Fab Lab CEPT

When we first entered Fab Lab CEPT, the lively but studious atmosphere stroke us. A 10-kid-workshop was ongoing (10% of users), professional makers where working on their fabacademy projects and tenth of CEPT students in design and architecture (50% of users) were in the wood and ceramic workshops.

As you will have understood: diversity is key here. More than 40% of the users don’t belong to CEPT University: it is mostly engineers, designers or start-uppers.

More than 610 members come in the Fab Lab every month, including 10 in-house makers for Fab Academy. Community is key for Fab Lab CEPT. That’s what makes the word-of-mouth so important for them. Even makers from Mumbai or Bangalore come in Fab Lab CEPT to be mentored and challenged to develop their idea.

It usually happens that once a maker has finished to develop his product, he comes back and keeps on helping the community with his own expertise. Moreover, as soon as the team spots an expertise detained by a maker, he proposes him to set up a workshop on this latter to share it to the community. It embarks the members and builds everyone’s skills.

CEPT University and Asha Jedeva’s foundation (MJFF) launched Fab Lab CEPT thanks to a 100,000-euro-budget : building, machines, equipment and wages.

Yearly, 17 500€ is spent to run the lab:

• 35% to maintain the lab (machines, repairs, materials, wages…)

• 10% for in-house projects (furnitures, tools,…)

• 10% for fabricate.me course

• 25% Fab Academy scholarship

• 20% for travel and events

Its revenues come from monthly memberships (1 800€ / year), but it currently doesn’t cover the Fab Lab costs.

In July, Fab Lab CEPT plans to move in a bigger new space inside the University. As the Fab Lab is expanding with more users and a brand-new business incubator, a workshop coordinator will be hired in the following months.

The main challenge of the lab today are :

• The creation of a proper documentation process in several languages (English, hindi, gujarati)

• A difficult material procurement

• Lack of visibility of makers and Fab Labs toward the outside world

The 7 passionate-maker-team is organized around 3 core pillars: Events, Academics and Entrepreneurship.

The Event pillar includes long-term workshops for kids from 8 to 18 years old, weekly FABFriday events which are said a “fun way to learn basic fabrication” on various topics and the annual gathering, MakerFest, the Indian continuation of MakerFaire.

As part of Academics, 2 mentors from Fab Lab CEPT coach 8 students on their Fab Academy projects. Also, the Fab Lab dedicates its staff and facilities for CEPT University’s Summer and Winter School programs. During 3 weeks, students will learn how to handle digital fabrication tools and discover the maker culture.

The Entrepreneurship pillar is intended to take more importance inside the Fab Lab organization. Lately, their “acceleration program” has been kickstarted in order to help start-uppers to develop their idea from the 1st prototype to the commercialization. For now, 3 start-ups went onto the market : Hectare, Oizom and Crear.

This is only a start!

According to Tapan, documentation at Fab Lab CEPT constitutes one of their main challenge.

Currently, all the workshops dedicated to the University students have a specific internal documentation process. This latter is handled by the University’s administrative Department itself and is accessible only to their students.

Regarding the other workshops, part of them are documented by the mentor thanks to photographs and videos uploaded on Facebook. The Fab Lab’s team is encouraging makers to document rigorously their work and is here to assist them.

For now, the whole process of documentation has been made for 2 of them (Hectare and Circuitricks): they mostly post photographs, videos on their website, and share their code on GITHUB.