With its events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide, PechaKucha Night (a japanese term for the sound of “chit chat” night) in Barcelona which was on the 18th of june has been presented by IaaC co-director Marta Malé-Alemany, where she presented the the IaaC Masters studio FabBots and the exhibition at the Design Hub museum of Barcelona which is currently showing the same works with lots of other prototypes of digitally fabricated elements and systems. More of the Pecha Kucha event can be found at www.pechakuchabarcelona.org. Works and schedules of the Disseny Hub of Barcelona can be found at www.dhub-bcn.cat
Master Project Theme I-Eco-Machinic Apparatus
With the last class of Masters Thesis I – the eco-machinic experiments are continuing, with only four days left for presentations, students are now working on their booklet, videos and panels where they present the series of works through out their project period. With Marco Poletto and Claudia Pasquero as tutors of the course, they gave students guidance on how to finish with their experimentations.
Master Project Theme IV: Contextualizing Digital fabrication
Each student can further their fab-bots in a certain way, now there are variations in the robots, some students are developing their projects through computation and potential outcomes, while others are researching on the fabrication techniques and how to add systems to have it fabricating different prototypes. There are also others with Vernacular research interests where their robots will be sited in. Students discussed these ideas with team Olaf Gipser and Faculty Marta Malé-Alemany, on how to develop their projects.
FabLab Barcelona
The Fab Lab program is part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) which broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation, fab.cba.mit.edu.
FabLab Barcelona is part of the FabLab central where students from Peru, Ethiopia, Italy and Spain are learning. With the future FabLabs under formation in both Ethiopia and Peru, students are taking courses from the MIT program, ‘How to make almost anything’. This includes projects from design tools (laser cutter, CNC miller, 3d scanner and printer ) to PCB design, microcontroller programming, Networking and communications and machine design. There have also been taking various workshops like the Fabfi workshop where the goals are to create simple, low cost and easy to create antennas,more information at fabfiblog.fabfolk.com.
Proceeding with their biweekly assignments students are also preparing for their final projects, where each one is now developing his/her final thesis project which will be presented by the end of the academic year. More of students projects can be found at fabacademy blog or fabacademy labs.
FabLab Barcelona – ShopBot (assembly and installation)
Machine design – part of the biweek assignment at the FabAcademy, helps students study how to assemble machines and see how they are wired, programmed and how it works. This also includes the current assembly of the ShopBot at the FabLab by the FabLab team, This robotic machine is highly calibrated to be a faster, easier and able to produce bigger materials. It has an automatic tool changer which reduces the time a project must remain on the machine by automatically changing, cutting bits between cuts, thus eliminating the need for the CNC operator to change and calibrate tools by hand. More machines will be assembled through out the week.
