Under the Volcano

Table of Contents

• Fab24 in Mexico

  • Sessions from Fab24

  • Interviews by MoonMakers

  • Make things that make sense

• Fab Fashion Statement

• Animatronic Luna

Fab24 in Mexico

The 20th edition of the Fab conference took place in Puebla, Mexico during the first week of August. The event occupied three locations in Puebla — CIEN in the nearby town of Cholula hosted a two-day festival of projects, San Roque in downtown Puebla was the site of the ArteFab fashion gallery and the Universidad Ibero and its Fab Lab within the IDIT center where conference talks and workshops took place. The IDIT Fab Lab was impressive and the centerpiece of a large building devoted to design and innovation. Sherry Lassiter of the Fab Foundation organized the conference along with Norella Coronell of Columbia (country) who handled most of the logistics.

While I haven’t been to recent Fab conferences — last year’s was in Bhutan — I was delighted to be in Puebla and meet some old friends and make new ones. I felt once again how Covid disrupted the personal connections that so many of us have in the maker community and this conference was another opportunity to reconnect and refresh those relationships. With an international focus, Fab24 highlighted the commitment and dedication of all those involved in the work of bringing digital fabrication to all corners of the world. Fab25 will be held in the Czech Republic.

Sessions from Fab24

Seven main sessions were recorded and are available on YouTube. They can be found here. Below is the opening session, which began with some ceremonial speeches. About two hours in, MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld gives the first talk in the Technology Symposium, introducing among others Stanford professor Manu Prakash (by video) who talked about “doing frugal science.” Gershenfeld talked about Fab-in-a-Box, intended to reduce the barriers to setting up a Fab Lab by providing a portable unit with digital fabrication equipment.

Eric Pan of SEEED Studios followed Dr. Gershenfeld and talked about AI integration and the Shenzhen ecosystem, which makers all rely on. He demonstrated writing an AI application in the Arduino IDE, which connected to a Xiao ESP32 board, and whose job was to monitor a conference room to see if the TV monitor was left on and if so, and the room is empty, turn it off. Pan sees AI as being able to increase the “smarts” of IOT applications.

Daniele Ingrassia of Inmachines.net in Germany has developed a complete set of digital fabrication tools that are all open source. Their newest machine is laser cutter with an automated tool head changer.  Ingrassia talked about the value of Fab Labs building their own machines, not only to save money but also to learn how to repair and maintain the equipment.

I spoke in the session called “Future Proof Skills.” The session begins about two hours in on the video. I was joined on the panel by Antonio Quirarte of Hacedores.com and Alejandro Mayoral of Indigenous Friends Association. The focus of the panel was education — Antonio has helped establish 100 makerspaces in Mexico in private schools and wished that it were easier to work in public schools; Alejandro works with indigenous schools and talked about the importance of including the elders in the process of integrating technology into schools.

I spoke about the prospect of a next generation of the maker movement — new makers, new makerspaces and new leaders. I called it “Next Up.” Make Magazine will be twenty years old in 2025 - what one might consider a generation. It’s time for a new generation and new people stepping up to meet the social, economic and educational needs of tomorrow.

Check out the rest of the talks here.

Interviews by MoonMakers

The delightful sister-brother team Camilla and Diego Luna of MoonMakers were Fab24 ambassadors and they did a number of interviews on site. I was one of them. Here’s a link to their Fab24 playlist.

Make things that make sense

Niels from Fab City Hamburg made a Fab City t-shirt “with foil cut by the signcutter and ironing press in Fab Lab Puebla,” which is located in the school of Innovation and Design (IDIT) at Ibero. Saad came up with the tagline: “Make things that make sense.”

Fab Fashion Statement

ArteFab took place at San Roque, a 16th Century building with a disturbing history as a former insane asylum for women. The building has been beautifully restored and the cells that surround a courtyard served as galleries for the art. The curators of the exhibition were Anastasia Pistofidou, Eduardo Ramirez Garcia, Raúl Babines and Maricruz Chávez García. I ran into Anastasia who had arrived on a flight from Barcelona and was busy on a Sunday morning getting things ready. One of the themes of the exhibition was biomaterials used in digital fabrication.

Here are some of the fashions on display.

“The Flight at Rest project is a proposal inspired by dragonflies that fuses technology and nature to create a unique visual experience using advanced techniques such as laser cutting, sublimation and 3D printing.” (from artist’s statement.)

“This project is mutable, at first it is short and flat, but as it stretches it fills with volume and energy, occupying a space that was not dared to be used before. It is an outfit with life, where the wearer is invited to play and claim more space.” (from artist’s statement.)

“In the atelier of the seamstress one can find tones of threads, off-cuts and waste. They carry with them memories of the hours of manual work showing what it takes to make a garment. They are traces of lost ideas, of discussions over the fabrics that were made to reach other hands than their creators. Rethreads is a biocomposite that bears the nudity of what is left behind a garment.” (from artists’ statement). Artists: ANASTASIA PISTOFIDOU, SILVIA BRANDI, MARIA PAPAHARALAMBOUS, BATOUL AMMAR.

Animatronic Luna

Students from Monterey California schools created Luna, a colorful animatronic panther. Sean True and Emiliano Valdez from the Monterey Office of Education brought Luna to Fab24.

Everyone should have received the new issue of Make: Volume 90, which is about animatronics.

Next week, I’ll write about some other highlights from Fab24.

Note: I am in the process of setting up a Fireside Chat for September 12 on the topic of Making in Mexico with Antonio Quirarte of Hacedores.com. More on that next week.

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