FABelgrade 2016 - It's all about making!
Last weekend the Institute IRNAS team traveled to FABelgrade 2016 conference in Belgrade, Serbia - the first conference dedicated to digital fabrication in the region.
The event was hosted by FABinitiative, Polyhedra and FABLAB Belgrade, at the Belgrade youth centre (Dom omladine Beograda). The organizers prepared a three-stage event, composed from invited talks by inspiring people, discussion sessions about current issues and good practices and a pop-up fablab. To the latter we contributed our GoodEnoughCNC machines and were able to demonstrate the KORUZA project. The response was very positive and the GoodEnoughCNC Hybrid machine now continues its fablab to fablab tour, which started at Polyhedra and is now in Fablab Zagreb.
The super interesting talks were organized into eight sessions over two days, all of which should inspire and motivate members of the making/hacking/fabing community. They featured presentations and viewpoints of successful makers, many of which pioneers in their respective fields, but also industrial designers, architects and more. Adrian Bowyer - inventor of RepRap used a very appealing and simple look at the world to show motivation for use of self replicating machines and correlated them to household items we are already using today. Andrew Pelling - the man who turns apples into human ears and works on a number of other amazing projects highlighted the importance of multi-disciplinary teams in scientific and research projects as diverse perspectives and views of the world foster innovation. Our founder Luka Mustafa gave a talk about how ideas and solutions are ported between open hardware projects and foster innovation from all perspectives as they bring you out of the comfort zone.
Hands on presentations were very appealing and sparked a number of debates between some very amazing people and there was bunch of interesting projects to discover in the pop up fablab: DIY electrophysiology by Backyard Brains and their amazing Greg Gage, who connected cockroaches and people to electronics, a synthesizer played with human muscles by Marc Dusseiller, BioBots 3D printer in action, a number of Printrbot Simple printers, which excited kids with bendable fishbones and a lot more. The New Raw’s recycled 3D printing filaments were made and tested on all the printers in the room, including our Troublemaker V2.
Despite being fully loaded with content for 10 hours each day, the atmosphere was relaxed and allowed people to get acquainted with each other, form new bonds and collaborations. We had the pleasure to get to know and hang out with the local teams who took time for us despite their busy organizational schedules and also teams from other countries, Waag Society, Tel Aviv Makerspace, Fablab Zagreb and others, all sharing their expertise and experiences openly and freely, making us feel as long time friends.
We would like to thank the organizers for their astounding effort to bring the conference to life, provide exceptional quality of content, and really made us feel at home.
You can check some highlights from other participants on the links below:
