HUGH DUTTON ASSOCIATES will participate in the MONA_LISA PAVILLION WORKSHOP and will give a lecture on Monday, 21st of Mai with the title PARAMETRIC DESIGN + COMPLEX GEOMETRIES + NEW TECHNOLOGIES. Thanks to Politecnico di Torino and Antonio Spinelli for inviting us to this event where we will also meet Andrea Graziano, an italian parametric designer who is also a very active member of the parametric network on the web. You can find below a draft of our presentation and an embed of Andrea Graziano’s lecture.

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PARAMETRIC DESIGN + COMPLEX GEOMETRIES + NEW TECHNOLOGIES
a lecture by HUGH DUTTON ASSOCIATES

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IN[FORM]ATION
a lecture by Alessio Erioli, Andrea Graziano
more info at co-de-it.com

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PHOTO: AAG PROCEEDING 2010 – SOURCE: aag12.architecturalgeometry.at

En ce moment à l’agence nous préparons un paper/workshop pour le congres ADVANCES IN ARCHITECTURAL GEOMETRY qui se tiendra au Centre Pompidou (@centrepompidou sur twitter) le 27 et le 28 septembre 2012.
Si vous voulez participer, la date limite de réception des articles ou ateliers est le 15 mai (plus d’informations ici)

AAG is a symposium presenting theoretical works and practices linked to new geometrical developments applicable to architecture.

This symposium aims to gather the diverse components of contemporary architectural trends which push the building envelope towards free form and respond to the multiple current design challenges with a renewed mathematical rigor.

It involves architects, engineers, software designers and contractors.

AAG has become a reference in the professional field and is supported by the direct participation of the most renowned architectural design and engineering offices along with academic laboratories.

L’édition 2012 de AAG est organisé par RFR, dans le cadre du programme de recherche européen IAPP, auquel participent TU WIEN, EVOLUTE et RFR.

En collaboration avec Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais et avec le support de Centre Pompidou où aura lieu le congrès.

Today we feature Open Energy Visualization by Fran Castillo.
The project is related to our recent researches about SMART HOUSING, REAL-TIME CITIES, and PARTICIPATORY SENSING

Open Energy aims to develop a platform to explore new systems of visualization and optimization for energy consumption, both in domestic and industrial environments.

The project has two dimensions: the first one, Energy Monitoring Device, investigates open hardware devices for monitoring power consumption and the second one, Open Energy Visualization (Data Visualization / Augmented Reality App – photo above), which explores new ways of real-time visualization power consumption in domestic environments.

“The citizens need to have their needs and desires addressed to create their own quality environment. IT IS A QUESTION OF INFORMATION”
Hugh Dutton at SMART TURIN WORKSHOP

Open Energy will allow us to amplify our knowledge about the dynamic behavior of our relation with energy.

Open Energy is an Open Source prototype. In view of the upcoming Internet of Things, Open Energy offers the design of a visualization system which is inserted into a new energy distribution model, where new technologies allow a decentralized production of electricity at a global scale, defining new frameworks for sustainability.

Open Energy Visualization (OEV) is a real-time visualization software for power consumption (kWh) and CO2 levels (g) in housing. OEV seeks to implement the design of a Smart Grid system (intelligent electric distribution network) by using visualization technologies, sensors systems and autonomous electricity production, in order to optimize the global energy distribution.

These visualization structures will allow new ways of relationship between energy and humans. Real-time visualization of power consumption and simulation of future behaviors will constitute a new information system for CO2 levels and real-time value of the electricity.

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MORE INFO ABOUT THE PROJECT AND ITS APPLICATIONS AT openenergy.francastillo.net

Le mois dernier, invités par l’association Assaut Vert et avec la participation de la doctorante Aurélie de Boissieu de DNArchi et le professeur Claire Pétetin, nous avons tenu à l’École de Versailles une conference sur l’Architecture paramétrique et libre de droit, en abordant le sujet de l’architecture paramétrique avec des cas d’application concrète. Retrouvez ci-dessous le support de présentation de la conference en PDF et, bien sur, librement téléchargeable et réutilisable [Licence Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0]

Pour une lecture plus confortable, vous pouvez visualiser le document en plein écran ou bien le télécharger en haute résolution suivant le lien ci-dessous. La conference contient des projets de l’agence Hugh Dutton Associés comme les PYLONS OF THE FUTURE, la passerelle pour LA ROCHE SUR YON et le projet TURIN SMART CITY. Egalement, la conference cite comme exemples d’expériences réalisées les projet AIR TREE COMMONS et DREAMHAMAR de l’agence ECOSISTEMA URBANO.

TÉLÉCHARGEMENT /// ARCHITECTURE PARAMÉTRIQUE ET ARCHITECTURE PARTICIPATIVE [PDF]

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Retrouvez également notre conference VERS UNE ARCHITECTURE PARAMÉTRIQUE.

A few months ago we shared with you a free download of our CAD Standards and we were surprised to see that the post became one of the most read of our blog with 2933 pageviews and almost 2000 downloads in total. This was also a good occasion to connect with other people who were working on the same problem.

As Phil from Hugh Dutton Associates explained in his post, “much of this standard is designed to be applied to both AutoCAD and Rhino (and possibly other design software programs which may be used), with the aim of increasing compatibility between the two. Since then, Gary and other guys have been asking for our Rhinoceros template files and today we finally share with you our work-in-progress. Please don’t hesitate to download and try them and share with us your comments!

DOWNLOAD RHINOCEROS TEMPLATE - work in progress (133)

In Guangzhou Swire Properties have recently completed a mixed used commercial development taking up a full city block on comprising hotels, offices and shopping including a cultural centre for the city. TaiKoo Hui is a large-scale multi-faceted complex in the thriving heart of the Tianhe Central Business District of Guangzhou, developed and managed by Swire Properties. Offering a gross floor area of approximately 358,000 sqm (exclusive of the cultural center), it incorporates a prime shopping mall, two Grade A office towers, a cultural center, the first Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Guangzhou, and serviced apartments. More info at taikoohui.com

Daylight is a key ingredient to the Taikoo Hui shopping centre, and notably with the intent to flood the mall with light deep into the lower and basement levels. The glass components designed by Hugh Dutton Associates celebrate daylight. They provide sculptural expression that responds to light through filtering it, diffusing it, playing with it’s shadows, reflecting it.

Hugh Dutton Associates were engaged by Swire as specialist design consultants to architects Arquitectonica for all the feature glazing components of the development; notably the main entrance atria boxes, and waving linear skylight down the central spine of the shopping mall.

Other fragments, such as the cultural centre lobby, glass footbridges, office building and hotel lobbies and canopies, glass flooring and glass canopies, are carried out in a similar design approach based on simple geometric compositions that play with light. Waffle grids in the case of the entrance box atria and a curvilinear series of glass facets for the main skylight. For both, the simple surfaces are reinforced with tensile bracing systems that complement the design composition with points of interest or spatial geometric compositions. Careful attention is paid to the design of the assembly details and structural components.

The glass box atria are waffle grids in welded steel plate ant then clad in aluminium casings to conceal the connection details and glazing joints. The long spans are assisted with the cable and inverted pyramid struts that culminate in a custom feature steel casting. A notable feature of the glass boxes are the glass to glass corners the play a key role in the feeling of transparency and lightness. The boxes are more waffle surfaces that play with light than they are devices for spatial containment.

The skylight roof comprises a series of facets of planar glass that describe an undulating surface from one end of the mall to the other. The undulations peak over the escalator exits to provide access onto the level 3 landscaped deck. The cable system assists the cross beams to span across the void of the mall but also protection against uplift forces in typhoon conditions.

In all cases the glass is fritted and treated to limit excessive glare. Black dots are printed on the glass surface to attenuate the glare, whilst still letting light flood into the space below.

Inside the mall, glass footbridges reinforce the use of glass as an expression of the light penetration into the mall. Conceived as the thinnest translucent wafers possible, 450mm deep for 16m approx. spans, they are supported by a tight array of heavy steel beams clad in translucent opal interlayer glass. To achieve the thin design, damping devices are provided for to limit the discomfort of the pedestrian traffic.

In Guangzhou Swire Properties have recently completed a mixed used commercial development taking up a full city block on comprising hotels, offices and shopping including a cultural centre for the city. TaiKoo Hui is a large-scale multi-faceted complex in the thriving heart of the Tianhe Central Business District of Guangzhou, developed and managed by Swire Properties. Offering a gross floor area of approximately 358,000 sqm (exclusive of the cultural center), it incorporates a prime shopping mall, two Grade A office towers, a cultural center, the first Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Guangzhou, and serviced apartments. More info at taikoohui.com

A few months ago we presented in this blog ROBOFOLD and its robots to create foldable complex surfaces. Today we share an overview about the “Facade Fabrication” workshop RoboFold held in London, September 2011. Run by Greg Epps and Daniel Piker, the workshop explored digital and physical design processes for producing facade panels in curved sheet metal.

Jeg Dudley, the author of the following presentation, was an assistant tutor at this event. The processes we developed utilize the Kangaroo and Lobster IK plugins for Rhino, both developed by Daniel Piker.

The design process is a very intuitive one, combining both hands-on experimentation and digital simulation/ fabrication. We have run several workshops for students, as well as collaborating on curved folding projects with architects, engineers, facade designers and artists.

We begin by encouraging them to build lots of rough card models by hand, just to get a feel for how the card behaves and in order to generate lots of varied possible forms. These can be made by sketching on card sheets and folding along the ridge lines created, or just by running a blunt scalpel ‘freehand’ across the card, and seeing how the resulting form folds (or doesn’t!). These experiments quickly reveal the few underlying ‘rules’ to curved folds in sheets material – such as if you have two concave folds next to one another, one must be a ‘mountain’ fold and one must be a ‘valley’ fold, and so on. All of these rules are in reality just a result of the material remaining developable throughout the fold process – so while the entire sheet might appear to have a very complex form, all the individual sections that comprise it are either cylindrical, conic, tangential developable or (in some unusual cases) planar.

We then isolate a few of the most promising panel designs based on criteria such as the desired aesthetic, ease of folding, numbers of contact points required (never more than the number of robots we own!), panel size and nesting during transportation, desired overlap (if it is external cladding), and so on. These selected designs are then flattened and scanned into a computer, and redrawn as a vector-based template. At this point we have to make some educated guesses about where the rulings sit on each piece of the surface, and draw these on the surface. Finding the rulings is straightforward for some folds, but in others the surfaces might blend from one developable type to another (e.g. the rulings in one section might run to a point, suggesting that the surface is a conic, before becoming parallel as the surface becomes cylindrical). At the moment RoboFold are working on several processes to make this analysis easier.

Once the final flat pattern is refined, we send it to a lasercutter or cnc router and produce the template for the object in sheet metal. Each of the mountain and valley fold lines is either subtly scored along, or we use a dashed ‘perforated’ cut along the fold lines. The depth of the cut, or the use of perforations, depends on the particular fold we want to achieve.

At the same time we import the pattern file into Rhino and GrassHopper, and use the Kangaroo Plugin to digitally simulate the material characteristics of the sheet metal we will use for the final object. We treat each edge and ruling in the pattern as a rigid spring and give them an identical start and rest length, meaning during the Kangaroo physics simulation they will act like a network of rigid wires. In this way the simulation can approximate a non-stretchy material (i.e. like sheet metal or paper, rather than say rubber). However each face must also stay planar – this is not a problem with the triangular faces in the pattern, but for the quad faces we must also extract diagonals and add these to the network of springs. After this we select certain ‘hinge’ points in the pattern, and define what angle we want them to fold to. Because the patterns have only a single degree of freedom, as one crease is folded all others should fold simultaneously.

Finally, we run the fold simulation and record the positional (X,Y,Z) and normal data for certain points on the surface where we want the robot arms to ‘grasp’ during the fold. Through an inverse kinematics process this positional information is then used to locate the robotic manufacturing arms during production. Other details, such as when to turn on and off the vacuum effectors at the end of each arm, are added after the simulation has been run and ‘recorded’.

The entire process is quite an iterative one, so that sometimes a pattern is simulated in Kangaroo and as a result we go back to the original pattern and adjust it. Similarly we often fold one of the full-scale metal templates by hand before sending it to the robots. This gives the designer a feel for how the material is behaving during the process, and it might tell us that the robot arms need to be repositioned on the surface, or that the score lines need to be deeper.

Personally, I really enjoy the process and value it for being fundamentally driven by the material constraints of the metals we use. This seems to be something rather rare in design at the moment, when everyone is producing ‘plastic’ 3D printed models.

MORE INFO > www.RoboFold.com + www.CurvedFolding.com

This post was written by Jeg Dudley
Photos : www.robofold.com

This post is the fourth of 4 posts about Digital manufacturing (fabbing) environments that we have been publishing weekly on Fridays. In these posts I have shared my research on fab labs, open innovation and smart cities, mainly in Europe and in Spain.

The fourth post is the result of a research on fab labs and their relationship with smartcities. In the last two articles I have written about two recent nodes of the global fab lab network. Although there are other fablabs in Spain, I decided to give visibility to these two initiatives in León and in Sevilla. Among all fab labs in Spain those two are giving a real opportunity to make personal production and digital manufacturing accessible and comprehensible for a wide range of people. However, the most popular manufacturing laboratory in Spain is Fab Lab Barcelona (2008). It is settled in the IAAC – Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and it is part of the Fab Lab Network. I would like to share my interest in their research on how the digital production ecosystem could make our cities smarter.

From Fab lab to Fab City: Barcelona 5.0
As Tomás Diez, director of the Fab Lab Barcelona project, explains in interview at owni.eu held in November 2011,  their idea is to make Barcelona a Fab City. The current urban layout of Barcelona can be seen as a product of major events like the 1992 Olympics  and the Universal Forum of Cultures in 2004. For the future of Barcelona, Vincente Guallart  (former director of the IAAC and chief architect of Barcelona), and Antoni Vives (deputy mayor in charge of urban planning and information and technology) aim to build Barcelona 5.0.

Image from owni.eu

This proposal consists on a fab city made up of an interconnected community of neighborhood fab labs. The venues’ goals would be to encourage entrepreneurship and interest in innovation that have already been present in Barcelona throughout centuries. As they see it, bringing factories back to cites will lead us through a new industrial revolution where production methods and social bonds will be transformed. To set the project up they are currently developing a brand – FabCity. A foundation would promote the project and it would be funded by the public and private sector. The goal is to set up a fab lab in each neighborhood to produce devices and products for the local community. Right now they are still reflecting on how to make these fab labs economically viable. Fab labs would be eventually managed by neighborhood’s residents that would have assisted to training courses.

City Protocol
On the other hand there is an important project going on in Barcelona seeking to make it a smarter city. Guallart’s team has been developing a model to define the anatomy of cities, using a set of common parameters, that could be used worldwide to characterize each city. It is called City Protocol and it aims to be a kind of unique “city ID card”. Guallart briefly sketched the model at the Smart city expo in Barcelona. City Protocol is a certification based system that aims to offer a unique fingerprint for each city, based on several parameters like information, water, energy, mobility and production. This last area could be used as the appropriate environment to develop the FabCity deployment project. As Neil Gershenfeld sees it, cities would become truly self-sufficient by developing these projects. He describes this scenario as “a solution to avoid the economic and ecological disaster of the current global production system”.

Below, you can read an interview with the architect Tomás Diez about the Fab City project. Tomás Diez is currently Project Manager of the Digital Fabrication Laboratory “Fab Lab Barcelona”.

How can cities solve the need of providing more and more diverse services, in a scenario of cutting budgets, while taking advantage of the opportunities that “fabbing” bring to us? At the Fab City… how do you think that having a neighborhood fab lab would change people’s lives?

TD: The answer to this question needs to be thought in a different perspective, cities need to be updated from the organization point of view, we need to re-envision the role of governments, and think that cities should provide commodities and platforms for people to solve their own needs. Services are associated with the consumption model, which has the service provider in one side and the consumer in the other, in the new scenarios this both ends are merged, and we need spaces and platforms for this to happen at different levels, from the neighborhood exchange, as happened in the past, to the high tech centers to bring digital fabrication to common people, as happened with web publishing, photography or video making. In the recent past we became publishers, editors and even journalists, now is the time of the makers.

Neighborhoods will be production clusters, as they did in the medieval age, we are in our way to a high tech medieval age, not only concentrated into the technocrat point of view, but with a high load of humanism and local needs perspective.

What is the business plan for these fab labs?
TD: It will be a mixed model in which the City Hall participate as instigator and initiator of the process, but with the vision that these Fab Labs should be economically sustainable, still with a participation of the government over time.

Are you planning mixed models like FabLab León?
TD: Each Fab Lab has its own “personality” in this case, the Fab Labs at Fab City are part of an strategic vision about the new productive cities, and how they can be more than service providers and trash producers. We would like to say that our labs will be centered on the citizen, not as user but as the motor for the fab labs to operate at different levels:

- education and research: by developing its own programs and collaborating with schools, universities and research institutions and centers.
- social sustainability: by generating solutions for local needs and engaging all the sectors of the society on the digital fabrication revolution and its implications.
- business platform and entrepreneurship: by giving the means and the tools to take ideas to the next level, and to think about new models of collaboration, and project development, like crowd sourcing and crowd funding.

Should individual initiatives be able to join this FabLab city project?
TD: Absolutely, Fab Labs will be platforms, they should be the mean and not the end itself of the project. Companies, individuals, institutions and society will be encouraged to participate in the project.

Would all fab labs be part of the MIT’s Fab Lab Network?
TD: A short answer is yes but what we call today MIT’s Fab Lab Network will migrate to a more distributed organization that will not only depend on the US, the Fab Foundation will be the support organization of Fab Labs worldwide. Fab Lab Barcelona is on super node on this network, we work as an European hub of Fab Labs, so all initiatives that we are supporting will be part of this worldwide network. (The End)

I trust ITC technologies will help us to find cheaper, healthier and more beautiful and sustainable solutions for cities. As we have seen in the participatory sensing series, technology is helping promote people’s participation and engagement in bottom-up projects to raise awareness on specific local problems. I just hope FabCity project will promote the participation and engagement of people in this city transformation process.

Finally I am grateful to JP de Vooght, César García, Sara Perez Thomsom, Alejandra Climent, Jorge Medal, Pedro Hernández and Ethel Baraona for the feedback and conversations on Digital manufacturing (fabbing) environments.

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.

This post is the 3rd of 4 posts about Digital manufacturing (fabbing) environments that we are publishing weekly on Fridays. In these posts I will share my research on fab labs, open innovation and smart cities, mainly in Europe and in Spain.

The third post is a result of a research on fab labs in an academic context in Spain. Fab Lab Sevilla  was promoted in 2009 by the IND_Center  (Centro de Innovación y Diseño_IND ) of the University of Sevilla . It received the official acknowledgement from the Fab Lab Network  in August 2011. I am eager to share my interest for this node of the digital production ecosystem.
 For the last two years, seminars, master classes and workshops have been taking place at the digital manufacturing laboratory at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Seville. IND_Center promotes collaboration between students, teachers, researchers and institutions, enterprises and other universities. It aims to build an ecosystem for research, implementation and enterprise development. Fab lab Sevilla find its place among the fields of architecture, social innovation, commons and free culture. It is a very interesting place for architects and designers to learn through open source software practices.

These “hands on” practices in the commons and the open design framework are being developed mainly at different workshops  all year round. Attendants experiment collaboratively with algorithmic procedures and speculate on the possibilities of robotic construction. We can find a collection of the academic work produced between 2010 and 2011 at Fab Lab Sevilla  on the FabWorks book.

Among all projects developed at Fab Lab Sevilla, I would like to present Fabbing CC. Fabbing CC is a research-action project that explores the translation of design and digital fabrication technologies to an urban environment. As part of the “Rivera Marco” urban regeneration project  in the city of Cáceres, it was aimed for citizens to participate in the process. Between March and May 2011, Fabbing CC created an open system in which to develop three interventions in the public space. These interventions consisted on collaboratively designing and building open prototypes with citizens. The result is thoroughly documented here and plans and designs can be found at thingiverse.

Fabbing CC was developed at three workshop-seminars where attendants discovered digital manufacturing technologies and their possibilities. Below, you can read an interview with the architect José Pérez de Lama about the Fabbing cc project. José Pérez de Lama [Seville] is a member of hackitectura.net, Ph.D. in Architecture and a professor at Universidad de Sevilla Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, and co-director of the Digital Fabrication Lab / IND_Center in that institution.

What did citizens involved in the open design process know about digital manufacturing technologies before the workshop? How was their reaction upon discovering them?

JPL: The producers in the Cáceres side  - around geographer and social-cultural organizer Adolfo Chautón  - knew about digital fabrication from a conceptual perspective. We had been discussing it for some time. They come from an open source experience; they had been working on an Open Source City / Territory concept for some time. In Extremadura, the region Cáceres  is part of the FLOS [Free Libre Open Source] where that paradigm is a strong one. Their government, was probably the first regional administration in the world taking action towards development model around Free Software – including development and intense social implementation of Linex one of the earliest local distributions of Linux [i wrote about this in 2006 in my book "Devenires cíborg”].

Therefore, the idea on both sides was to insert the FLOS digital fabrication concept into their 10 year long local experience on regional development around Free Software.

Current local organizations and people participating in the Fabbing CC process didn’t know so much about digital fabrication, but i wouldn’t think they would be too surprised. Some of them were already working on digital design; most of them knew and were users of Free Software. However, i think many were quite excited and inspired. The idea was also that Fabbing CC would be a seed to develop a Fab Lab in Cáceres. And i think it still is!

For Fabbing CC we designed a process with two main production teams, one with local Cáceres -Extremadura people who were all the time on site, dealing with facilitating the participation and relations with local administration, and the other with the Fab Lab team which was in Sevilla, dealing with the design and fabrication process, making several trips to Cáceres throughout the process.

In the first seminar- workshop we made two main presentations in order to introduce the topic. One of them dealt with a theoretical-conceptual approach, to the actuality and virtuality of digital design and fabrication, from an open source and sustainable perspective, – making emphasis on the Fab Lab Network model, which is a particular form of approach to the field, – connected in many ways to the “social hacking ethics and practices”. The other one was more specific on design tools and machines available at Fab Lab Sevilla, not so much teaching these issues, which would be difficult in this time set up -, but rather showing what kind of things could be specifically done. On one hand we showed how parametric design works, on the other the specific construction techniques feasible with machines like laser cutters and CNC milling stations. We tried as well to show case studies that we thought could be inspiring to participants.

First workshop-seminar

Then we discussed the sites that we were supposed to work in [two of them, at this phase]. Participants explained their perceptions, needs, expectations, desires. Some of them had already concrete ideas, proposals and even designs. We made some collective mapping of these ideas, and tried to approach some lines of work, to define, given the budget, what kind of interventions-designs we would be able to engage during the brief time period that we were going to be work together – trying to think of them as acupuncture actions, or seeds for future development.

These information and documents were posted in a blog created for the project – http://htca.us.es/blogs/fabbingcc – that the different participants were invited to use as a communication and collaborative production space. The Fab Lab Sevilla team made intensive use of the blog showing the various ideas and designs coming up after the first workshop – and throughout the whole process. Some of the local teams, with design experience, posted as well designs of their own. During the next two weeks the network elaborated on these materials. On the Fab Lab Side we made a scale model for each site, and trying to interpret those ideas, fabricated a model kit of architectural proposals to allow people to play around with them and study various alternatives.

Which were the strategies that allowed you to introduce all citizens’ ideas/suggestion/demands? How did this digital manufacturing technologies change the participatory manufacturing?

JPL:The second workshop-seminar  was actually organized around the scale models. The workshops took place on site, in both locations. Participants working collectively made successive configurations using the models and kit parts, and variations on them. We took as well materials to cut and make manually new elements on the fly. Various resulting configurations were discussed and evaluated.
As a conclusion to the second workshop, on site, and later on using the blog and the mailing list, decisions were taken as what the full scale elements to design-develop and fabrication should be. These decisions were taken among the local organizing team, the Fab Lab team and some of the participants that became most involved in the project – with a rather tight-timing concern. This group of more involved local participants made a visit to the Fab Lab to learn more about the fabrication details – Sevilla and Cáceres are about 250 km away. They participated in the actual fabrication process during this day.

“Embarcadero 2.0″ prototype 

Eventually, one of the designs – consisting of large planters for an urban civic garden [named Embarcadero/ Aldea Moret]– was built after the initial concept and actual design by one of the local Cáceres teams, with minor modifications made by the Fab Lab team to make it more robust, and easier to fabricate and assemble. A second element, a small garden pavilion for the same site – that received the name of “Pergola-bench” – was based on a concept and design by the same Cáceres team, but thoroughly developed by the Fab Lab team.

“Mejostilla” prototype

A third design, a seating area , for the other site, which is a rather large open space in front of a recently inaugurated Civic Center [Mejostilla], was fully developed by the Fab Lab Sevilla team, trying to interpret the needs and desires expressed by participants in this location, on the actual placing of it and on the kind of uses that ought to be promoted in order to initiate the social appropriation of the space, which until then was a rather unkept terrain vague. As part of the project the site was leveled and cleaned by a City team. (The End)

The socialization of the design and the fabrication process become new systems to design projects in architecture. This is an example of people manufacturing their own goods and developing solutions locally to serve a common purpose. We will continue sharing approaches about the commons ecosystem and digital fabrication in next post.

Bibliography
Manuel Gutiérrez de Rueda García, José Pérez de Lama Halcón, Nacriso Vázquez Carretero, Percy Durand Neyra, 2011, FABWORKS Diseño y Fabricación Digital para la Arquitectura. Docencia, Investigación y Transferencia, available on line at http://issuu.com/pabloherrera/docs/fabworks_2011_low_update accesed 1 March 2012.

Images of the workshop-seminars from http://htca.us.es/blogs/talleresfablab/category/taller-fabbing_cc/.

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.

The second post is a result of the visit to the Fab Lab León on the 27th of December when Fab Lab León had just opened its doors to the general public. León is situated in the northwest of Spain. I am eager to share my interest for this node of the Fab Lab network.

tMA Foundation (Telice Magnetic Anomaly) is a non-profit organization created by TELICE. tMa team discovered an article written by Neil Gershenfeld about the Fab Lab network in October 2010. They got in touch with Neil in December 2010 and began the adventure of settling a Fablab in TELICE’s hometown. From December 2011 Fab Lab Leon’s doors are open to the public and it started working on issues related to the citizens of León.

The foundation’s brief is to encourage entrepreneurship, leadership and interest in science and technology, especially among young people. tMA see the personal fabrication revolution as an opportunity to place León in the secondary sector (industry, trades construction), and I would dare say that it is plausible. At present there are five fab labs in Spain; three of them are related to academic or artistic institutions and two others have a wider range of users related to industry and entrepreneurship. Among these, Fab Lab León is giving a real opportunity to make personal production and digital manufacturing accessible and comprehensible for the public.

Nowadays “do it yourself” and “do it with others” are trendy concepts that are referred to on the net. However those practices have been part of the daily routines in rural environments and have been passed on as traditions to the new generations. In small cities in Europe, those practices are still usually found not only among the elderly but also among young people that have grown up making things in their parents’ garage. Fab Lab León offers the opportunity for this community to share their experimental knowledge and discover new technologies. For those people who don’t know where to go or don’t have enough space at home, the fab lab is the best place to go, encouraging collaborative designing and making it possible for people to learn from one another.

Their business model, that aims to be self-sufficient in the near future, is very interesting. Even though they have only been open for three months, their approach is similar to that of Protospace, which we saw last week. Fab Lab León is situated in the industrial area of Onzonilla in the outskirts of León. It offers a different service for enterprises, businesses and entrepreneurs. Closed fab lab sessions for enterprises can take place only twice a week during half a day. Although it could seem contradictory, this mixed business model allows to keep a low entry fee for members of the fab lab. Those members are ordinary people who pay to access the venue and to use its facilities for their own projects. They don’t only have the opportunity to manufacture just about everything, but they can also meet and get in touch with people sharing the same interests.

Fab lab León is a relevant open node that is building an entrepreneurial ecosystem and an infrastructure to develop creativity and promote innovation. Having access to such different services at a fab lab in an industrial area gives enterprises and amateurs/prosumers new opportunities. Where else could these “do it yourself” and “do it with others” practices in the commons and the open design framework meet the small and medium enterprises and entrepreneurs?

During the last few months many workshops have been taking place at Fab Lab León. By constructing their own products and having to make decisions about how it might work, users increased their knowledge. Moreover they became more involved and responsible for the adoption and use of these technologies. The manufacturing experience is shared and a community of fabbers outside the academical and artistic context is increasingly growing. Participants in the first workshop at the fab lab have already shared their experience on the fab lab’s website. In a city of 140.000 inhabitants in the northwest of Spain there are fabbers, whereas in Madrid all that one can find are two or three Makerbots at Medialab Prado.

Far from aiming to replace the existing systems, this project provides a venue in which to think of how relationships between society and technology might exist otherwise. Would this relationship be different and more related to the local context? It is an enormous challenge to communicate the possibilities that a fab lab can offer citizens. It is exciting to see how the community of users is growing. Will the community make a long term use of it? Will we be able to communicate that this is more than just a new trend among geeks? These initiatives promote an understanding of what design and industry are, and how it can develop through open design. It is important to be in touch with these types of new manufacturing processes; it allows creators and entrepreneurs to foresee their capabilities and obtain strategic advantages for their future projects.

All images were taken during the visit to Fab Lab León on the 27th December 2011.
Information about Fab Lab León can be found on the website http://www.fablableon.org/.
Finally I am grateful to Cesáreo González, Uribex, Rubén Ferrero and the rest of staff for their hospitality and availability.

This post is by Sara Alvarellos, a guest editor at complexitys.com
Sara Alvarellos is a young architect interested in citizen engagement and implications of technology for architecture and urbanism, actually collaborating with sienteTecity and Oblomobka. Currently researching about Contemporary production, commons and The Internet of Things into Masterdiwo_Alicante framework.