FabLab.nl

As described earlier there was a large FabLab presence at the SHiFT conference in Lisbon last week. Part of that was a documentary about FabLab. This 14 minute film was made by Elmine Wijnia, based on 2 days of filming in 2 FabLabs, and doing interviews with both visitors and staff of the labs.

The documentary was shown twice during the SHiFT conference, once as part of the FabLab workshop, and once as the official premiere in the main room. Now that it has been also shown to the FabLab community at the FabTable today, it is time to reveal it to the wider world.

It’s a documentary, not a clip, so do take the 14 minutes of time to watch it all. Enjoy.

See FabLab video channel at 23video for more video material on FabLab.

Last week the SHiFT conference took place in Portugal. FabLab and personal production were a large part of the program, as you can read in a previous posting.

My talk ‘Maker Households’ was the closing key-note of the SHiFT conference last Saturday. This posting gives you the slides (with text) and the video of my talk (made by Siert Wijnia with his iPhone. Thanks!). The video starts about a minute after the beginning of my presentation.

This is the text that goes before the start of the video: I am here today to do two things: Pedro and his team asked me to try and bring everything that happened in the past 2 days together under one notion: ‘Maker Households’. And the second thing I want to do is to talk to you about how we can start looking at DIY not just as a skill or skillset, but also as a literacy. So we can live in these what I call ‘Maker Households’.

So let’s start with the detour leading up to this story that I created over the past two days. And the detour starts with something you are probably familiar with. In the past 15 yrs we mainstreamed 2 new infrastructures and connected people in the furthest regions of our globe to it: Internet, and mobile communications. These infrastructures are unique compared to any other infrastructure that went before. First of all. Conventional infrastructures basically always connect two geographic locations. Your bathroom to the sea..

Now hit play :)

Ton Zijlstra on Maker Households – SHiFT 2010 from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.

Closing key-note of the SHiFT 2010 Conference

These are the slides (with the text below the slides)

A great illustration of my talk, made by Bauke Schildt / @bschildt

This week the SHiFT Conference will take place in Lisbon. The third edition of this conference, looking at the societal impact of technology, has DIY – Do It Yourself as a theme. That is of course a fitting place to discuss FabLab as well!

FabLab Netherlands will be well represented at the conference. Protospace’s Siert Wijnia and RepRap-Yoda Erik de Bruijn, will do a talk and a 3 hour workshop on personal production with a RepRap as well as (hopefully) a laser cutter.

Elmine Wijnia has been busy interviewing and filming us these past months for her short documentary film about the Dutch FabLabs. The english version of the final result will be premiered at the SHiFT conference. She will also give a talk on the meaning of DIY in our digital and networked age. (The Dutch version of the documentary will be screened the first time at next week’s FabTable.) She also made two virals for the conference. One of them even ran as a TV-ad on Portuguese national television. The other is set in a FabLab. After next week’s FabTable both versions will be available in the FabLab video channel hosted with our friends from 23Video.com.

As last speaker of the conference Ton Zijlstra has the job of trying to tie everything discussed at the SHiFT conference together in an overarching narrative. His talk ‘Maker Households’ will discuss the opportunities full digitization bring for local resilience in the context of a resource-limited and fully networked world. Read the proposal in my blog.

Material used at the conference will of course be shared on-line and here. Follow the conference Twitter stream at @shiftconf Friday and Saturday for live updates.