Fab Lab BCN is the first FabLab in Europe, founded in 2004. The digital fabrication workshop is embedded in the "Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia" (IAAC). IAAC is an international centre for education, fabrication and research dedicated to architecture. IAAC and Fab Lab BCN are located in a former factory hall in Barcelona´s old industrial and working class district Poblenou.
Fab Academy? is a 5 months Digital Fabrication program directed by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT’s Center For Bits and Atoms and based on MIT’s rapid prototyping course, MAS 863: How to Make (Almost) Anything. The interdisciplinary program combines design, programming, engineering to enable custom-tailored digital fabrication. FabLabs emerged due to an MIT initiative. MIT´s Media Lab launched the Centre for Bits and Atoms (CBA) in response to the “Digital Revolution” in 2001 in order to create a digital fabrication facility. The CBA investigates “how to turn data into things, and things into data” at the intersection of computer and physical science.
Fab Labs are makerspaces that correspond to the Fab Foundation principles. To be a Fab Lab, the four principles require the workshop 1) to provide a common set of technologies, tools and processes, 2) to participate in the global Fab Lab network and 3) to provide the public with open access to its technologies, knowledge and skills. Supporting and subscribing to the network´s “Fab Lab Charta” 4) acknowledges each workshops´ correspondence to these principles.
Conceptualised as an interdisciplinary educational initiative, Fab Labs are not only physical workshops that provide a common set of equipment. Fab Labs are supposed to create a community of “Makers” by mediating the knowledge and skills necessary to “innovate” through experimentation, prototyping and the hacking of analogue and digital devices. Fab Lab workshops are explicitly created to be a “community resource”, which allow Makers to realise their projects – “almost anything” – no matter in which Fab Lab you are. Next to the provision of the workshop space with the tools to build and tinker, hardware and software, cutting-edge digital fabrication machines, Fab Labs are required to actively participate in the global network, e.g. by collaborating with other Labs through projects, workshops, conferences or joint educational programs. Fab Labs are classified within the network either as “nodes” or “supernodes”. The status depends on the reach of their education and research programs as well as the extend of equipment available beyond the common set. The Fab Foundation discourse highlights the need to democratise access to the tools for personal expression and invention. Therefore, the facility and its resources have to be open to the public and its creative environment, at least occasionally.