Dear Reader!

I am Aysheshim Tilahun from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I am here to say about the impression that I have just the moment I got to Barcelona and especially to the purpose related to my education in FabLab Academy. Well, Barcelona is a big and interesting City, especially to any one of my kind who is raised in rural area. but here I would like to say something about FabLab…far from my expectations, smart people leading the lab, inventions taken as day to day assignments, and state of the art machines.
My impression starts in Addis, when Tomas, one of the Fab Members from Barcelona had told us about the machines, the Video Conference and ….
But most of all, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I have seen the machines and our remote instructor Neil Gershenfeld from MIT teaching us about the Fab formation, the Fab forums, the ‘how to proceeds’ and finally giving us assignment about thinking of a self reproducing machine.

As a chance I am feeling more glad as I get to know more about the Lab and people, rather families of the Fab Lab.

Well, I hope finalizing the course and starting the job with the Fab family, I can be one effective person that the world will recognize.

Aysheshim Tilahun

Barcelona

Spain

Desde el 5 al 10 de Enero se llevo a cabo el “Boot Camp” Fab Lab en Noruega. Este taller se ha convertido en una tradicion dentro de la comunidad de Fab Labs. Este año ha contado con la participación de diferentes laboratorios como el de Amsterdam, Islandia, o Barcelona por nombrar algunos. Haakon Karlsen Jr. fue el anfitrion de un evento en cual ademas se discutieron varios proyectos como el Solar Decathlon 2010 (IaaC), o el lanzamiento de diferentes iniciativas dentro de la red mundial de Fab Labs, entre las cuales estan; el Fab Foundation (Soporte para los labs existentes y los nuevos por venir), Fab Fund (Plataforma comercial para los labs) o el Fab Academy (Programa de estudios en fabricación digital); con referencia a este ultimo, el Fab Lab Bcn anuncia que será una de las sedes en el año 1 del Fab Academy, conjuntamente con otros laboratorios del mundo.

Fab Academy será el primer campus educativo distribuido de manera global. Como parte del programa piloto de este proyecto, el Fab Lab Bcn participa en la clase How To Make Almost Anything (Como hacer casi todo?) que enseña el Prof. Neil Gershenfeld en el Massachusetts Institute of Technology, las presentaciones finales incluyeron proyectos de los alumnos del Prof. Gershenfeld en el MIT y Fab Labs a nivel global, el Fab Lab Bcn presento los proyectos de Victor Viña, Daniel Ibañez y Tomas Diez.
Siguiendo con la filosofía de los Fab Labs el programa de estudios Fab Lab Academy esta basado en las nuevas tecnologías de fabricación digital y su inclusión en la vida cotidiana de la sociedad en general, permitiendo personalizar elementos hasta ahora producidos por procesos industrializados.

IaaC hosted the launching meeting of the Fab Academy program together with the MIT CBA and different Fab Labs of the world. Fab Academy is a distributed educational program based on the digital and personal fabrication.

The Fab Academy will provide instruction and supervise investigation of mechanisms, applications, and implications of digital fabrication. Field “fab labs” are providing early access to these capabilities, through prototype tools for personal fabrication.
Instead of traveling to a distant campus, or connecting remote sites for distance learning from a central hub, a global network of local labs can itself become a distributed campus. This is the mission of the Fab Academy. The Fab Academy emerged from the experience of students who had exhausted local educational opportunities and came to fab labs for informal, peer-to-peer, project-based technical education, mentored by a growing group of faculty from around the world. Classes will be taught via networked video to students in fab labs around the world, with collaboratively developed online instructional material. Because there is no international accreditation, the Fab Academy will undertake applicable local and regional accreditation procedures; however the program content will be shared across these.

Fab Lab Bcn is compromised with this evolving and innovative educational project.