A laboratory of digital fabrication, serving as a prototyping platform of physical objects, with broad educational, social and economic advantages. These spaces aim to empower its members for the realization of sustainable solutions, using open source tools and equipment’s, to allow all the possibility of creating low cost products which meet the need for one, one hundred, or a thousand people.
Published in Chapter:
Fab Labs and Makerspaces for Learning and Innovation: The Case of Arhte Program in Brazil
Sérgio Maravilhas (UNIFACS Salvador University, Brazil) and Joberto S. B. Martins (UNIFACS Salvador University, Brazil)
Copyright: © 2018
|Pages: 12
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-3012-1.ch039
Abstract
A collaborative space for stimulating innovation is a place of learning through the exchange and sharing of knowledge and experience among its members. At the same time, it allows one to leverage innovation using technological resources available in the space, stimulating the creativity of its participants and enabling the development of products and solutions based on personal projects from ideation, or the construction supported on knowledge developed by other elements together, collaboratively, enhancing the final result. These spaces have several designations and typologies, like makerspaces, hackerspaces, techshops, and fab labs. In this chapter, the authors focus on a model, widely tested and in use in several places of the world, the fab lab. The possibility of implementing a fab lab, or fabrication laboratory, or fabulous laboratory, which is a laboratory of digital fabrication, serving as a prototyping platform of physical objects, with broad educational, social, and economic advantages will be analyzed and described.