FabLab Software, concept design and project lead for Ars Electronica Futurelab

The interactive FabLab Exhibition includes a significant amount of customized software, developed and adopted to provide children and novice users and easy and playful start with Fablab-technologies. Fab labs, as coined by Neil Gershenfeld, have established a great point of view for educational access to modern means of invention and technological empowerment. Our main goal was to provide an easy entry level to design software and digital manufacturing machines through intuitive interfaces to enables visitors of the FabLab to get in contact with the technical infrastructure and produce their own ideas.

Creative Prototyping: Visitors can use special made intuitive 3D software when beginners, or work with professional products if they are expert users.
Shared Creativity: All designs made in the Lab appear in the Digital Gallery next to the gallery of physical objects directly in the lab to give also other visitors and users an idea what is going on and possible with the given infrastructure.
Integrative System: All computer-controlled devices (and installations) are interconnected. Saving a design makes it appear in the Digital Gallery and at the same time at the Fabrication Stations (printer laser cutter, 3D printer,…) where customized interfaces again help inexperienced users in the fabrication process.

Within the context of the museum it is especially important to make fast and low priced fabrication routines accessible to the visitors, so every visitor – if they wish so – can take home their digital design as well as the physical object resulting from it .

Interactive 3D creation

Tabletop intuitive 3D design and Fabrication

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Irene Posch, Hideaki Ogawa, Christopher Lindinger, Roland Haring, and Horst Hörtner. 2010. Introducing the FabLab as interactive exhibition space. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 254-257.