I’m curious - what are the oldest labs in Europe? Haakon’s fab lab in Lyngen, Norway - then Barcelona and Amsterdam? Manchester?
what was the first lab in your country? is it still running?
Interesting! We are in USA, the oldest lab technically (Center for Bits and Atoms), but the first lab beyond that in the USA … ???
Caitlyn, check out Neil’s book FAB from 2005 if you haven’t already, it is indeed an interesting read. the first people, projects and places that turned into fab labs. the South End Technology Center in Boston, a collaboration with Mel King that became a fab lab, which is still running (p. 77). McIlwain does a really interesting summary of the SETC MIT collaboration in Black Software.
Vigyan Ashram is still running (p. 161), Karlsen’s Norway lab is still running (p. 187), Barcelona (p 190), and other labs that transformed later into other things than fab labs. Amsterdam and the Dutch labs went rogue by aiming for all the benefits of being distributed and autonomous while being translocal. and other early adopters.
Hello Cindy,
It has been a while since reading FAB (sometime in 2014-2016)! We actually gave our copy of FAB to someone in (2018)… Thank you for refreshing our memory!!
-Caitlin