MIT lab on wheels turns ideas into reality
By Jennifer Aponte
Jena3000@gmail.com
Photo by Jennifer Aponte
The Fab Lab brings designers to The Point and is used to teach students and residents.
Inside a brightly-painted trailer parked at The Point on Garrison Avenue, Ashley Pullen watches intensely as Professor Neil Gershenfeld from Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrates a technique for making molds.
A student at Bronx Guild High School, Pullen is learning to use the Fab Lab, a laboratory and factory on wheels. On loan to Sustainable South Bronx from MIT, the Fab Lab houses computers; a laser cutter for making two- and three-dimensional structures from metal, plastic or wood; another machine that makes devices for electrical connections; and a machine that makes circuit boards and precision parts.
A computer program written at MIT allows users to describe designs and show the various ways the designs can be made into objects. Users can make a variety of products, ranging from furniture to electronics and from jewelry to t-shirt logos.
A fellowship program allows the Fab Lab to attract talented architects, designers, and engineers to work on projects. In turn, Fab Fellows and other volunteers help local residents, including Pullen, to develop their ideas and designs.
The FabLab arrived at The Point in December, and will be moving to a permanent space in six to nine months, either in or near Sustainable South Bronx’s headquarters in the Bank Note Building on Lafayette Avenue. The environmental organization wants to use it both for youth programs and to advance its efforts to create and support manufacturing businesses that use materials that would otherwise be discarded.During the holiday season the FabLab helped a company that etches designs on iPods, computers and cell phones fulfill orders. Currently, Nathan Carter, a Fab Fellow, is focusing on a project to design and build benches and other street furniture from wood that contractors in the neighborhood throw away.
Pullen has an idea for making cases for iPods. Three weeks into her internship, she leaned over, curiosity written on her face, to look into a mixture of liquids in a plastic cup, as Gershenfeld poured the mixture into a mold and quickly transferred it to what looked like an Easy-Bake Oven.
What came out of the oven was a cube something like a Lego piece. The process illustrated a molding and casting techniques that enables designers to create multiple products from a single design, something that will be useful to Pullen if she can take her iPod case from the design phase to the manufacturing phase.
At first, said Pullen, who has a semester-long internship at the Fab Lab, everything in the lab seemed complicated. But Gershenfeld and Fab Lab coordinator Jon Santiago took her through each process step by step, and now, she said, it is much easier to understand.
She has been brainstorming on designs for the cases. Making the molds “was a real learning experience,” she said, that she can apply to her plan for iPod cases. Santiago, an MIT alumnus employed by Sustainable South Bronx to run the Fab Lab, is Pullen’s mentor, and recently introduced her to Adobe Illustrator and other software that could allow her to take her idea from imagination to blueprint.
The Hunts Point Fab Lab has won a $100,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which said the project would contribute to understanding of “urban sustainability.”MIT has placed other Fab Labs in Boston, India, Norway, Ghana, South Africa, and Costa Rica.
The FabLab is open to residents and local businesses. Those interested in learning more about the lab or in using it may contact Santiago at jsantiago@ssbx.org.