Week 1 Day 1
We met our Prefab facilitator and fab guru Francisco today who explained and excited us about Fabacademy, his experience in fabacademy and the weeks of making to come.
The ugly truth behind the modern era and capitalism is the huge amount of resources going to waste as in lieu of pleasing the consumers. More products are created than the number of consumers and the margin of profit is good enough to cover the loss of wastage. This doesnt cover the cost of environmental impact. This is highly inefficient and unsustainable. One option is personal fabrication.
Fabacademy is known as How to make almost anything in MIT. When you go through the course you will be equipped with knowledege of various concepts and skills of topics broadly coming under mechanical and electrical engineering. However it doesnt delve into the details of this fields, it hand picks certain skills of rapid prototyping physical and electrical objects. You are not going to learn the equations of a beam or law of electrical current, but you will be capable of using shopbot, 3d printer or motors and sensors to make something useful.
Digital manufacturing- modular manufacturing- imagine just like you assemble lego pieces to make a structure having a basic form, what if you could do similar thing with almost anything. Your mobile phone would be a cluster of modules, maybe a camera, light, gps, gsm modules put together. What happens if it malfunctions? The modules can be separated debuged and new module can be attached in place of damaged or you dissassemble the module use it in a robot which does something for you. Now you dont have to throw the entire mobile, you reuse or reconstruct it and it will still not be useless waste.
Fabacademy is the brainchild of Neil Gershenfeld, professor at Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) MIT who is working in cutting edge of this idea. Fabacademy is also form of this idea.
You use stuff from the fablab and take it apart and reuse to make something else. That is why Fablab has a standard inventory. All over the world its the same. All over the world people collaborate using this platform and create something beautiful.
The fabacademy way of Learning- In fabacademy we collaborate and learn. We learn from peers who are knowledgeable from different fields to help you understand something you dont know about the field better.
And you pull a packet of knowledge which you specifically require from some people who know or are guru in that area. The Fabcademy has a weekly structure, you work on one field in a week. If you take a university course in similar field you will learn the skills in a range of a semester or a many years. This is compressed in to a week. Like you will learn about how to design PCB and stuff it and make it work and debug in a weeks time but you wont be expert at designing PCB. But you'll be capable of making a PCB to your needs and imagination.
This requires very good time management and focus. The 6 months are going to be like a boot camp but extended to 6 months. You need to be able to quickly do protoype of design soon and test soon and fail and do different version in limited time and do a lot of things in parallel.
Sharing- Francisco says sometimes it is not there if it not there in your documentaion. The main purpose of the fabacdemy is you learn and you share your learning. That requires you to put it online and make it opensource. You will be graded and evaluated based on what learning you share.
We met our Prefab facilitator and fab guru Francisco today who explained and excited us about Fabacademy, his experience in fabacademy and the weeks of making to come.
The ugly truth behind the modern era and capitalism is the huge amount of resources going to waste as in lieu of pleasing the consumers. More products are created than the number of consumers and the margin of profit is good enough to cover the loss of wastage. This doesnt cover the cost of environmental impact. This is highly inefficient and unsustainable. One option is personal fabrication.
Fabacademy is known as How to make almost anything in MIT. When you go through the course you will be equipped with knowledege of various concepts and skills of topics broadly coming under mechanical and electrical engineering. However it doesnt delve into the details of this fields, it hand picks certain skills of rapid prototyping physical and electrical objects. You are not going to learn the equations of a beam or law of electrical current, but you will be capable of using shopbot, 3d printer or motors and sensors to make something useful.
Digital manufacturing- modular manufacturing- imagine just like you assemble lego pieces to make a structure having a basic form, what if you could do similar thing with almost anything. Your mobile phone would be a cluster of modules, maybe a camera, light, gps, gsm modules put together. What happens if it malfunctions? The modules can be separated debuged and new module can be attached in place of damaged or you dissassemble the module use it in a robot which does something for you. Now you dont have to throw the entire mobile, you reuse or reconstruct it and it will still not be useless waste.
Fabacademy is the brainchild of Neil Gershenfeld, professor at Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) MIT who is working in cutting edge of this idea. Fabacademy is also form of this idea.
You use stuff from the fablab and take it apart and reuse to make something else. That is why Fablab has a standard inventory. All over the world its the same. All over the world people collaborate using this platform and create something beautiful.
The fabacademy way of Learning- In fabacademy we collaborate and learn. We learn from peers who are knowledgeable from different fields to help you understand something you dont know about the field better.
And you pull a packet of knowledge which you specifically require from some people who know or are guru in that area. The Fabcademy has a weekly structure, you work on one field in a week. If you take a university course in similar field you will learn the skills in a range of a semester or a many years. This is compressed in to a week. Like you will learn about how to design PCB and stuff it and make it work and debug in a weeks time but you wont be expert at designing PCB. But you'll be capable of making a PCB to your needs and imagination.
This requires very good time management and focus. The 6 months are going to be like a boot camp but extended to 6 months. You need to be able to quickly do protoype of design soon and test soon and fail and do different version in limited time and do a lot of things in parallel.
Sharing- Francisco says sometimes it is not there if it not there in your documentaion. The main purpose of the fabacdemy is you learn and you share your learning. That requires you to put it online and make it opensource. You will be graded and evaluated based on what learning you share.
