A collaboration comprising the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), three Midwest community colleges and a polytechnic university is part of an international network that puts the modern means of invention in far-flung communities.
The goal of the Midwest Fab Lab Network is more ambitious than simply equipping spaces for people to tinker. It is “to help reinvent the way people innovate,” said Jim Janisse, development manager of the digital fabrication laboratory at Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) in Wisconsin.
The community colleges are not only the first U.S. higher education institutions other than MIT to offer the digital fabrication laboratories known as fab labs, they are among a small group of entities around the world to host the facilities. Most of the 30 labs in 11 other countries are offered by either government agencies or community organizations.
Fab labs provide off-the-shelf industrial tools and materials for people—anyone who shows up at the labs—to experiment with and invent new objects.
“We try to provide direct access to the tools, techniques and technologies that help people translate their ideas into reality,” Janisse said.
The other institutions involved in the fab lab network are Lorain County Community College (LCCC) in Ohio, Century College (Minnesota) and the University of Wisconsin-Stout (UW-Stout).
In September, the network received a $670,000 Advanced Technological Education grant from the National Science Foundation to integrate digital fabrication experiences into “product realization” courses, as well as associate degree science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) curricula.
The Midwest collaboration, which began working with MIT two years ago, will analyze how the labs affect people’s competencies in and attitudes toward STEM. The project plans to develop curricula to help “scale up” the labs for use in technician education programs in the U.S.
Using the labs for accredited certificates and associate degrees for technicians would add a new dimension to the model that MIT started six years ago as low-cost ways for digital experiments. The facilities currently operate more like public libraries than postsecondary institutions or commercial prototyping centers. In most cases, the labs rely on the technicians and educators who run them to serve as “masters” to the many apprentices who use the equipment.
The labs fit into the participating institutions’ academic and economic development goals. The colleges are already planning how to sustain the program once federal funding expires. Ideas include charging a user fee and partnering with business and universities.
Sherry Lassister, program manager for MITs Center for Bits and Atoms, said she and other MIT colleagues are excited about the network’s efforts to move project-based learning into more formal STEM curricula that meet the demand for vocational and technical education and skills.
Each lab has about $50,000 in equipment that students, entrepreneurs and local residents can use to create objects that range from sensors to signs. The set of tools curated by MIT include a computer-controlled laser cutter, a computer-controlled milling machine for household products, a precision milling machine for micron-size projects, a sign cutter and computer programming tools.
The fab labs combine the tools with other equipment to meet particular community needs:
- FVTC’s lab has a plastic injection molding press and works with the college’s center for entrepreneurs.
- LCCC’s facility has two laser cutters, a three-dimensional scanner and printer. It’s often used by the college’s university partners.
- Century College, which hosts a business incubator, uses the lab for its engineering and prototyping courses. It is developing new degrees in engineering technology that incorporate fab lab activities.
- UW-Stout, a public polytechnic university, uses its lab to provide real-world experiences for engineering, applied technology and management students.
In addition to helping start-up companies with rapid prototyping and testing models, the fab lab network institutions encourage cross-discipline activities among liberal arts, engineering and technology students and faculty.
“It’s not just industrial manufacturing. It’s really literacy in this new means of expression,” said Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.
Gershenfeld said he learned from students who took his “How to Make (Almost) Anything” course that creating a microcontroller program can be as expressive as writing a sonnet or creating a painting. Digital fabrication allows people to tap into their passion to create high-tech objects without years of schooling in electronics or computer science, he said.
“Kids are scientists. They tinker, they invent. And we slowly train that out of them. So, this is providing kind of the modern means of invention,” Gershenfeld said.
Aside from requiring users to follow basic safety rules and to use equipment properly, the main expectation for fab lab users is that they join in the esprit de corps that supports peer-to-peer learning.
With MIT-affiliated fab labs in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, Iceland, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, India, Afghanistan and the U.S., peers are broadly defined to include anyone who uses the labs. At any time, people in eight to 10 different fab labs talk to each other using the network’s global video bridge. MIT’s Web site provides tutorials and places for people to share files and collaborate on projects.