#DigiFabCon

I headed over to Pittsburgh for the Digital Fabrication Conference , DigiFabCon, held at the Carnegie Science Center. It is kinda like an “intermediate” meeting for @FabLab people, not the annual meeting. There were about 50 people, some from Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska, Montreal, Bulgaria. Of course I had to go 2 hours east to meet someone that is 30 minutes west of me at Lorain Community College FabLab.  I went to learn more about FabLab/FabFoundation, get some new contacts and ideas, and really talk “mobile” #MakerSpace with the Carnegie people, especially John Doctorick. The Pittsburgh area is really thriving with Maker and STEAM.

Though it was a “Fab” conference, there was no making involved. It was presentations and discussions and networking. I always wish there was some making involved. Sarah Boisvert spoke about the “New Collar Workforce”, sharing some key points from her book. Manufacturing has changed, yes there is more automation, but the human aspects have become more STEM oriented. 75 million jobs could be lost to automation by 2022, but 130 million new jobs requiring new collar skills will pop up. Geoffroi Garon-Epaule from Montreal shared with us his digital badging project, Badge Factor . It is an open source, WordPress plugin. We learned a little about America Makes . They are a collaborative entity and national accelerator for additive manufacturing, and are based in Youngstown. Yes , they have been on my list to visit.

David Woessner from Local Motors spoke about their innovations in vehicle manufacturing. There main points are global co-creation, digital fabrication, micro-factories. They can 3D print a 1000 pound vehicle and 4000 pound vehicle on same machine. Car factories cannot do that. Cars have a 5 year timeline from conception to market. They are less than one year. Olli, a small people mover, is their latest project.

Sherry Lassiter shared about the FabFoundation (part of the MIT Center for bits and atoms). For us new people she gave an overview, then spoke of some new ideas. There are 1600 FabLabs across the world, they are a “group of capabilities” not a strict list of equipment. Collaboration with others is key . They are trying to create a repository of digital fabrication in STEM curriculum activities. Right now it is called SCOPES-DF , though they are open to a different name.

The CSC FabLab had a workshop they call TAD (tactile assisted design) for some of us still around on Saturday morning. TAD came about from a request on how to get those with visual impairments more involved in the design process. The first iteration of their solution is having a variety of design materials available for people to use (wikkistix, pipe cleaners, paper & scissors, play dough..) and a person creates a design physically, say the parts of a glider (body, wing, tail) Use dark colored materials and put them on a white background. They had a white acrylic square, one side with a grid etched in it for measuring, the other side was smooth. Take a picture (can your tablet do that with voice commands?). These two steps can be done by a person with visual impairments. The picture is inserted into InkScape (or Corel Draw, or Adobe Illustrator), vectorized, then sent to the laser cutter. These computer steps are usually done by the “teacher”, as they would often be even with students without visual impairments (unless you were teaching that part of the software).  We made gliders out of foam core. The photo stand has side and back guides for the tablet and acrylic square so that the square is centered in the photo. (design questions: do you make the square a rectangle that perfectly fits the shape of the photo screen?? then do you orient everything portrait or landscape??)

The most important thing I got out of the days was the Mobile Maker Space discussions. I had already downsized my ideas from a trailer to a box truck. But I needed a little more push to go from that to a van that can carry everything and you offload all the equipment. A mobile work space is “neat” , but not practical for school settings, since you can't put a whole class into it at once. Taking all the equipment into the school makes more sense. And it gives the school a vision of the tools IN their space. John gave me that push.