Applications and implications - Class 15

so we're done with the technical classes we've covered the basic skills from here on out the focus is on the final projects and the remaining classes the lectures are going to be context around what we've covered this week I'm going to step back to look at what you can do with all the skills week after that I'm going to talk about managing uh invention intellectual property income life cycle of projects in the lab the week after that I'm going to tour final projects and then we're up to the presentations already so no new technical content uh main focus is the final projects and the classes are going to be context so this week is now when we really pivot to focus on the final project you've survived the weekly pace of skills this first link is to in two weeks I'm gonna give you a tour of final projects so these are Greatest Hits From history of final projects I'm going to walk through a bunch of them to show you lots of different examples of what a final project looks like and in particular if you look at them you'll see almost all of you are well behind just on documenting your work of what goes into it and the final project is a masterpiece let's see uh hafi is asking about uh signing up uh we don't want to do sign ups until um here I'm getting in to check that we don't want to do sign ups until students are far enough along to be ready to sign up and um I'll have that for you in a second if May 24 th yeah so after the next class is then then we'll be ready to start with the sign ups for the final projects so let me explain Masterpiece in in English Masterpiece has come to refer to a a great work of art you know that you you say that's a masterpiece but that's not the the original meaning of the word the the meaning of Masterpiece is in a guild to graduate excuse me and become a member of The Guild you had to make a masterpiece it's a piece that shows mastery and so it's not specifically a great work of art it's something that demonstrates the skills for the guild to become a master and so your final project it could be a great work of art it could be a thesis it could be a startup it could be your life's work that's really up to you on our side we just want to see mastery the project is to show that you've mastered the individual skills and the real point is the integration so throughout the Fab Academy cycle we've covered all of these skills separately the final project is where you integrate them so the homework for this week is settle finally what's your final project so uh make a detailed proposal and the questions I want to know are what's your project going to do so we had the uh thing to count and share recycling uh who's done what beforehand so there's a notion of standing on the shoulders of giants of your predecessors at versus standing on their toes um I you can absolutely do something somebody's done before but the goal is not simply to replicate it or do a worse version the goal is to build on what came before you and do a better version so I want you to explore who's done what before and a good starting point is just the search engine we have built into the page so who's done what and so then how does your work relate to that at this stage I want to know what you're going to design you should have a complete system diagram you should have the inventory of the materials and components for the weekly assignments your Labs provided everything for the final project looking ahead to life beyond the class I want you to know where the things you're using come from and how much they'll cost and the guidance for that is the labs expect to spend tens of dollars a person on uh materials components supplies from the inventory uh you can go beyond that if you want to invest for example in higher quality wood things beyond what the class supplies but there's a basic amount of resources the lab can supply um anything beyond that doesn't change the evaluation it's just if you want them for how you're going to use the project I want to know at this stage what you need to make how you're going to make them and then an important thing at this stage is uh the questions you need to answer so um let me make a note on that so we had the phone projector a key question there is what sort of lenses they'll be and what kind of Optics and then one more thing I want you to at this stage look at is how should we about how should you and how should we evaluate your project so we want to know more than what I did we want to know did it work how how do you decide if it's successful what's the Criterion for evaluating it um and I I don't have a note here um but one more thing you should do this week for this week's assignment is make a detailed schedule between now and finishing so we're going to have four sessions for the final presentations and you really need a day by day schedule to be able to finish on time so make a detailed planning schedule now in the project I want to see that you can design in 2D in 3D I want to see you can use processes that are both additive and subtractive you can design and produce Electronics you can embed microcontrollers which means the microcontroller goes into your project not you into it um you can interface it you can program it and I'd say this is the most important one and often the worst one you don't just design the parts you need to design the system you need to make a design of how all the parts come together and then how you package it to present it so it's not just a a tangle of wires on a breadboard but it's an integrated system where you design the packaging and the this last part may seem like the smallest part but in some ways it's the hardest part and can take the most time then where possible I want you to make rather than buy things to learn how to do it and then you can work together but in a specific way we don't want it to separate to one person does hardware and one does software you need to make a complete separable system so that your project can be demonstrated in isolation but then you can make the systems that come together in a larger system so like if it's a drone project there's one whole system on propulsion one on navigation uh one can be on Mission payloads you can demonstrate and develop each of them separately but then integrate them in a more powerful drone now this requirement to integrate all of these skills that we've covered is for the masterpiece most projects you'll do in life don't need to check off all of these different skills in one project here what we're looking for is a somewhat artificial extra requirement that you take all these different skills and integrate them to drive system integration but it doesn't need to be heroic so you need a microcontroller to show that you know how to use them but it doesn't have to be a autonomous AI system in the microcontroller it's fine if it reads a button and controls the light we need to show that you can do each skill each skill doesn't need to be heroic again the real focus is integrating the skills so this week's assignment is you're going to finally drill in and make the detailed proposal and plan for your final project uh then looking ahead in the next week class where I talk about things like intellectual property you're going to start the work of the final presentation you're going to be making a video in a slide and this won't be done until you present but you should already have much of the work for the final project by this stage and so next week's assignment is you'll make draft of the summary slide in video then the week after that where I do the Torah final projects uh you finish working on it and I'll talk about project management in that class what you need to do in in the final push and then we'll be up to the presentation and in the presentation that's where you uh fill in the answers to the questions uh and you present the work okay so that's where we are and now what I want to do for the rest of today's class is take you on a tour of what you can do with the skills we've covered uh some of these links are very recent some are historical but they they give you a tour of now that we've covered all the things we've covered what you can do for each one oh the um the presentations Andre is asking their uh extremely short so the video is um let's see here um the video is about a minute long um at the pace we go to get through everybody it's just a few minutes a person and to understand this few minute pace uh a few minutes a person is just enough time to do the demonstration clip and um if possible show it live and then uh in the review process much more slowly we'll go through your website to see everything that you did but the live presentations you'll do it's just a few minutes a person um yeah and Ricardo is noting people tend to go towards the end uh um if you go to a session that's less crowded we can spend a little more um and then let's see Jason is asking about the LED example um yeah Jason so it something as simple as designing a circuit board where you design the circuit board and put a processor in it and it reads A Button as an input and controls an LED as the output that shows the skills that's a pretty low bar I hope I hope you'll do a little more than that but that embeds a microcontroller interfaces it and writes a program so it satisfies the letter but you should go a little bit further than just blinking an LED at this stage but but that does illustrate all the things I'm describing but yeah the presentations are very short it's just a few minutes a person we'll have a detailed minute by minute schedule and the video clip is about a minute long okay so let's take a tour now so one of the things you can do is uh medical intervention and this slide links to when the pandemic hit uh this is a repository of meetings of what grew to hundreds of people working on the response to the pandemic that was a good illustration so um one of the projects uh did um electron microscopy and airflow measurements to test and fluid simulation to test exposure to viruses um one developed and tested swabs for um making samples and there was a lot of work on uh protective equipment both for individuals but for Frontline healthcare workers that included uh Shields um uh stations for intubation one of the things that came out from it is for the Frontline healthcare workers the simple Shields people were making uh could be borderline uh useless or dangerous in that air could get in around them and they could trap particles in the way they were constructed and so in this project there was a lot of laboratory research on how to do these things effectively and safely but once that's done they turn into open designs and so for example the Mumbai Fab Lab coordinated PPE production across India in the scale of millions of units based on first doing this kind of curation and so the rapid prototyping response to the pandemic ended up filling a gap between do-it-yourself on small scales that does that responds quickly but doesn't scale and industrial production that's scalable but can't respond quickly and so the Fab Network uh stepped in and in this coordinated way helped with the uh pandemic response and there's links here to some videos that tell tell the story through that so Electronics uh you've learned to make Electronics uh Sean was one of the early Fab Academy instructors who really bonded with making electronics and so he started a company modern device where he sells the sort of things you've been making so you've been making you know Electronics of the week just that there's lots of different kinds of demand for it and so he started a company that sells uh the kind of electronics he was doing in the class then um I've mentioned this but just to recap it this was a student in the input device week um who did a nice project making a simple oscilloscope and so uh here he's digitizing a signal um so you can think about this as uh how to measure almost anything and uh Yani has been um keeping an index of these uh in your lab is test equipment uh with the tools we've uh been using you can make test equipment so you could you can make a volt meter you can make an oscilloscope um I'll link um uh there was a nice project uh uh somebody in a Fab Lab made a soldering iron I I have one of them in my office I don't recall who did that if anybody can remember that link but there was a nice Fab Lab project to make your own soldering iron um these things are increasingly um uh commoditized but making them is interesting because the skills are local the jobs are local you can customize them so you can make test equipment uh from there you can make um let's see uh Yani where's the page you've been keeping on um uh how to measure almost anything I'll look for the link I'll put it in the chat in a minute yeah I don't recall where that link was um so from Electronics comes consumer electronics this was a nice project from a student uh his final project was a boombox and so this is all the parts of it so uh here's a processor reading an SD card decoding MP3 going to an audio chain um with speakers with the controls um uh and um you know making complete uh consumer electronics as a project so uh this was a nice example of a nicely finished uh boombox and it's a simple but complete example of what I was describing of um system integration of how all the parts fit together so this was a a a surprising early version of making a phone this was one of the first uh DIY phones uh this was David um uh MIT student who took how to make who um for many years LED software for the Arduino project and he got interested in um uh making a cell phone and so this wasn't a high-end smartphone it was just a bit basic minimal Communication phone but using a basic um uh chipset uh he was able to go all the way through and make a basic audio phone from scratch and um more modern descendants from that are projects like um uh fairphone uh uh is an a much more advanced uh open phone project um but this was a hello world of actually making a phone from scratch um and Yani put in the chat um Fab measure is a page um uh looking at some of these open measurement projects um and then yeah again if somebody can recall the soldering iron if not I'll hunt back to find that so a basic phone then this was a few years back this was um Max and David who went on to co-found form labs and for remote communication uh they did a project to make a computer terminal so I I've mentioned how much I like uh uh curses just moving characters on a text terminal uh um there are web browsers that are simply reduced down to Tech space it's a very bandwidth efficient it needs simple displays and so uh with a more powerful processor and Dev board you can generate HDMI what they did was um with just a simple processor and I think this was a okay this was sdm32 it's fast enough to synthesize basic video signals and so for just a couple dollars in Parts they implemented a terminal it aimed at low that produces video output aimed at low-cost communication um and at this point you can buy uh relatively few dollar Dev boards that in Hardware do HDMI and it's just reaching the point now where you can do um digital this is analog video but you can do digital video and software on the fastest processors we're using uh so that's making a computer terminal then from a terminal um this was a nice project from uh bunny a legendary um uh student from MIT who's done all sorts of open projects and reverse engineering and he wanted to make a complete open source laptop and so uh this was a complete design of an open laptop and that uh one part of it over here is named for one of my students who worked with Nadia as the extension breadboarding part of it and he went all the way through um producing yeah here's bunny uh this open laptop it doesn't compete on price or performance on what you can buy but it's a completely open design you can reproduce and extend then once you have a laptop you need something to connect it to um the this uh yeah um Jason is linking to cyberdex uh this was a project that started in a lab in Afghanistan um went on to Kenya and it was there was no Telecom infrastructure and in the project we looked at a lot of different ways to make regional Networks and after testing many different types of radios and antennas what came out was something surprisingly simple which is in the background you see a segment of a parabola uh in uh the way the geometry works is um if you have a parabola and at the focus all the lines that come in straight uh reflect into the parabola into the focus and so rather than developing a special radio and antenna this is just a commodity Wi-Fi access point but it's put at the focus of the parabola and then you need to tweak the software a little bit for the delays for backup backing off um uh but what it then lets you do is make a link on the order of 10 kilometers and then once you have links on the order of many kilometers you can then set up a Citywide Network and in turn you can use that to do messaging uh without a um a telecom provider and uh you can cache local sources of information uh like Wikipedia The Fab archives all of that were supplied through it and so it was using the tools in the lab to now make a regional area Networks and I see Stephen is linking um Bunny's guide um so yeah this bunny is a great resource for Shenzhen um uh and also Eric pan who runs seed is another really good friend of the network and a great guy to send them and so uh you can really think about making Regional networks out of your lab where you actually manage and run uh the network not uh paying a provider then this is a link to a cubesat uh launch vehicles often have both space um uh in their fairings and some room in their weight budget and so there's a number of open projects to launch cubesats and if you look at a cubesat what's in here are just the sort of things we covered you need to make the frame you know you make the electronics you need to mount it a bit better so it doesn't vibrate but the kind of electronics in the cubesat is really no different than what we've been making and so there are a number of projects uh creating local space programs uh and so it it's not crazy to link up to one of these uh cubesat launch programs and there's a standard form factor for that uh shown in that image uh and you could have a space program in your Fab Lab and it really is realistic you really could do that uh this summer will be in Bhutan and uh Bhutan has launched its own um space agency working on small uh cubesats just like uh we've been talking about then this we've already talked a lot about um we're at the Fab 2.0 stage where you can make at this point all of the machines in your lab have open designs with good performance and so we're just at the edge of transitioning from buying Fab labs to making Fab labs and that's one of the most important Transitions and it's not simply to reproduce the machines in your lab it's uh the skills and jobs can be local but then the machines can be adapted to the local needs of the community in your lab materium already came up today and I want to stress that uh bit by bit we want to reduce the global Supply chains going into Fab labs and make them more sustainably locally you know ultimately that means things like making uh integrated circuits in the lab a little bit further out but a big one is just the materials so the materials for your laser cutter or the feedstock for your printer or the stock for large Machining there are a range of ways to Source them from forest products from waste plastic from all sorts of food waste let you make a range of high performance materials so Alicia has been devoted to it um you know this this is a bio composite made from eggshells uh just to take that as an example when you cook with eggs the the shells go in the trash but the eggshells are actually a really interesting uh uh material and there's a coffee grounds are another interesting waste material uh that you can make high performance materials out of uh so I really encourage thinking about uh how much of the material use in your lab can be sourced locally from your lab and a material is a great platform to coordinate that um and let's see uh uh if we go back to um uh one of the projects we did at Haystack Labs was a super wood and I think so um uh super wood um is a process um where you take wood and you densify it and you make something stronger than steel um out of just starting with uh wood so those are materials uh robots I I picked this as just an example um this is was done by uh two of my students this is and I don't recall if there's a video oh good yeah so um okay so this is a bounding robot that was used for studying Gates and um the whole thing was made um on a shopbot um this was a good example of just um uh uh every part here was machined on a shopbot to make this beautiful uh bounding robot uh other labs started by former student Saul has been a Pioneer in uh building uh inflatables and so by cutting and sewing you can make this is a robot that walks uh this is a car that you steer by leaning they've made dexterous arms um uh all by cutting sewing and inflating to make inflatable structures there have been a number of votes in Fab labs this this one was uh Sam who I showed you before this was a combination of two weeks in one week make something big he cut out the frame for the kayak and then in composite in Wild Card week uh he did the skin and so he laid up a skin and then um uh made a composite skin to seal it and he made this gorgeous uh kayak as a boat project in the lab foreign Ed to for the nice cardboard projects in Singapore uh this bicycle project uh so this was Kenny a former student now at Nasa uh he didn't uh at this stage makes the other parts of the bicycle it was just the bike frame but to make the custom bike frame uh it was just cut from cardboard and I mentioned this in Wild Card week and then he laid up the composite around it and the cardboard stayed within the composite um as the core of the composite and so that was an example of a custom bike frame uh made as a composite layup project uh fun project uh uh John um in 2022 uh made skis so he wanted to make electric ski skis and so he went through all the steps of uh and make something uh big he made the tooling and then uh he did the composite layup of all of the steps to um laminate and lay up the composite ski and Jean-Michel who works with the Fab Academy is also experimented with uh making custom skis this way uh there have been many um yeah let's see Jason is asking about Boston Dynamics so Boston Dynamics uh started from a colleague at MIT Mark raber he he's a colleague and um another colleague who's now the CTO of um Chief scientist at Toyota Gil Pratt was also involved in the early leg work but that was led by Mark raber who studied legs at MIT and then started Boston Dynamics there have been many drones and um uh Danielle and Gracia who's now in Germany uh uh uh did a beautiful job making complete drones in the lab where he did the whole stack where he made the Drone and the control system um uh as uh complete Fab Lab projects and then from there he went on to machine buildings this is an interesting emerging one uh this picture is the Barcelona Fab Lab and they did a Fab car project uh let's see this is a link to okay so their site is still up um and so this was a uh wood frame car for an electric vehicle um done as a project out of the Barcelona Fab Lab and with electric vehicles it's increasingly feasible to make a car the regulatory status of these is very much a work in progress um but EVS make um I've shown smaller versions of um uh vehicles uh in the last year's how to make at MIT um there was a nice um smaller vehicle project uh this one uh they made an electric ATV um as the class project let's see um and it was um oh let's see um yeah so uh that they made an all-terrain vehicle and this was a Fab car project so it's increasingly feasible to actually make real transportation for the environment a nice example is Tomas who runs Fab city took his Fab Academy project and developed a sensor kit and then the sensor kit became the basis of smart Citizen and smart citizen takes these sensors and then he Aggregates them to do Regional environmental monitoring and there are a number of examples where they've used this to have impacts on things like Regional policy and planning by doing distributed environmental data collection this is an interesting opportunity there hasn't been enough of this yet this is a project from uh Tom odeyo colloquially called shopbot Tom and I believe he was in Kenya uh and he fell in love with the shopbot um and so he did this is a project where he's making uh composite blades to make a wind power generator and so we've covered the Power Electronics covered Power Electronics we've seen some heliostat projects for PV and with the tools in the lab you can make uh turbines for you know you've learned how to spin Motors to make energy out running the same thing in the opposite direction is energy in to make turbines for energy conversion uh food uh Guillaume did a final project where he made an aquaponic system uh this is a a page that's tracking a number of different uh food related projects and then uh agrilab uh Luke and Agri lab is looking ahead to um how to grow almost anything or agricademy and so these are all uh oh good this has been updated since I saw this last um these are all projects using the tools we've covered to make food it's not uh molecular nanotechnology it's just taking uh traditional uh farming and you can do it in a number of different ways much more resource efficiently um by controlling the inputs and outputs this way and you can do it vertically and you can do it in things like Urban environments and so yeah I think food is going to be a I was going to say killer application it's sort of an anti-killer application it's it's it's a health not a killer application of using your lab to make infrastructure to grow food foreign this is a link to uh Tools in a bio lab made in a Fab Lab so one of the sister classes is uh bioacademy and you can essentially make all the tools now in a bio lab in a Fab Lab so you can use your Fab Lab to start a bio lab you still need reagents for it but all of the biolab tools can be made in the Fab Lab this is one of my students Manu did a really interesting talk on making a one dollar microscope and it's done by folding it and making a single Precision lens and this is good enough to see at the limit of what an optical microscope can resolve Micron scale to see micro microbial worlds micro worlds and this has been very successful millions of these folded microscopes and then I had mentioned uh for ULU uh in this project working with the National Institute of Standards in the U.S we looked at making not simple citizen science of something like measuring temperature or light but Advanced citizen science of making scientific instruments and so um there are videos here of the talks uh Richard makes uses flexures which we talked about to make Precision motion systems for high resolution microscopes um he makes Raman spectrometers and a Raman spectrometer is one of the main tools for chemical information so you can use it to do a chemical characterization of materials um uh these are talks on making instruments that do open materials measurements to characterize material properties um uh he does wild stuff he takes uh elements of consumer electronics like a CD player and then turns them into biosensors and turns them into Atomic Force microscopes to do atomic scale resolution and so you you really could in your lab make an AFM an atomic Force microscope to to do um to see atoms um uh Gideon's asking about uh the the um uh use in fiber optics uh Raman transitions um our uh energy inelastic and so it in one case you're using the transition to add energy to a system for gain um in spectroscopy you're using these Raman transitions to learn about chemical information um so all of these are a surprising range of scientific instruments you can make in your lab um this is a link to a project that's um uh developed uh Prosthetics and um there's now a lively collaboration um Adriana are you on um there's a lively collaboration on Fab care and I don't recall the site for that um but there's a lively group of Fab Labs working on a range of uh assistive technology and in particular a range of Prosthetics you can use for all sorts of disabilities you can make in the lab um uh so link from Adrian on this but and okay good yeah this is the Fab care link I was looking at this is a collaboration across Fab Labs developing um a range of assistive Technologies uh shoes this was a nice project um uh uh uh from a student who um wanted to make sneakers and so uh um what he's doing here is it's molding and casting um he makes a mold and then um the mold then has this um inset structure and the logic of this is um the first casting is with a fairly flexible material and that's the deformation of the Soul and then the the the posts then get filled with the second material um that's uh stiffer and then that's what gives you the support So this it's a very anisotropic material it supports you well vertically but then it flexes uh horizontally and he used that to make uh custom sneakers so once you can make uh sneakers then uh there have been all sorts of clothes related projects so uh kniterate overlaps with a few Fab labs and has slowly come to life um making an open knitting machine and uh the software development developer for that worked uh spent a while in my lab and now he has uh a startup doing stuff like this as a cloud service but this is a computerized knitting machines are about a hundred thousand dollar investment this is bringing it down to ten thousand dollar scale um to do programmable knitting and this is likely to be an important part of if you think about Fab cities producing what they consume um an important part of local clothing Productions um this started in part as an open project became a business uh it's still percolating there's a few versions of open projects uh to pick up this lineage of open knitting um that that's very much in transition right now uh uh to men to explain our um I've mentioned a few times Haystack this is in the U.S the premier Retreat for craft and so at Haystack they have Studios for making Ceramics doing glass blowing woodworking um blacksmithing Fine Jewelry uh working with fibers Printing and in the middle of that we set up a Fab Lab and initially it was very controversial there there's a real kind of battle between how craft related to The Fab Lab but very quickly it got adopted because in in this setting nobody designs there on the computer they design in traditional media but they use the Fab Lab as a transformation device so there was an artist struck by the light on the ocean in Maine how it it sparkled and so we worked with her to take images of that turned it into topography and then use that to slump glass so that the glass sparkled like the ocean or another example is this is intaglio printing where you print into plates that deform so that the printing is raised and it was a previously very tedious to make the intaglio print plates but we found the PCB Milling process makes perfect uh italio print plates and so artists would draw by hand um the the printing they wanted to do and then make these print plates or another example was uh using the shopbot they could make small sketches and then we could turn them into huge blocks for wood block printing to do giant prints and so these are all examples of using the lab not as a design tool but as in transformation tool to make things bigger smaller stronger for art Michelle's noting laser engraving for linoleum stamps again for printing printmaking there are also a lot of problems there that one of the reasons why I like this lab so much is it challenges everything that we do so for example the the mods project started because originally we used just commercial Cam software but kept tripping over artists wanting to make something on a machine that wasn't designed for it and then there are all sorts of experiments with materials there many of which fail like we discovered uh some an artist wanted to laser cut hair and it turns out it's a really bad idea it smells terrible and it ignites and just don't laser-cut hair but there's a lot of really interesting experimenting like that there uh Alex Alum from the vogfab lab Made Beautiful musical instruments so um he got obsessed with making a bass guitar and he spent quite a while um doing this gorgeous City I don't know if I don't see more pictures um but uh made this beautiful bass guitar um just combining the Machining we do with the electronics so making the whole thing um and then um he got interested in these um uh tongue drums and uh again this gorgeous drum was just made with the tools we've covered um but as a Fab Lab project so making a custom musical instruments uh Furniture Ohad are you on today yeah no he's uh so he's not here today um this is a wonderful story out of uh ohad's lab in Holland um the so yeah this is was a mixed Community a low-income community uh in it um the uh there was what was supposed to be a um community space uh that was uh sad and completely neglected and so this tells the story of Ohad did a workshop with kids from the community where he asked them to design what they wanted in their space um to design the furniture in the space then he worked with them in the Fab okay good yeah there are these images so they did design studies to design the furniture um then he worked with them to make the furniture in the lab and then it became their lab and it had this huge impact it transformed the space because it was now a space that um they designed that they inspired uh and many of them were inspired so inspired from this they wanted to study digital fabrication and become designers and it opened their eyes to new opportunities in life and so I I really like the model of when you create a Fab Lab you don't buy the furniture you get the lab working and then you make the furniture in the lab um uh Vanessa remind me Vanessa what's your platform link yes I will if you can put that in the chat we've seen it before and yeah the um the web type yeah um uh I won't spend more time on it now because uh she's going to join the recitation on startups we're going to do not in the coming Monday but after that on uh this startup she has around this uh Furniture creation program and you can press a test that prototype okay um okay okay well um we'll we'll see this uh in the startup recitation but just quickly uh she has this nice platform that lets you uh customize the furniture and then make the custom furniture yep um so you can really think about making the furniture in your lab in your community so then from furniture I'd say the biggest tab lab project ever was the this where um it almost killed the Barcelona lab but they made a solar house they did contract out some of the cutting just for capacity but the whole thing was done out of the lab the only thing they didn't do in the lab was the control system for the smart house for the solar decathlon and that was the one thing that didn't work well the commercial solution and in retrospect they wish they had done that internally but they made this solar house with all the furniture in it as a large-scale rapid prototyping project um so that was a really impressive one and then there are a number of other related ones like uh uh Wiki house which is just doing exactly the sort of large format Machining we've been doing but um yeah you saw the giant uh bear from Singapore in cardboard if you make it in um more permanent Structural Materials you can then make shelter and so these are all projects making uh housing um then um Dan actually yeah rather than here let me move this to um is Danielle connected um so in machines came out of Danielle's machine building and from there they've developed an Open Lab starter kit and you saw this in the machine recitation and so now this is not just a machine but they've put together all of the machines um uh to make uh uh a complete lab from scratch um and let's see the um mobile labs in Ukraine Danielle has been outfitting to help with the Reconstruction in Ukraine um and so this is a vlog project uh casting with mud explain this Hank it was already a long time ago it was at the picnic Festival uh okay used ancient building techniques together with the video I generated designs interesting and I think yeah Jason is suggesting The Bard in Bhutan doing composite and when I say composite um the composite can be friendly it can be natural fibers and biorresence but to lay up on cardboard to make um shelter would be a great Bhutan project um Blair are you on today um so Blair who led the Fab Lab in Detroit and is now working in a really interesting um community in Northern uh Michigan um uh let me see if we can find a link for that um uh um uh he's yeah um Blair after leading the lab in Detroit is now um doing this in Idlewild which was a historic um vacation spot for black people that fell into disrepair and now he's leading a a Renaissance a renewal of this community and what let's see yeah there's a um a few good links on that I'll I'll move this link to there uh what he's doing now is designing communities he's actually really designing how a whole Community functions and so it's not not just a machine or a project but um building a community so I'll come back to this link uh this is the Fab city project and so let me go back and explain that in a little more detail uh Vicente gay art uh helped start the Fab Lab in Barcelona and to understand the history of that if you look at um The Institute for advanced architecture of Catalonia is this impressive space with these impressive programs and the way it started originally was this group of Founders wanted to let's see let's go back to react Fab Lab um the uh if you look at just the range of programs run out of the Fab Lab they originally just needed a place to get a large format machine to make things and so they wanted to get a warehouse and so to get the warehouse they needed to invent an organization and so they made up The Institute for advanced architecture of Catalonia but it then became real so that became the Fab Lab and then over a period of years it grew into the city planning because Barcelona has a fabulous design sense but historically it's had a huge youth unemployment roughly 50 percent youth unemployment so limiting the ability of a generation to work and so Vicente became the city planner of Barcelona Gowdy's descendant in charge of City Planning and what he led was creating uh a network of ateliers they called them a Fab labs in Barcelona in communities with the notion that instead of products going in one side and trash going out the other side that the atoms would stay but the bits would come and go and so that idea led to the Fab city initiative which is a 40-year countdown to Urban self-sufficiency and it's not a step at the end it's a few percent a year and it led to dramatic things I was on one trip where at the very edge of Barcelona pushed up against the Hills was was a uh poor immigrant community and um one of these Labs was going to come in and they had a protest saying we don't want a lab we just need food give us a food bank and I was at a dramatic session with that session with them where the city explained you can have a food bank but you're going to depend on us to supply it and at some point it'll stop or with the lab you can make all the things I've just described you can make furniture and you can make systems to grow food um uh and there was this really dramatic pivot where the community then embraced this notion of having those skills this was a planning project to look at taking pobla now the district around the Barcelona lab and building a complete economy around it and so if you take everything I've spent the last hour walking through these are all the ingredients you need for a city to produce what it consumes uh and so there's a small set of high-tech Global consumables like say Precision end mills or microcontrollers but much of the rest of the supply chain can be made locally and so the Fab city program has grown into um this complete autonomous sister program with about 50 cities around the world with a series of programs um with overlapping events so in Bhutan there'll be an overlapping Gathering of these uh Fab cities and one of the newest things happening is what's starting to emerge are uh Fab city labs and so the idea of the Fab city labs are um uh labs to develop and propagate best practices in all of these other things I've been talking about so best practices in for example aquaponics and hydroponics of you know what are the resources in what is the productivity out how much food can you grow in a certain time in a certain volume designs for micro turbines things like that building up the the technology base for Fab cities um yeah Jason is noting uh in um I have Linked In the recitation for Fab All In uh uh Blair in that talks about uh his work on building community uh and so Jason has in the chat um uh a link uh Blair talking about that uh and so it's this really interesting thoughtful exercise exercise in hearing um uh how to build a community Jason is also not knowing Rico talked about how to run a noodle shop as in how to how to make these things uh economically sustainable uh and then this last link is um there could be many links for this last one um but this is one I wrote uh with my brothers uh Alan who led the biggest video game Studio at Activision and uh Joel who led the National Labor Relations organization and they were excited by the research roadmap for digital fabrication but concerned by how it goes out into society and um the internet started with great libertarian Vision but didn't really anticipate things like spam and fake news and income inequality and so in the same sense they were concerned about how digital fabrication goes into society expanding rather than reducing access which is very much the um story of the uh Fab all in and so a again in the in addition to the um uh Fab all-in recitation in the education uh recitation there was description let's see oh I guess we didn't cover it here because we covered it there but fabwal in has emerged as an academy program and will be running again this fall an extending access what this article is looking at is the economic implications of uh self-production and so there's a basket of goods today that are used to measure things like inflation uh Consumer Price Index and um you can't yet make everything in that in the Fab Lab but increasingly components of the basket of goods consumers create can be made in the lab and it really changes a lot um uh among the most sensitive issues right now are diverging income uh employment uh competition between parts of the world um uh inflation tariffs barriers to trade are all among the most sensitive battles if you go in the lab and make all the things I've spent the last hour talking about it's not Utopia it's not free but it fundamentally changes those assumptions um and let's see the Adrian is posting the link I was looking for which is uh the Fab Ballin program from the last cycle and then it'll start again um this fall um let me add that and so when you make something in the lab you could make it for yourself um you could do it for friends and family you could do it as a small business you could do it one size larger on a community scale but if you take the range of things I just did in this tour it means you can replace a lot of Global Supply chains with local production it eliminates the need for the infrastructure to ship things long distances it it eliminates the competition over that skills and jobs are local um but then what it means is you don't need government to do things like regulate ports for import and things that are typically hard power you do need soft power you do need help in the logistics of this transition to sustainable local production and so many of the things governments do aren't relevant many of the things they don't do are needed and it detours around many of the most sensitive battles in the world today and so ultimately if you take all of the other things in this tour what we're really really doing is inventing a new notion of an economy a long time ago agrarian economy was purely local then we went to Pure purely Global based on consumption now we can marry the best of you can produce locally um but you can connect globally in this hybrid really inventing a new notion of what is an economy and ultimately that's really what we're doing the technology you know uh the technology I covered in this class will become obsolete in the coming years as each of these skills changes so you know we're starting to storyboard the future of Fab Academy and a few years out you'll learn to make an integrated circuit in a few more years you'll learn to microassemble an integrated circuit all of that's going to evolve but what's not going to change really is this there's going to be faster better cheaper ways to to make things but what you can make you can already do today and it has these echoing implications of ultimately we're in Reinventing how an economy fun you know from commute from a lab to a community to a city to a country to how an economy functions so all of that is a tour through what you can do with the skills we've covered next week I'm going to talk about just mechanics of managing invention through life cycle and then the week after that I'm going to give you a tour through final projects through the years and then we'll be up to the final presentations so hopefully this tour inspired and challenged you to think about what you could try to accomplish and this week now you drill in to the final project plan so the once again the homework is uh set up all of these questions and then in the final presentation you'll answer them and I'm going to add one more line I left off which is uh make a schedule I'm going to add um just one more question which is make a schedule for what will happen when okay any final questions or comments okay if not Saturday open time uh let's see well Jason has an interesting question um it's a really relevant question he says any career implications the reason that's relevant is uh I so this is something I'm in particular starting to work on from Academy classes we've created educational paths where we're moving up for a more advanced study but there's lots of examples of people um coming through Fab Academy and then going for more advanced study um there are examples of people going through and then getting um hired by existing companies they're examples of startups coming out but I would my criticism would be we have lots of examples of life-changing experiences through Fab Academy but we haven't done a good job on the helping with the transition to the career stages afterwards so something I'll talk about at the startup recitation is what's emerging is a distributed incubator where rather than you going to the incubator the incubator comes to you in the same way Fab Academy does is something to help build um alternative career pathways through the network uh Jason it's a good question because I'd say anecdotally they're lots of examples but but institutionally systemically we haven't done a great job with the infrastructure for career transitions it's it's a bit similar to you know a a university has a career office and um we really um uh same thing Ricardo is asking about the HR platform we've been working on building a job site but it doesn't it hasn't quite gotten traction we're working to refresh that that we get a lot of requests to hire people with the skills and people looking for jobs um uh uh as part of this incubator we also want to refresh the job site this this is uh very much a work in progress to help fill in it's an important question to end today with okay so take advantage of Saturday open time the team great team that runs that no recitation this Monday and uh the following week we startups and really uh more than anything here um um uh work on schedule the most important thing for this week is make a plan between now and finishing and we want to get as many of you through on that schedule if you uh fail that you haven't failed you'll just finish on the next cycle but we want to get as many through as possible okay so that's the world of what you can do with the skills you've learned and I'll see you all next Wednesday bye bye thank you [Music]

2023-06-25 13:17

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