Archive for the ‘Fablab’ Category
What is a Fablab in 3 words
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010Amputation the defining injury for Haitian earthquake victims
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Caryn Brady, Ms. Alexandre’s physical therapist, helped move her to a wheelchair. The need to adapt is challenging for all new amputees, but in Haiti, there is no rehabilitation hospital, few physical therapists and a limited supply of crutches, canes and wheelchairs gradually being reinforced by donations.
Photo: Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Thousands of Haitians have had their limbs crushed and amputated due to the earthquake. There are now thousands of new, young amputees in Haiti. In the developed world, the leading cause for amputation is diabetes and the average age of an amputee is 80 years old. In Haiti however, many amputees are in the current labour force. Rehabilitation is necessary to involve the patients in society and rebuilding Haiti. They cannot become an additional burden on Haiti’s economy.
Craig Gavras, executive director of Limbs For Life Foundation, inspects a prosthetic leg donated to the foundation at their warehouse in Guthrie, Oklahoma February 03, 2010.
Photo by Steve Gooch, The Oklahoman
Foundations like Limbs for Life and Physicians for Peace are collecting gently used prosthetics for Haiti. (Updates from twitter.com/prostheticlimb all the time.) But prosthesis are highly personal objects, and patient compliance could certainly falter due to something as simple as the wrong colour.
We are working with doctors from the Jaipur Foot Organisation, specialised in developing world prosthetics, to develop low-cost but not low-tech prosthetics and assistive technology which can be made in a Fablab. The MIT class Developing World Prosthetics is especially focussed on Haiti after the recent earthquake. We’ll keep you updated!
A language is a dialect with an army and navy
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010The above is a quote by Max Weinreich, an early 20th scholar of the Yiddish language. MIT Linguistics professor Michel Degraff quoted him in his excellent Pecha Kucha talk on Haitian Creole last month. Michel Degraff is a Creolistics expert and is often citing for his research on the relation between Creole and imperialist histories.
Tout moun se moun– every person is a person
There are a lot of misunderstandings about language and literacy in Haiti. Many believe that French is the official language of Haiti, while it is actually Haitian Creole. Only around 5-10 percent of Haitians are fluent in French. But even though Haitian Creole is the official language, many of the school books, official documents and communication are published in French. The literacy rate is often measured in terms of French. As recently as 2004, a Reuters journalist published an article on prostitution in Haiti referring to Haitian Creole as Haiti’s language of broken French.
http://matenwaclc.org Yves Dejean and his son Frisler at their Kreyòl-instruction school Sant Twa Ti Flè in Pòwòyal
Creole languages are developed during the colonisation of nations and the introduction of slaves. Because spoken by the ‘low class’ portion of the population, there is a bias to consider Creole inferior as a language as well. This bias exists to this day. When I was looking into enabling multi-lingual functionality on this site, I was struck by the fact that Haitian Creole was not presented as one of the options! (and speaking of this, if you can help with translating the site, please contact me (Nadya Peek)
“Notice: The artist is not dead. Call 3907-9920 for your shirt-printing jobs.” (Delmas 33, February, 22, 2010, photo by Dr. Evelyne Ancion DeGraff)
If you want to learn more about Michel Degraff’s work, do contact him!
Pecha Kucha for Haiti Presentation
Thursday, February 25th, 2010We presented at the 15th Boston Pecha Kucha and the format was 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. It was very stressful, but since I made notes beforehand, it’s easy for me to put the condensed talk online.
Hi, I’m Nadya Peek, I’m a student in this building in the Physics and Media group, involved with Fablabs and the Developing World Prosthetics class in D-lab.
In this photo you can see the materials for a fablab arriving at the College of India, Pune, Maharastra. Fablabs don’t always arrive in truckloads, each Fablab is built in a different way.
a Fablab contains, amongst other things, a 3 axis router, a small 3 axis mill, a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter and a full electronics workbench. The idea is that with a Fablab, you can make almost anything- furniture, electronics, prosthetics.
the Fablab in Pune took us 5 days to set up, and that was because there was no wiring, plumbing or floor when we showed up. We set up the large 3 axis mill first, and used that to make furniture to put the rest of the stuff on.
There are more than 30 labs around the world, sometimes it can be hard to set one up, sometimes it can be easy. This picture shows the mobile Fablab, which drives around the US and is currently in Ohio. It can be self powered, and although it is easier to set up, it’s much harder to take down or away– people rarely want to give it up!
A Fablab is not only machines though, and the machines are certainly less important than the people who help run them. Here you see us at the last Fablab conference, where people from Fablabs around the world showed up to teach each other how to make things.
Each lab is in a different place and will focus on different things. North American Fablabs are generally part of community centres and educational spaces. Here on the right you see AS220 in Providence, RI, they generally have a younger crowd of high school students working on computer and engineering skills.
These are images from the CabFabLab in the Hague, the Netherlands, where girls spent a day making customised keychains on the laser cutter. The event was part of a teach a girl about engineering program.
these images are from a Fablab in Soshangove, South Africa, where this girl learned how to connect and program all kinds of input and output devices to AVR microcontrollers. She now knows more about practical electrical engineering than many electrical engineering concentrators at MIT!
The Fablab can also be used for larger things. Here is a project by Larry Sass, a disaster response house made entirely on a Shopbot 3-axis mill and friction fit together using rubber mallets.
This Shopbotted structure is a current contender for this years Solar Decathlon in Europe.
The oldest Fablab is in Pabel, India, and focusses on agricultural education. Here you can see Yogesh Kulkarni with biofuel cells and a biofuel composter.
Here you see Kipp Bradford from the board of directors of the Providence based AS220 lab testing the Vigyan Ashram lab’s solar cooker (and learning that hot things are hot).
A cycle powered drip irrigator and a 2000 dollar tractor!
And here Bamboo greenhouse– none of these projects are based on the Fablab, but the Fablab houses the tools that help make them.
These are photos I took this summer at the Jaipur Foot Organisation. I’m currently working with them and a team of MIT undergrads as part of d-lab’s Developing World Prosthetics class.
We have funding from MISTI to explore rapid prototyping possibilities for prosthetics. We are currently working on children’s prosthetics in particular.
Fabfi is a project that originated in the Fablab Jalalabad, Afghanistan. There is one big satellite downlink, but not a lcoal infrastructure to get the internet around. So they designed these directional antennas for linksys routers to beam internet around to the places they needed it.
Keith Berkoben showed the routers to people in India and Afghanistan and now they are all able to make these en mass on their own.
After they got annoyed with material and the design, they were able to make their own antenna with the same basic principles and unsaid oil cans! Their antenna was only a few dBs off from the original design.
There’s been we’ve been talking a lot with different people who can be stakeholders for a Fablab in Haiti. Without people to support it, the machines in the Fablab are useless. We started a blog about our efforts and accepting donations for the Fablab.
Unless otherwise noted, photos in the slides by Keith Berkoben, Kenny Cheung, Nadya Peek or Amy Sun.
Collapsible packable vs. emergency housing vs. the Fablab
Friday, February 12th, 2010In July 2008, MOMA New York held an exhibition titled Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. MIT Architecture professor Larry Sass contributed yourHOUSE, a house entirely CNC milled on a ShopBot, a tool readily available in many Fablabs, and then assembled with rubber mallets.
Skip to minute 5 for the section on yourHOUSE.
Larry Sass: This design of yourHOUSE is a reinterpretation of historical New Orleans style “Shotgun” Housing utilizing recycled plywood as the main structural material. The house will be fabricated and assembled entirely of friction-fit components, completely eliminating the need for mechanical fasteners such as nails and screws. This fabrication technique is made possible through the extensive use of computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines…
Sass’s house at MOMA was subject of much scrutiny– after all, minimising joints to increase robustness has been a builders rule of thumb for many centuries. However, yourHOUSE should not be viewed as a house through the eyes of a realtor, but as a demonstration of the possibility to not only make almost anything with personal fabrication machines, but also to make those things personally customisable. Sass and his team paid great attention to the architectural origins of the location site they were designing for, in this case, post-Katrina New Orleans. This is a general benefit of providing machines for fabrication instead of pre-fabbed products. The users can make things the way they want, the way they see they need things.
Jeff Warren and Alice B. Philips: The SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production) is an attempt to bring housing and other relief to large displaced or homeless populations, especially those who have suffered in a natural disaster. Providing shelter to a family of four, it folds up into 1/4 of a shipping container for efficient deployment.
Harnessing economies of scale is theoretically by far the cheapest way to help as many people as possible. Architecture schools are riddled with proposals of flat-packing houses that fit into shipping containers– cheap, fast and easy. However, these rarely ask whether or not they will be used. After all, it is a free house for those who don’t have houses, so they (where the disaster has struck) obviously want this…right? The rejection of FEMA trailers would probably be viewed as similarly surprising.
In the end, no one can know what it is that Haitians will use but the Haitians themselves. We hope we can help by supporting Haitians in rebuilding.
Breakdown of Funding for a Fablab in Haiti
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010We’re going to need 250 thousand US dollars to buy, transport and fund the first year of a fablab in Haiti. We came to this estimate as follows:
One time costs:
- 50-75k: lasercutter, modela mill, shopbot mill, vinylcutter, basic materials listed under http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/fab/inv.html
- 10k: site prep (tables, chairs, lights, etc. not including basic construction)
- 60-80k: shipping overseas
- 10-80k: off-grid power / generator for intermittent city power / power conditioning
Operational/ongoing costs: approximately 100-200k/year:
- staff salaries
- rent
- internet
- utilities (power/diesel, water)
- consumables depend on projects and usage, aprox 5-20k/year. Can be up to 50k if covering supplies for larger scale projects.
- insurance
Start of the Haiti Fablab Project
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
cardboard mockup for Nadya’s rowboat in fabclass, 2009
In Port-au-Prince in the past few months, thousands of people have lost their homes, and with that all of their belongings. Many have been sleeping in the street– houses which are not completely destroyed are often too unstable to reenter. In the near future, Haiti will rapidly rebuild itself.
A fablab, or fabrication laboratory, is a workshop of computer controlled machines with which one can make almost anything: furniture, electronics, even houses. In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, people need to be able to make the things they want and need to resume their lives.
We are raising money to be able to buy, install and run a FabLab in Port-au-Prince.
