haakon karlson jr

Fab Labs are workshops where almost anyone can design and make almost anything. Under the name Fab Labs or other names such as Tech Shops and Hackerspaces, hundreds of shared spaces are providing the means to design, prototype and produce new objects, to create installations, to customize existing products.

Fab Labs are made of computer controlled tools creating rapid prototypes of physical objects - and revolutionizing the fabrication processes. The initial program launched at the Media Lab at MIT in 2007, spread to all over the world. At Lift France 10 the Fab Lab pioneers Adrian Bowyer (University of Bath, UK), Ton Zijlstra (FabLab foundation Netherlands) and Haakon Karlsen Jr. (MIT FabLab Norway) presented their insights.

Adrian Bowyer (University of Bath, UK) introduced the session by presentation RepRap, a tool that is both used and produced in Fab Labs. It is a self-replicating machine made of a cheap desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Bowyer showed both the underlying principles of the RepRap and the community tools (such as the sharing of digital designs) and gave an outlook on the legal and economical implications of RepRap.