Green FabLab

“The users are anyone who come, who can find us in the forest. It remains open to all cross sections of society, from Barcelona, the country, and the world.” It includes master students from Iaac, volunteers and young convicts taking part in the Open Days, participants to workshops, companies coming for corporate bootcamps, students from FabAcademy/BioAcademy programs, interns, associations from Barcelona and around!

What people are looking for coming to Green Fab Lab? “Particularly at Green Fab Lab and Can Valldaura, the answer would be : new ways to interface, in a more honest way, with nature/ecology. They want to make things, be sustainable, self-sufficient, resilient, become part of the makers and transition movement, look at different modes of production. Can Valldaura is a microcosm of the world!”

The range of things made there is quite broad, “anything almost (laughs)”: prototyping, social agriculture, housing construction, forestry, biophotovoltaic panels, constructions out of mycellium, drones mapping the terrain, open source beehives.

“It’s a community. We have our own problems and risks of course, because it’s new and moving. People can come, get engaged through residency program, internships, volunteering. But how can you build a community that can be self-sustaining? It’s not self-sufficient so far, we’re not quite there yet.”

The Green Fab Lab project was funded through a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Tourism and a bank loan. Cost of buying the property, constructions work and projects funding? Almost 5 million euros. The Fab Lab in itself cost 100.000 euros to set up. Most of the machines were bought or obtained through partnerships like with Trotec.

Architecture work was lead by Vicente Guallart (cofounder of IaaC institute), Tomas Diez was in charge, and Jonathan came as a coordinator. 2 people work every day in the Fab Lab nowadays. The core community is made out of 120 people, welcoming a thousand visitors every month with the students, volunteers and others.

Part of IaaC university, the Green Fab Lab has a 56k euros yearly budget, and makes money through hosting, workshops, FabAcademy program without any regular grants. And it fully benefits from Fab Lab Barcelona partnerships!

In a near future, the lab team will keep on developing FabAcademy and BioAcademy programs, getting fundings from projects, and becoming a place where companies come to think and experience the idea of self-sufficiency at many levels.

Their indicators of a lab’s success? “More people with an understanding and operative knowledge of the place, our community resilience, the FabAcademy students, the projects we help to take off and the ones we’re involved in!”

2 people are running Can Valldaura every day, helped by the community: Martin Goodman, working on the site, driving the bobcat, feeding the chickens, watering the plants, farming, maintaining the house and a 113-hectare forest - and Jonathan Minchin who’s in charge of everything the labs and projects!

First thing when arriving there? “Have a cup of tea, it’s the best thing! When you have a group of permaculture practitioneers, how to introduce them to A.I. specialists and technology? Let’s share a cup of tea, understand what everyone wants to do here and choose what to talk about. People need to do what they want to do, understand the others, make something meaningful to everyone. They have to become the leaders of their own design and making process, prosumers.”

There’s rythm in the Green Fab Lab’s life with the Open Days, FabAcademy & BioAcademy programs, corporate bootcamps and workshops (among other things)! “We can’t follow all the projects. If people are the leaders of their own design and making process, they’ll make things. And here, we collaborate and work all together!”

“Most of the projects we are engaged are documented. The protocole of documentation is Git (through GitHub and GitLab), no matter what is the publicised platform. All of the FabAcademy projects developed by the students are on Git.”

Thanks to this protocol, Jonathan can see and be updated on what the students are doing by getting the data in his computer. Everything is publicised on Green Fab Lab’s website, IaaC students share on iaac.net, FabAcademy students share on FabAcademy website, same process for the BioAcademy.

One of the best documentations there is the Open Beehive project. You can buy the beehive that Jonathan will make for you, or you can download the design and files. But the whole documentation is on GitHub.

Anyone who can use this platform can do it. Jonathan don’t know all the people working on it. “That’s actually the point. Greg from FabAcademy here is working on it, people in London, a German guy is paid to do the sensing devices, people from Latin America.”

Another project linked to documentation is Living Archives! “It is a platform is currently being developed by one of the interns. Kind of a wiki tied to a location. If I go to a tree within the forest, I can access the data of its history. The plan is to consolidate the data coming from the different devices, know when the plants are planted, with the machines you can reference the use for a project.”