FabLabs - Great but Not Everything

FabLabs – fabrication laboratories – including ours, are great, but they also aren’t everything.  Many FabLabs, perhaps most, are associated with institutions of higher learning, often tech colleges or junior colleges.  Ours is more free-standing, and from what I understand it is more centered on youth education than most.  All in all, this is probably a fine role as the earlier you can get kids to take chances on technology and on making things with their hands, the better.  This is doubly true for girls.

However, FabLabs for older teens and adults have a place as well, and ours probably doesn’t do quite as well as some that are aligned more with tech schools that can teach and reinforce the more advanced skills.  Still, I think all the FabLabs are missing a component that I and my friends always had while we were growing up at our houses:  junk.  Junk is a critical component as it provides material for experimentation, learning, and invention.  Unfortunately it’s also an eyesore and will run afoul of just about any HOA.  I think for teens, and probably for adults, a strong FabLab experience would include:

-          Free access to tools, with training on-site for those that require skill, and some supervision to keep things organized and in good repair.

-          Junk and raw materials, available for free or at least cheaply.   The wider the variety, the better.  A local junk pile, access to a junk yard, a supply of stock goods, and access to a hardware store would all be helpful.

-          Free or cheap consumables:  wire, solder, welding gas, rods, glues, tape, paint, etc.

-          Not much oversight or rules, with just enough rigor to keep things safe.

None of this needs to be very expensive, but it will take some monetary support.  I wonder if a cluster of related labs, say one for woodworking, another for metalworking, another for electronics, another for 3D printing and cutting, etc., each associated with a TTC or TCC lab, and with some oversight by a teacher or knowledgeable retiree, would work.  Again this would cost some money, but around here teachers are used to not being paid very much, and some sponsorship is reasonable.  After all, many companies are willing to pay recruiting fees and relocation costs for solid tech employees, and for the cost of couple such hirings a lab manager could be funded for a year, helping to grow a local supply and to point our those students with the best aptitudes for a given company’s needs.

The next step up from that is shop businesses, for outsourcing fab services for customers who need it.  I think this is much the thinking behind the Rawspace concept, fostering such businesses as startups themselves, with support from local customers.

And this now brings us around to the topic of Makers.  The term is popular, and vague, but really Makers are just people who build stuff, as professional craftsmen, skilled trades, hobbyists, and home crafters have for a long time.  The new take on such activities is that in an increasingly commoditized world of cheap mass-market goods built by automated machines and robots, there is a shrinking need for blue-collar workers.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the problem isn’t that jobs all went to China (though some did), but that so many jobs can be done better and more cheaply by robots.  Today, the US produces more than ever before, yet the blue-collar workforce is a fraction of what it once was.  The potential counter to such trends is bespoke, custom manufacturing, the one-size-fits-one paradigm, where those with sufficient means will pay extra to get higher-quality, personalized products of all sorts.  Plus, large-scale manufacturing struggles to address small product niches, and the low-cost-leader tends to push towards lower quality as well as lower costs.  Small scale Makers, either individually or in small-business shops, could address such niches at various price/quality points, and innovate to create new offerings and better variety.

Besides the points above about quality of a local FabLab and networking with local institutions and organizations, a FabLab network would be beneficial as well.  The equipment for a FabLab is expensive, and there is no reason each needs to replicate the same equipment beyond the common tools for skills training and basic fabrication.  For example, there is a FabLab in Independence KS, another in Wichita, and other nearby in Fayetteville, Muskogee, and OKC, all within range of day-trips or easy shipping.  If the one in KS gets a 3D metal printer for aircraft parts, the one in Tulsa has good 4D or 5D mills, and the one in OKC has a welding robot for tubing frames, then the collective value will be greater than if all chase the single latest and greatest tech widget. 

Today, there is an association of FabLabs, so some of this thinking is probably underway.  I’m not involved enough to know if they have gone so far as to create and share a regional vision and have active reciprocity and joint projects to spur personal networking.  This brings up an important point:  visions should be fractal and overlapping, not contrary, if the regional entities are going to be able to get support from state organization, who will in turn have an easy time finding support for local projects.  We all need to be heading the same way if we’re going to build virtuous cycles with speed (I guess this would then be angular momentum?).