Stories about the New Industrial Revolution. FAB15 “Collectively Intelligent” was the 15th International FabLab Network Conference and Festival held in El Gouna and Cairo, Egypt, 28 July – 4 August 2019. It was a fantastic introduction to Egyptian fab labs, and more African makers were able to attend the otherwise often inaccessible (due to conference fee and travel costs) event.
Nadya Peek held another iteration of the Machines that Make Machines MTM workshop. The resulting machines were donated to Egyptian schools for STEAM learning.
To spur on development of local manufacturing and making networks, a partnerships between the fab lab network and Wikifactory was announced. As is common with these kind of announcements in the network, there was critique rumbling amongst some fablabbers, as such a partnership had not been openly discussed previously and it was seen as an opaque and top-down decision.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals continued to grow in prominence as fab labs try to remember their promise of offering more sustainable prosumption offers for people in wealthy as well as low income regions. Often a techno-centric discourse prevails, while there are regular calls to re-adjust and re-align the visions and imaginaries that are being presented. Meanwhile, several fablabbers, supported especially by Pieter van der Heijden, continued with another iteration of the Fab Lab SDGs workshop where they work with SDG aligned fab lab profiles and identifying relevant targets and goals.
Walter Gonzales Arnao from Peru is a prolific maker, fablabber, educator and researcher particularly on the techniques and philosophies of connecting traditional Latin American craft with digital fabrication technologies. He presented his latest book to FAB15, to our delight.
With the FAB15 theme being “Collective Intelligent”, the organizers asked for the distributed, global fab lab community to submit printed parts to a collective Nerfertiti bust
For more photos, visit my FAB15 Flickr album here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmGoF7aH