[MUSIC] Hi, we are here today to chat with Jeff Ginger who operates the Fab Lab affiliate, the CU Fab Lab facility at the University of Illinois. And we're going to chat with him about the role that his particular operation, and the Fab Lab Network in general, plays. In allowing people to learn by making. So, Jeff, thank you for taking the time to chat with us. Tell us a bit about what's the mission of the Fab Lab Network. >> Thank you, Vishal. Nice to meet everyone, this is my first chance to talk to many of you. So the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab is one fab lab in a giant network of fab labs. And our particular mission is that we're dedicated to helping foster education, helping to boost research. Helping to inspire entrepreneurship, and helping to promote art. And so we sort of have these four prongs that we get to in different ways. >> 3D printing has a place to play in empowering people to create. And I know the Fab Lab Network and CU Fab Lab have a broader variety of tools. So give us a sense of where the Fab Lab Network puts itself in empowering people to create. >> There's actually many kinds of fab labs. So we're a fab lab that's embedded in universities, so we tend to link ourselves well to education. But there are fab labs in all kind of settings as well. So you can find them in government buildings, and as community centers. You can sometimes find them in libraries, in museums. There's one in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago that we work with often. But you also can find them in community colleges and as part of catalyst business startups where lots of business pool together resources. And kind of other settings, too, where they're even just a sort of a standalone makerspace or a fab lab. And all of these might lend different capacity building initiatives, right? Or work with different capacity building initiatives. So the business catalyst might help small businesses and startups work on things. Our fab lab works a lot with education, with empowering workforce development or helping workforce development go. So it really depends on the kind of fab lab. >> Give us a sense of scale, I mean, how big is the network? >> There are over 200 fab labs across the world, it's a little hard to keep track of. Because so many new ones are coming up and the specification's sort of loosely enforced. So you have fab labs that range from the full MIT spec, with machines costing in the billions of dollars. Well, machines totaling in the cost of billions of dollars. All the way down to people that are just trying to barely, they've got their own hacked together laser cutter. That maybe is not as nice as the Epilog that some others might have. So they sort of vary in their scale, but there are roughly 200 to 250 around the world and they're really very predominant in Europe. And they're all linked through a common webcam system. And so we can have information sharing, they have common classes, so they have something called Fab Academy. And they have a conference every year that allows all the people to come together in one location, one global location. And then they'll have sub-conferences in different areas for the US Fab Lab Network or the European networks, etc. >> Give us a sense of some of the projects, perhaps addressing the four objectives that you try and espouse for the fab lab. So some examples that make it real for people as to what all happens at your fab lab. >> Well, so one thing it's important to note about all the fab labs is that they have similar software, similar tools and sort of similar ideologies. And so they tend to work around open source projects and projects that can be capacity building or developing kinds of projects. Now that can vary a lot. So our experience for education, and how it might apply to the people in the class, is that by teaching people how to use these tools you're sort of automatically helping build capacities. You're bringing the ability to use different kind of technologies and 3D modeling into the community. Or in the environment wherever that person works. And then that person also might, in turn, share a lot of their knowledge. And that's really part of the makerspace culture, which is an important part of fab labs. Is that there seems to be a lot less about proprietary, I'm going to hold my own knowledge. And a lot more about, okay, I don't know how to do this, do you know how to do this, can we figure this out? We've got a forum here, we've got this guy that we know there. You can sort of work with a lot of people. And so that's the sort of a part of the education as well, is there's a lot of sort of DIY and peer to peer. But, more generally, 3D printing can be a tool for learning, also, in informal and formal settings. So it's being explored in schools, which is a big challenge right now, because a lot of schools will get like one 3D printer and have 400 kids. And they have no idea how to do that yet. But then you also get hobbyists who build their own 3D printer, and they have to learn all the mechanics of this thing. And that can be a really great take away. So there's sort of capacity building in how people learn how to do this. So that's the education piece. And there's also a lot of work with research, obviously. Because we're part of an academic institution, we can help with advanced research projects. So here we've done a lot of work with modelings, so geographic models to look at watershed analysis, or that kind of thing. And then, we've also, one of the neater ones is, we actually took a 3D printer that, it was one of those cool sort of cylindrical type ones, the three point type. And it would move around and they actually replaced the extrusion head with a camera. And they could use this for quickly scanning samples of insects and so- >> Nice. >> It was still the same sort of CNC set up of a 3D printer, but it was for a different kind of purpose. And once you sort of get into this world you can do all these other kinds of applications that might be useful for reasearch. Then also, one of my favorites is citizen science. So 3D printing might be used for creation of Internet of Things devices, sort of assisting with that. So you can make customized housing to maybe fit a device that might collect data on maybe pollution in a river in your own neighborhood. And so the 3D printer doesn't necessarily automatically lead to that data collection. But it helps enable you to make that device for that specific kind of context. So research happens in that way. We also do some with entrepreneurship, and actually the maker lab is the bigger player in our town for that side of things. But we have a lot of passionate small business owners that will come in, or individual freelancers that will work on things. Sometimes new products or just new processes for things. So one of the students we're working with right now, who you already know because she worked with you as well. Was building specialized racing gloves for wheelchair athletes. And one of the challenges is that the gloves are $400 right now to have custom hand moulded modeled. And she's trying to cut this down to a $4, open source, you can send us the metrics for your hand. You take a picture of your hand and we actually can scan that picture and figure out what size glove for you. And then we're going to help you 3D print that at one of the hubs around wherever you live. And her angle on it is actually kind of inspiring. because it's not just about the wheelchair athletes who have a lot of money who are really into this. But she wants to make this cheap so people that maybe wouldn't be able to get into athletic, wheelchair competition kinds of things could get into it. And so it actually becomes a community health issue. So I think that's a really neat kind of entrepreneurship. And then the last one that I like to talk about is art. Of course, many of you have probably seen 3D printed fashion. And the really cool shoes and these sort of giant art installations that are 3D printed, and those are really amazing. But I also like art in the sort of simple, informal format of, I'm just a first time maker, I'm going to make a toy for my kid, or a piece for a board game. Just the things that just people have fun with, and we really want to inspire that piece too. So it doesn't always have to be about solving a reasearch problem, or educating a person or making a product. It can also just be, you're doing it for fun, and I think that's a perfectly valid way to get people inspired for it too. So that's the scope of the kinds of the things we do. >> How accessible are these, are there monthly payments, or is it more accessible? >> It varies a lot by fab lab. >> Okay. >> So some of them will be based on a membership model. A lot of them are partnered with an institution that the institution provides some kind of access. So if you take a class at the community college, you can get into the fab lab there. Almost all of them have some kind of open community time. So either a promo night, we have just free, open hours that are regular, and a lot of them are like that. Others, like the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, it's just an exhibit. So you go into the museum, you do have to get into the museum, but then once you're in the museum you can go visit the fab lab. So they do, generally, try to follow the mission of having some opportunity or access. >> I think this seems like a great resource. And given the fact that it's a global network, I'm sure many of our learners will leverage this network and learn to make. So thank you for taking the time. >> I'm looking forward to seeing all of you. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
