FabLab Veritas

Daniela, Alex and Vanessa. This is the core team of Fablab Veritas who enhance design process with digital fabrication in Costa Rica. To welcome you with a big smile while achieving their multiple daily tasks, they didn’t have the gift of ubiquitous but a lot of organization, passion and imagination. And for them, it’s not a choice but a necessity to look for efficiency in order to become a reference center of digital manufacture in Latin America.

Their first key success is a transparent and clear tasks repartition. Everyone is able to replace a member if required but usually, they stand in their position. Vanessa is the fabmanager in charge of business development, relations with clients, governments and of the strategy with the university. Alex is the technical supervisor and coordinator who is in charge of helping students and clients to design their projects and to produce them while maintaining the machines park. Daniela is in charge of the administrative and financial part of the lab and she helps users to register their brand as a CATI point (center for technological intellectual property). The communication and marketing part, which used to be handled by the team, is now performed by the University.

Secondly, they used their creativity to find a way to handle the increased workload when Roberto, the former director and founder of the place left in January 2018. Vanessa took the missions of Roberto, Alex was in charge of coordination tasks performed by Vanessa and they hired 8 students to be part of an assistants team. 6 of them of volunteers who look for machine training and free machines used against 10 hours of services in the lab and 2 are scholars who help 10 hours in the lab to reduce the scholar fees (see more in good practice).

Last but not least, the team is linked around the values of the University (respect, honesty y service) and their personal values and state of mind:open minded, collaboration, communication and adaptivity. The smooth transition before Roberto leaving and his support to the team after its departure is a good example.

As a university Fablab, 70% of the users are students from Veritas Universidad. Among the various fields of study offered in the school, most students come from architecture or design products specialties. Fashion design, animation or cinema are areas where digital fabrication potential is still not understood. Alex and its assistants team guide them to design their idea and to choose the right material and production process. Then they produced the product for them. For security reasons, only the core team and trained assistants are allowed to use the machines. Designing support is free and students are learning with the team how to use design software to digitally prepare the production of their product. However, they have to pay for the final production. The price depends on the machine and complexity of the project (time, material). 40% of the users are students from other universities, companies, entrepreneurs or institutions who are looking for training, designing or production services.

To grow the community, the team bet on the viral marketing with 2 levers. First the word-to-mouth of students who talked about the great projects they succeeded to design thanks to the Fablab, then the social networks used by the team to show what they were able to produce in the design area. This strategy bore fruits with an increasing number of students.

After 2 years, they decided to broaden the community externally by attending many events such as TedX or by organizing their own event, Encuentro de Diseño e Innovación (EDI), in partnership with the University and the mall company Multiplaza to show their design productions and expertise. As a result, companies, schools, and even the government contacted them to visit the place and they started working with them on innovation, education or social projects.

To foster this new maker community, the former Director, Roberto Garitas, created the association “Asociacion of Fab Lab Costa Rica” to gather makers in the country and work on common, local and impactful projects. A FabAcademy course was opened in 2017 to all Central American makers. He also launched in partnership with Kolbi, a famous Costa Rican telecommunication company, the project of a Fablab mobile to reach isolated citizens and show them how digital fabrication can change their activity. Keep an eye on these initiatives, results expected in 2019 ;-)

Like many other universities, University Veritas was first motivated to create a FabLab for its educational potential. So, since the beginning, the university covered the fixed and variable annual costs of the workplace which in 2017 was around 60 000$. It also progressively invested in a 50 000$ machine park. Aside from this investment, 3D system helped the lab by giving a 3D printer, Cube printer and 3D scanner with counterpart a sale of raw materials. During the first years, it was about seeing what can be done in a FabLab.

Think to impact first, finance then

Once the university discovers the lab can generate benefits, it asked the team to work on business development (while working on teaching and social impact projects) to be sustainable and finance projects.

Find a viable business model

In 2017, the lab generated a turnover of 32 000$ thanks to the workshops they created, the services they gave to companies and students and the projects they developed. As an example, the Ministry of Science and Technology financed courses to support entrepreneurs so they can learn digital fabrication and use it in their business. And Kolbi supported the creation of a FabLab mobile.