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

The following people were previously involved in some part of the project:

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

Publications

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