Get in touch with Janaki via email. You can also see her website.
She's most recently been living in Peterborough, NH, USA.
I have added some writing here, thinking about what's going on for me in Fab Academy 2016. It's February as I write this, just Week 3 of 18.
Anecdotally and not analytically, I would say most of the people in the FabLabs in BCN (meaning Green FabLab up the mountain in Valldaura and the FabLab at IAAC architecture school) are product designers. There are also industrial designers, engineers, jewellry designers, furniture designers , software programmers, and artists ~ the majority, however, are coming from a product design background.
Why do these people who, to me with my background as a craft-based artist, seem to know everything already, want FabLab?
Canzu, a student from Turkey, told me that her coursework didn't involve prototyping in real materials. Xavi said that he's thinking of pivoting from software into more fabrication. Arnau is like me: he wants to get better at designing art projects that involve technology. Gori is curious and skeptical; he wants to do things with his hands.
People get fascinated by the possibilities, I think. It is magic, compared to learning to be a woodworker or learning metalwork, to be able to work in hundreds of materials and surfaces by using what I would call a "software-assist." It ain't natural to me, but I can see the value. (It isn’t natural, but the sense of possibility is contagious.)
It's important to think about PR, too. For any project, as an artist or developer or designer, it's important to show some knowledge about something attached with the idea of "the future." It gets people excited. And while FabLab is definitely intense and thrilling, it is also clear that the Zulu effect is easy to achieve: by knowing just a little bit, I know leaps and bounds more than most of the people I talk to in the non-fabbing world. For instance, I am agog about the sharing economy and the p2p renaissance and the new model of funding that involves blockchain technology; I am finding out about wireless transmission of data over distances that is not cellular; I am seeing examples of ways to take gorgeous old buildings and turn them into labs for the future; I am understanding the ethos of open source ... I am trying to catch up with putting together all these things ~ which do fit, if I can get it all in my brain ~ into a mission and vision for a humane future that is a genuine new thing and not a re-enactment of things that have already happened in the past.
I have struggled a bit with whether I should bend my work into a more functional direction, but, finally, my strength is in that which is felicitous. After that is achieved, if funds and time and strength of concept remain, I can think about functionality in a more practical way.