomadic Furniture I & II, and as many of the T-slot
companies' catalogs as you can. With these you have design guides for
cheap, simple, quick, and easy furnishings, workstations, and the
like. The Living Structures and Nomadic Furniture books are also
excellent as a guide to how you would evolve the Lab Manual with
technique guides and key examples of the kind of literature I've been
talking about in the ToolBook concept. Maker media as we know it today
started with books like these in the 60s and 70s. These should also be
mandatary books in your lounge library section. That list I sent to
the P2P site would be a good guide to filling your library.
Focussing on the development of fab tool kits would be a smart
approach to leveraging your member skills to generate money for the
lab and founding a cooperative enterprise -and right now anything that
can create some new jobs is going to be very well received in any
community and would be eligible for incubator funding and the like.
However, the lab space you have would not be suited to concerted
production beyond a very small scale. For more than that you would
need to consider creating -some time later, of course- a companion job-
shop that is more commercially-oriented and managed by some key
members with more of an entrepreneurial bent. You could base it
largely on part-time employees and use it as a flexible/scalable
modest volume production facility for whatever Fab Club members invent
and want to try and market. Using a job shop model, you're treating
this little factory almost like another one of the tools of the Fab
Lab. The lab comes up with designs and this job shop is your modest
mass-production fabber. Same set of tools, but more of them used
repeatedly by a crew that get paid to work per job, which might
typically mean product for a unit volume of something to last a
quarter, 6 months, or a year in one job. As the inventor of the Dyson
Vacuum Cleaner has said, the first thing an inventor needs today is
not a patent but a factory. This is that factory.This is yet another
kind of bridge to a ToolBook style co-op where members can earn a
living Making, sometimes by publishing, sometimes by providing the
mass-production labor for their own goods or those of their fellow
Makers.
Note also that I already have a T-slot Sourcebook project in the works
and there was some recent interest lately expressed by the Jeriko
House company in sponsoring it -though I haven't heard any follow-ups
from the company president on this for a couple of weeks. Plan at the
time was that the workshop he was building in New Orleans for Jeriko
House production would co-produce some demo projects to my specs,
their profiles suppliers would offer the materials and hardware, and
the Jeriko Houses themselves would be used as photographic backdrops
and examples of the highest form of use of the building tech. If you
use T-slot at your lab, anything you come up with could potentially be
added to this book. Or you might be able to help me make some of these
planned T-slot demo projects, if Jeriko House can't come through. I'm
having trouble figuring out how to make a small workshop fit with my
adobe cottage here -let alone find the time to work on these things-,
hence the idea of having Jeriko House make what I can't yet do here.
These demo projects are intended to illustrate the diversity of T-slot
uses (on top of archival examples found around the globe) and include;
digital machine tools much as you've been planning (ie. the MultiTool
idea), example furniture and lighting items, an integrated mini-
workshop (where tools and workshop furnishing merge), a T-slot beam
recumbent bike, a screened and raised outdoor summer sleeping shelter
or guest pavilion (a modernist take on the Asian/Polynesian yoga or
sleeping pavilion), a transportable hot tub (there's a Japanese
interleaved wood frame design based on a membrane inner lining that
I'm thinking of reverse-engineering), self-contained mini-hydroponics
systems, electric indoor composter, computer enclosures, structurally
integrated appliances (to work with Jeriko House buildings), simple
robots (like the SpoolBot I've been thinking about lately and the
RoboMule), and perhaps the Green Bug OScar if we can access the new
large profiles. I so need to get up to date on the current version of
Smart Sketch so I can start 'showing' these ideas instead of just
talking about them...
So these are my thoughts for the moment. Let me know if any of this
synchronizes with what your imagining for the lab.
___________________
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
Ton Zijlstra
Here in the Netherlands a number of FabLab initiatives follow a sort-of shop in shop model.
The labs are run in part by closed groups (like an association of inventors, or a cultural education programme, or a research/media lab), and in part as open fablabs. Staff is on site during the fablab open hours. Staff is partly paid by exploiting other hours through e.g. renting out the lab to groups or people wanting to work on commercial stuff (past the prototyping stage), or if they want to keep their work secret (sharing is mandatory during fablab hours), partly by organizing paid for training sessions and workshops for groups of company employees etc.
During the closed group hours staff is also on site, but not necessarily helping out those working in the lab. Members of the closed group have been trained in using the lab machines savely and wisely before letting them work on their own.
best,
Ton
-------------------------------------------
Interdependent Thoughts
Ton Zijlstra
t...@tonzijlstra.eu
+31-6-34489360
http://zylstra.org/blog
-------------------------------------------
ben lipkowitz
> Staff is partly paid by exploiting other hours through e.g. renting out
> the lab to groups or people wanting to work on commercial stuff (past
> the prototyping stage), or if they want to keep their work secret
> (sharing is mandatory during fablab hours)
I'd like you to expand on how "sharing is mandatory" since it seems like
the sort of thing that sounds good in theory but hard to enforce in
practice. Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be "documentation is
mandatory" since that's really the end goal.
Then I can say "there doesn't seem to be any documentation for this pile
of junk" instead of "gee, you didn't share" and then get some handwavy
I-showed-so-and-so answer. Online documentation flattens the "clique"
hierarchy and opens knowledge to everyone in the lab. This also increases
the group's online portfolio which can be particularly handy to have
around when looking for funding.
Nathan Cravens
I've had similar thoughts in regard to Fab facility organization; which began during my visit to Factor e Farm and later refined when discussing the theory with a few college students. The hypothetical problem came when needing to address "tool accountability:" how to locate a tool, determine who used it, and when a tool requires maintenance. Thanks for putting this into words Eric. I'll add to this discussion once I've read the remainder of your post.
Let's work on developing and refining this Fan Club model here:
http://www.appropedia.org/Fab_Lab_Organization
I'm calling our discussions "brainstorm sessions." This format chunks some of what seems most relevant to application. Eric, as the author of the content, revise these chunks as you see fit. These chunks will later turn into an organization platform described on that wiki.
'Fab Lab Organization' is linked from 'Fab Focus', a hub for the ideas expressed on our list:
http://www.appropedia.org/Fab_Focus
Now to read the rest of your post!
Nathan
Bryan Bishop
> Bryan and I were discussing this off-list and he thought this set of
> idea on the setup of the lab might be of some interest to readers here.
> _________________
Hello world, my apologies for taking so long to get to these
(primarily three) emails from Eric. Partly it is an issue of finding
time, and partly it is an issue of realizing that (apparently) there
are some things that are unspoken that otherwise seem clear to me, or
both Eric and I and probably many others thinking about these topics,
but without actually writing them down, they will inevitably be lost
and forgotten. So, here goes.
> It seems to me that it may be smart to prioritize a bit on the
> facilities setup and operation before you start delving into more
> sophisticated projects. Just about everything one might want to do
> starts with establishing a user and support community around your lab.
> So it makes sense to focus first on how that is setup and run as a
> resource for that community.
I suspect that the different types of fablabs that you outlined (in a
later email) require different sorts of frameworks for operation.
Ultimately, a fablab-in-a-box in a garage isn't going to necessarily
require a support community to maintain it 24/7, though it might
require a "geek squad" service or "moving men" service from time to
time. On the other hand, the TechShop model of a round-the-clock
"fitness center" for 'making stuff' (except stuff that builds
TechShops) requires a large user base, perhaps one even larger than is
feasible to support per some business model flukes. I imagine it's
something like looking at extremophiles, organisms from our biosphere
that are able to survive particularly harsh conditions, yet still
built from DNA and proteins, meanwhile you can also look at ant, bee
and termite colonies, which are also built from DNA and proteins. And
perhaps there are extremophiles that also exhibit structure in the
sense of colonies.
Anyway, does the fablab exist for the community, or does the community
exist for the fablab, and how are conflicts of interest between the
two resolved?
The problem with the fabclub model- which is really just the same as
the TechShop model- is that the member fees aren't able to possibly
cover costs of equipment, or if they were, then you probably have too
many members and would never be able to accomodate them all ("maximum
capacity"). Joseph and I were talking a few weeks ago about how much
he dislikes the gym slash health club business model :-). (because
it's a broken/bad one at that) Now, ultimately, if the machines in
fact were capable of building the machines, in total, there would not
be much of an issue regarding costs of equipment, but there is some
certain level of bootstrapping required perhaps? And perhaps not. By
this I mean that there is some level of machinery that is required to
bootstrap a fablab that will not require a ridiculous amount of the
mysterious green sheet of paper in order to continue operations. It
may be that we have jumped the gun here in Austin, having gone
straight to machines without first putting significant thought into
which machines we should build first, in the sense that some machines
are going to allow the fabrication of other machines, and so on, to
the point that there wouldn't be a need for membership fees since the
right amount of work was done upfront to make it so that it's just
smooth sailing from there. But overall it's nice to have some machines
and tools in the first place. I feel like one of the unspoken issues
with all of these membership models and different ways of managing
fablabs is still heavily dependent on making appeals to older (social)
institutions, and so in order to cover ourselves we have to make some
sort of appeal or argument that makes sense, but meanwhile- in
reality- it should be technically possible to not bother, and just
come up with those beginning machines and start from scratch, a la
Gingery, and then the membership models are much more interesting. For
instance, consider the model for Factor E Farm, or consider the
hypothetical scenario that I have imagined for years- building some
sort of agricultural system, or food growing system, feeding
developers, housing the developers, and taking care of the basics, all
so that progress can go full circle right back into itself
(bootstrapping and such). And then the issue of time on tools, isn't-
it's an issue of building more tools; it's not an issue of authority,
it's an issue of putting in a request for more tools; I see that some
of these ideas were appropriately explored in The Skills of Xanadu,
which Paul recently made a few links to.
I see. When I plan trips around the city, or when I'm going somewhere,
I sometimes consider the consequences of going there, in terms of the
amount of time that will be spent just sitting around doing nothing in
order to get to that location, and then lack of tools that I have once
I get there. For many years I used to carry around as much as
possible, in as little space as possible in a backpack, which my
brother will be forever better at (e.g., Boyscouts camping training
regiments). And so sometimes going somewhere for one particular tool
isn't really worth it considering the lack of availability of my other
tools, and not much stuff can get done while I'm there. Recently, a
fellow from Wired twittered about wanting everyone to post a map of
their walk to work, and I've also for the past few months been playing
around with Google Maps mashups and other mapping services, some of
which have been accepted into the Google Summer of Code this summer,
and so the idea hit me that it would be interesting to play around
with maps that express travel distance or plot contours and the
differentials of a multivariable function in terms of tool
accessibility in that area. Naturally, traveling then takes on a new
dimension- a question of whether or not you're going to be able to
make certain things, or do certain things, in terms of capabilities
and capacities. The more of these technologies you implement and solve
at special locations on the maps, the better a destination spot you're
going to be for the traveling fabratorialists.
> on the instant ramen, frozen pizza, and MREs) Again, remember that
> Mens Shed coffee machine? I think some of your first practical
> projects might actually be an OS coffee machine, Slurpee machine, and
> pizza oven! And note that there is a lot of Maker activity that's
> better suited to a kitchen than a workshop. And think about the old
> Texas tradition of the community BBQ.
What could be more Texan than not only going to a BBQ event, but also
building the grills and slicing the meat when you get there? I like
it. It also speaks to the "flash mob assembling to build things" meme
that has been floating around recently.
> With this basic division of space, you organize the lab around noise;
Yes; for subletting portions of the lab, there's actually a price
gradient with respect to distance from noise sources here in Austin,
and of course sound partitions for the lounge areas and such.
> Flexible space is another important consideration, again, because you
> don't have the luxury of a campus to spill over onto. A workshop area
> should ideally have an open space big enough to drive a car into
> (sometimes you will...) that can be quickly utilized in different ways
> such as by setting up folding tables and chairs (Sams Club has these
> excellent height-adjusting PE tables), putting down some rubber mats
> or plastic pallets, etc, And it should, of course, have a direct path
> to any garage doors. Setting up a 'round table' conference in the
Yes. Another idea that I proposed was that of building movable walls
on wheels. Apparently this is how some office spaces are done these
days over at Microsoft. The problem though is that the cost of making
these walls is significant, and if the materials plus insulation can
be figured out, it's that much closer to a reality. Reconfigurable
space with movable walls could also be templated for different
occassions, i.e. press a button on the computer and off prints the
instructions for N people to help move walls A, B and C into the
correct spots for transformation xyz or occassion blah.
> storage space for tables and such. We'll need to know more about the
> specific building and its physical layout to get into details.
Strangely, I've been asked not to share the physical layout just yet.
> Now let's consider the stock room. The size of this and its overhead
> in terms of operating costs and member fees depends on how much stuff
> the club would want on-hand. Existing Fab Lab inventory lists are only
> suggestive and it looks to me based on simple assumptions of what the
> different fab tools commonly work with. It's also focused on teaching
> so some of its materials priorities differ a bit from what most Makers
> are using day to day. The practical inventory, however, is going to be
> determined/adjusted by the patterns in member use according to what
> things they tend to make. There can be varying priorities here from
> place to place and in different mixes of people. The basic strategy
> for stocking the lab is figuring out what materials the group tends to
> use the most so the lab can achieve a savings for the group buying in
> bulk. This takes some experience because, as I said, it will vary with
> the group. In an earlier forum post I mentioned the idea of
Implementing some software to keep track of BOMs is possible. The
reason why I like this idea so much is that it's feasible to implement
an inventory machine for dollying out the individual parts per a BOM.
This though would require either a large vending machine for
dispensing parts- which do in fact exist apparently- or maybe
converting a room to be a makeshift vending machine sprawled out over
the place. I don't know which way will end up happening, it's probably
an issue of whatever just happens first, maybe the software will be
written for only pushing parts to the side that are requested, which
is a suitable first step for demonstration purposes, or something.
> repurposing point-of-purchase/inventory software to help automate the
> lab supply. This is another place where that key club idea comes in.
> You can use the same digital access card people use to access the
> facility through electronic locks as a check-out card for materials
> which are labeled with bar codes. So a person can go into the stock
> room, fill up a tote box with the stuff they need, then swipe their
> card at a check-out station, and scan the items with a cheap wand-type
> bar code scanner just like using a self-check-out system in a
This will of course work best for big materials- there's no way I (or
anyone else) is going to be bothered to put RFID chips on the washers.
:-)
> supermarket. You can then bill them for materials use, if you use that
> pay-as-you-go model, or just keep track of the flow of materials so
> you know what needs to be restocked at any time. Very much like how
> the military does it, though they've been using RFID on everything
> lately. Many of these systems will even automate re-ordering from
> networked vendors so even that can be automated. Mind you, this would
> work in the kitchen too...
Yeah, it's been a dream for kitchens for a long time. My mother is in
the woodworking business, in particular, furniture restoration;
because of the state of the economy, many individuals are opting to
redo their kitchens instead of buying that new home that they were
thinking of. Unfortunately, I missed the opportunity to suggest
throwing in some electronics for these individuals, like cabinets and
refrigerator microcontrollers for keeping track of supplies, which is
a real shame- this is a perfect opportunity for those who are looking
to get some tech into the kitchen beyond piles of cookbooks and
forgotten grocery store lists scrawled out in five, no, six different
pen colors.
> If you think about the outfitting of the lab as initial project
> priority then you can easily define these projects in terms of
> specific furnishings for the lab and equipment you would rather make
> than buy. Since you're bootstrapping things a bit here, you can't be
> quite as refined with these early projects but if you already have a
> good core set of tools at hand, you should be able to produce some key
> furnishings. If you haven't already, I strongly suggest you get a copy
> of the old Box Beam Sourcebook, Ken Isaacs' How To Make Your Own
> Living Structures, Nomadic Furniture I & II, and as many of the T-slot
> companies' catalogs as you can. With these you have design guides for
Okay, I'll look into those.
> Focussing on the development of fab tool kits would be a smart
> approach to leveraging your member skills to generate money for the
> lab and founding a cooperative enterprise -and right now anything that
> can create some new jobs is going to be very well received in any
> community and would be eligible for incubator funding and the like.
That's an interesting way of looking at it. I've partly been avoiding
the task of market research for different items, simply because I
really don't like doing market research and figuring out how much of
what I have to say to get people convinced that a tool is going to be
bought, or whatever, simply because I don't really know how other
people work or think and so on. Although if it happens from the other
direction (a good idea happens to actually be marketable), then that's
great too. I wonder though if that incubator funding would happen even
without the market research though? Where would I look into that, the
chamber of commerce?
> Note also that I already have a T-slot Sourcebook project in the works
> and there was some recent interest lately expressed by the Jeriko
> House company in sponsoring it -though I haven't heard any follow-ups
> from the company president on this for a couple of weeks. Plan at the
> time was that the workshop he was building in New Orleans for Jeriko
> House production would co-produce some demo projects to my specs,
> their profiles suppliers would offer the materials and hardware, and
> the Jeriko Houses themselves would be used as photographic backdrops
> and examples of the highest form of use of the building tech. If you
> use T-slot at your lab, anything you come up with could potentially be
> added to this book. Or you might be able to help me make some of these
> planned T-slot demo projects, if Jeriko House can't come through. I'm
I don't remember you talking about this before, can you give an update
on this project? How are things going? Did you see the recent blog
item about a different type of slot fitting python script involving
gcode that Zach came up with? The same thing could be done with
T-slot, if I understand things correctly.
> having trouble figuring out how to make a small workshop fit with my
> adobe cottage here -let alone find the time to work on these things-,
> hence the idea of having Jeriko House make what I can't yet do here.
> These demo projects are intended to illustrate the diversity of T-slot
> uses (on top of archival examples found around the globe) and include;
> digital machine tools much as you've been planning (ie. the MultiTool
> idea), example furniture and lighting items, an integrated mini-
> workshop (where tools and workshop furnishing merge), a T-slot beam
> recumbent bike, a screened and raised outdoor summer sleeping shelter
> or guest pavilion (a modernist take on the Asian/Polynesian yoga or
> sleeping pavilion), a transportable hot tub (there's a Japanese
> interleaved wood frame design based on a membrane inner lining that
> I'm thinking of reverse-engineering), self-contained mini-hydroponics
> systems, electric indoor composter, computer enclosures, structurally
> integrated appliances (to work with Jeriko House buildings), simple
> robots (like the SpoolBot I've been thinking about lately and the
> RoboMule), and perhaps the Green Bug OScar if we can access the new
> large profiles. I so need to get up to date on the current version of
> Smart Sketch so I can start 'showing' these ideas instead of just
> talking about them...
It's entirely possible that I haven't understood T-slot in general, or
the possibilities that it would allow. Let's say that I could come up
with a way to automatically generate assembly instructions for certain
T-slot designs, i.e., "put this part here, put that part there, etc."-
then for all of these myriad different designs and tools that
structurally use T-slots, would it be useful to have a design
generator? For instance, would it be useful to let the user specify an
input mass and a requirement for force stability (or something), and
then calculate whether or not a certain design supports that? or maybe
it's more useful for motion stability. Again, this is probably just
because of my misunderstanding of what's going on, and if I had a
better understanding, some software could quickly be whipped up that
I'm sure you'd like. I just need some specifications or a better
understanding of the design methodology that comes from reasons to
think about the T-slot in the first place (etc.).
On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Eric Hunting <erich...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This sounds like a good approach and consistent with my thinking that,
> off the traditional campus and without an institution like a
> university to back it up, a lab needs to identify its specific
> community of core users, functioning and being sustained -funded- as a
> common resource for that community. Awareness of the concept and value
> of a fab lab isn't yet ubiquitous in our culture. Only a few locations
> in the world could probably sustain a model like these walk-in pay-as-
> you facilities like TechShop. Western culture in general still doesn't
TechShop isn't actually sustainable. At peak operating capacity,
there's simply not enough members that you can shove into the building
at once to pay for all of the machines per their membership fees, and
so on, to the extent that some non-insignificant portion of your
members might never get any shop time, etc.
> quite yet grasp a concept of 'industrial literacy' as it has computer
> literacy.
"From this combination of passion and inventiveness I began to get a
sense that what these students are really doing is reinventing
literacy. Literacy in the modern sense emerged in the Renaissance as
mastery of the liberal arts. This is liberal in the sense of
liberation, not politically liberal. The trivium and the quadrivium
represented the available means of expression. Since then we've boiled
that down to just reading and writing, but the means have changed
quite a bit since the Renaissance. In a very real sense post-digital
literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming.
I've even been taking my twins, now 6, in to use MIT's workshops; they
talk about going to MIT to make things they think of rather than going
to a toy store to buy what someone else has designed. The World Bank
is trying to close the digital divide by bringing IT to the masses.
The message coming back for the fab labs is that rather than IT for
the masses the real story is IT development for the masses. Rather
than the digital divide, the real story is that there's a fabrication
and an instrumentation divide. Computing for the rest of the world
only secondarily means browsing the Web; it demands rich means of
input and output to interface computing to their worlds. There was an
amazing moment as I was talking to these Army generals about how the
most profound implication of emerging technology for them might not
lie in designing a better weapon to win a war, but rather in giving
more people something else to do. So we're now at a cusp where
personal fabrication is poised to reinvent literacy in the developed
world, and to engage the intellectual capacity of the rest of the
world." - Neil Gershenfeld
On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Eric Hunting wrote:
> Here are some thoughts that have been mulling around lately. I've been
> thinking about the varied roles of different fab facilities, how they
> are diverging, how they relate to each other, and where this leads in
> terms of the integration of fab technology into the mainstream culture
> and business environment. What comes after the fab lab?
What comes after the fab lab? That's a delightful question. Space
habitats and space culture- where mostly everything must be
technically documented and recorded and executed- are one place where
fablabs would be needed. I originally began thinking about fablabs
because of von Neumann probes, or the concept of self-replicating
probes that were capable of building themselves. Eschel's two hands
drawing each other, or Bobbie Carlyle's self-made man chizzling
himself out of the finest marble. But why? The ability to "fork"
civilization in new directions, and then to maybe later merge it back
together, if necessary. To take responsibility and make sure that
there are enough resources for some level of growth, and knowing that
you're in the dark if you go beyond that. To me, there is not much
beyond a fablab, since within a fablab you have technically
"compressed" as much industrial civilization as you possibly can into
an entire package, and so from this it should be possible to "unfold"
into what we observe today, and into everything else- is there
anything "after" that? This question has been asked many times on
collaborative fiction sites like Orion's Arm, except from the
perspective of ai and other technological singularity issues, and
there does seem to be an 'after', but it's mostly a play on the same
original concepts. "Nuh-uh! My mage has a *billion* times more IQ!"
going in circles?
> It occurs to me that we are seeing the original fab lab concept
> diverge into a spectrum of facilities with different roles that
> present different possibilities in different settings. Here's how
> things appear to me to break down;
>
> Outreach/Educational Fab Lab
> Incubator Fab Lab
> Community Fab Lab
> Storefront Fab:
> Fab Shop
> Mercantile Fab
>
> Personal Fab: the ultimate evolution of fab facilities, the Personal
> Fab is just what its name implies; the tool set of the fab lab reduced
> to the scale of personal use. Even now these exist, though we don't
> hear much about them because individuals able to afford a $100,000
> workshop for their personal use aren't likely to boast openly about
> it. But the general trend with all these tools is the same as with the
> personal computer and we see a growing number of individuals buying -
> or making for themselves- lower-end versions of individual tools. This
> will create a race to maintain relevance for other types of fab
> facilities based on the need to push the edge in fabrication
> sophistication -to keep leading the trends that trickle back to the
> Personal Fab. But, short of the advent of nanotechnology, can the
> Personal Fab ever get ahead in this race?
One way to get the personal fab ahead in the race is that if the
community fab grandfathers them into existence. As soon as you start
building a personal fab per child in a community, and scale only at
the rate at which you can get a fab per child rolling (and perhaps it
should be a part of the child's educaton to help work on and build the
personal fab for himself). The adults are going to have to sit back
and play with the tools only in the community fab (or something) and
not be too overly upset about the awesome opportunity that the
children are getting that they never had. I also think that kinematic
self-replication can provide some solutions before nanotechnology has
to. I'm not sure it's much of a race of "personal vs. community fabs"-
ultimately I see it as an issue of personal fabrication overall, and
competition simply doesn't matter because I'll simply build my own
tools anyway :-).
> I think a key breakthrough here is going to be defining the equivalent
> of a PC platform that integrates the underlying tool component
> 'ecology' to a common fab standards platform, so that different kinds
> of fab tools get assembled at a high modular level in the same way an
> IBM PC does. Because form factors for machine tools are limited/