What’s happening at the Fab Lab

Wendy Nealle describes the Fab Academy qualification and how digital fabrication – makerspaces and hackerspaces – opens up opportunities for students.

Duration: 02:04

Transcript

Wendy Nealle: It’s been really exciting for us this year that we’ve been able to offer the Fab academy qualification which is run globally through MIT.

We’re one of maybe 25, 30 labs that are running this and this is a very intensive course that takes the participants through the full range of things that they can do within a Fab Lab and they develop a final project.

And we’ve been very lucky to have nine very exciting students engage in that and that’s part of us being able to really bring the level of engagement with digital fabrication and with the fab network to a higher level and increase the possibility of us having much more impact on the way that New Zealand has an impact on the world.

We’ve been engaged in a number of global projects in a smaller or larger way, some of which are developing really nicely. I think the potential is much more apparent to a broader range of people within the university and the broader community as to how Fab Labs – and digital fabrication in general – such as makerspaces and hackerspaces, how much of a democratising effect that they have on accessibility to digital fabrication.

It shouldn’t be that you have to live in a city to access all of this exciting experience. One of the things that I would say about being involved in the global network is that it has decreased the feeling that we have in New Zealand of that tyranny of distance and I’d like to see that same sense of isolation be removed from the difference between urban and regional people.