af-FAB-le
A summary of the outcomes of the af-FAB-le project.
Af-FAB-le is a research project financed the French Agence Nationale de Recherche. It aims to augment fabrication workshops (fab labs, maker spaces etc) to facilitate the capture and resuse of knowledge generated and consumed in such spaces.
People
The following people are currently involved in this project
- Clara Rigaud (PhD student)
- Yvonne Jansen (CR CNRS, project lead)
- Gilles Bailly (CR CNRS, collaborator)
- Ignacio Avellino (CR CNRS, collaborator)
- Christian Simon (Directeur du Fablab Sorbonne Université)
The following people were previously involved in some part of the project:
- Tiffany Wun (intern, May 2018 - July 2018)
- Delphine Son (intern, July 2018 - August 2018)
- Arthus Grisel-Davi (intern, June - August 2019)
- Vincent Roudaut (engineer, November 2019 - Octo 2020)
- Kevin Jabbour (intern, March 2020 - Aug 2020)
Context
Fab labs are workshops which make powerful fabrication machines available to a wide audience to create physical and computational artifacts. The machinery available in fab labs was previously solely available to experts, partly because it is expensive and partly because their use requires a certain level of expertise. Yet no prior knowledge is required to become a fab lab user, and the main ways in which users can acquire knowledge is through tutorials offered by fab lab staff, through guides and documentations found online, and through free exchange between users. However, documentation is mostly seen as a burden and thus commonly neglected by fab lab users.
Recognizing both the importance of sharing knowledge and the overhead that documentation puts on users, we aim with this project to integrate knowledge documentation into the fabrication process such that (1) the extra effort required to document is considerably reduced, and (2) users experience the benefit of documenting their activities more directly by being able to make immediate use of prior knowledge during their fabrication activities.
Results
- We report findings from a survey inquiring about capturing practices and needs. Find a summary here.
- We present the Capush framework and set of prototypes based on the framework’s design principles (see below for details on each).
- We discuss the potential and limitations of automating content capture for documentation. Find our position paper here.
- We review the literature to identify objectives and challenges of knowledge resources in maker spaces here (in French).
Publications
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