Keywords

1 Introduction

Fabrication laboratories, often referred to as Fab Labs, are public spaces that aim to make the means of production available to anyone. They provide uncomplicated access to digital fabrication tools. While Fab Labs have been hailed as disruptors of the established manufacturing practices that rely on economies of scale and largely exclude individual makers, they have hitherto failed to provide a truly equal access to digital fabrication machines. Their potential for grassroots technological emancipation is largely limited to the global north and the establishing of labs is hindered by financial and administrative hurdles. As Fab Labs rely heavily on proprietary machine tools, open-source economics provide a promising alternative that mitigates many of the challenges associated with the setting up of Fab Labs. The Open Lab Starter Kit (OLSK) makes use of Open-Source Machine Tools (OSMT) to empower makers to establish so-called open labs. This chapter introduces the OLSK and explains its design philosophy based on open-source principles, in juxtaposition to the global Fab Lab movement. It analyses the OLSK’s application of OSMT and how it enables the wide diffusion of digital fabrication tools and technological innovation.

2 Fab Labs: Enablers of Technology Emancipation?

The first so-called Fab Lab was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002 with the aim to make the tools for digital fabrication more widely accessible. As communal manufacturing spaces it is their goal “to allow anyone anywhere to make (almost) anything”, thus making personal manufacturing broadly available (Fablabs.io, o.J.-b). Their standard inventory is an array of mutually compatible and complementary machine tools. At the very least, it typically includes 3-D printers, laser cutters, and milling machines. Their broad and inclusive approach towards manufacturing and their aim to reshape the modes of production towards a grassroots technology emancipation has even resulted in Fab Labs being called the onset of the next industrial revolution (Anderson, 2012). In this, they are also an essential part of the concept of fab cities and enablers for circular economic models (Fab City Hamburg, o.J.). The overall number of Fab Labs has surged in recent years, and there are now more than 1750 labs strewn across 100 countries. However, there are great geographical differences in their distribution, and many more labs have been set up in countries of the global north than the global south (Fablabs.io, o.J.-a). The main reasons for this are challenges associated with the typical Fab Lab inventory. Nearly all machines included in the list of recommended standard lab inventory are proprietary machine tools that are almost exclusively produced in industrialized countries. In total, they typically cost well over USD 100,000 (Békés & Harasztosi, 2020; RepRap, 2022). As a result, setting up the machine inventory of a Fab Lab in the global south is much more expensive than in the global north, not only due to the comparatively higher buying price in relation to the average purchasing power but also because of the additional costs associated with transporting and importing them (including customs taxes, shipping costs, and opportunity costs due to administrative hurdles and time-consuming processes). Moreover, the use and maintenance of imported machine tools may be associated with additional inconveniences over the course of their use when repairs and maintenance works are needed, and spare parts or adequately trained personnel are not readily available.

These combined challenges make the setting up of Fab Labs difficult and expensive endeavors. Especially in contexts with less abundantly available financial resources, the Fab Labs’ reliance on proprietary machine tools can prove to be a serious obstacle to the establishing of labs. This hinders the global diffusion of digital fabrication technologies. Consequently, this exacerbates the uneven distribution of these technologies and results in an even more disparate access to manufacturing technologies across the globe. As a result, new Fab Labs are typically established in areas where resources are readily available and access to manufacturing technologies is not difficult. This further aggravates issues of unequal technology access, as those in need of them the most cannot get access to them with the help of Fab Labs. This is a predicament as it contradicts one of the key aims of the Fab Lab movement: to provide universal and equitable accessibility to the means of production. In fact, Fab Labs do not truly enable anyone to produce almost anything because their spatial distribution is limited, and they are simply not accessible to everybody. This in fact increases the discrepancy in technology access and availability of modern means of manufacturing between the global north and the global south which Fab Labs aim to mitigate.

3 Enhancing Fab Labs with Open-Source Machine Tools

The Open Lab Starter Kit (OLSK) is a project that aims to meet these challenges. Since early 2021, it is being developed in a research project at the laboratory for manufacturing technology of the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany, in collaboration with InMachines Ingrassia GmbH, a startup focused on open-source machine tools development (Fab City Hamburg, o.J.). The project consists of three one-year development cycles during which a total of eight machines are designed. During each cycle, one prototype of each machine is manufactured and tested. The development cycles follow an incremental and iterative approach in which each subsequent prototype is built based on the analysis and capabilities of the previous cycle’s prototype. Each new prototype therefore offers additional or improved features.

The OLSK generally follows the Fab Lab idea in that it aims to establish public spaces for personal manufacturing that make digital production tools accessible to anyone. However, instead of simply listing proprietary machine tools as recommended inventory, the OLSK is an online repository with detailed plans and instructions on how these machines can be built by the users themselves (The Fab Foundation, 2022). The central concept of the OLSK is therefore based on open-source principles applied to tangible artifacts, in this case Open-Source Machine Tools (OSMT). OSMT are a subcategory of Open-Source Hardware (OSH) that encompasses all machines which enable the manufacturing of products, and which are made freely available online for anyone to be replicated, modified, studied, or sold (Omer et al., 2022). In recent years, OSH in general and especially OSMT have seen a surge in popularity, resulting in an abundance of designs scattered across the internet. However, their sheer volume and the vast number of OSH repositories makes it challenging to locate individual machine designs. Moreover, as there is yet a lack of proper standardization and certification guidelines, there exists a significant variation in design quality and documentation. Anyone can upload an OSMT design without assuming any responsibility for its replicability, quality, or safety. This has led to the release of poorly designed projects with insufficient or faulty instructions. For example, manufacturing guides are commonly missing in many open-source projects published online. Manufacturing processes to produce machine components that are not bought off the shelf require specific and accurate machine settings, jigs, and measuring tools. When these manufacturing processes are not described to the OSMT user, the manufactured parts can lack accuracy or might even be produced in completely wrong dimensions. This can create further problems in the subsequent assembly process and may render machine designs either not replicable or even outright dangerous.

The OLSK project aims to address these shortcomings by developing complete, easily replicable machine designs that fulfil high safety standards, and then compiling them in a single online repository. The OLSK follows a comprehensive approach to project documentation with detailed user and assembly guides, tutorials, and troubleshooting assistance (see Fig. 19.1). Additionally, the project publishes the CAD files for each machine design. This way, users can make a wide range of modifications to the machines to account for differences in resource availability and manufacturing technologies. Through this, the machines can also be tailored to meet the diverse budget and spatial constraints of each individual user. By creating a platform that allows for easy replication and modification of a range of machine designs, the OLSK drastically facilitates the access to the inventory needed to establish laboratories for digital fabrication (Omer, 2021).

Fig. 19.1
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Overview of the Open Lab Starter Kit documentation strategy

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Similar to the Fab Lab inventory, the OLSK repository is designed to form an ecosystem of eight complementary and versatile machines that allow for the production of a wide range of products (see Table 19.1 and Fig. 19.2).

Table 19.1 The Open Lab Starter Kit machines’ technical specifications
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Fig. 19.2
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Overview of the Open Lab Starter Kit machines

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The machines in the OLSK repository can theoretically be accessed by anyone from anywhere in the world and allow for the setting up of so-called open labs – fabrication laboratories that are set up with OSMT. The machines included in the OLSK repository have been intentionally selected to fulfil the digital fabrication training requirements of Fab Labs aimed at equipping users with hands-on experience in rapid prototyping. Open labs therefore offer similar capabilities and learning opportunities as Fab Labs.

To increase the safety and replicability of the machines in the OLSK repository, the machine tool designs follow industrial best practices for design for manufacturing and design for assembly. All OLSK machines can be replicated with the standard Fab Lab inventory and do not require heavy industrial production techniques. They are designed to be comparatively easy to build with minimal room for mistakes. Specifically, the machine designs use the poka-yoke approach by relying on assemblies and sub-assemblies that can only be put together in a single way. This allows for easy and fail-safe assembly which helps prevent user errors. The OLSK machines are built from a mix of ready-made and custom parts, whereas the former are selected according to their ease of sourceability in as many countries as possible; the latter can be built using either the machines of the Fab Lab inventory or standard hand tools. Existing open labs can therefore produce the OLSK machine ecosystem, and the labs are thus self-replicating. In this respect, the OLSK constitutes an advancement towards making Fab Labs instead of buying them, as is the case with conventional Fab Labs.

The building instructions furthermore primarily rely on diagrams and schematic figures with little written information to reduce language barriers in the building process (see Fig. 19.3). By emulating the successes of the picture-based manuals of companies such as IKEA and LEGO, the instructions are kept as simple and unambiguous for the user as possible. This eliminates potential errors and makes the machine designs safely replicable for users without previous machine-building knowledge. Additionally, the building process equips users with in-depth knowledge about their machines, thus facilitating the repair and maintenance processes.

Fig. 19.3
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Excerpt of the build manual of an open-source laser cutter from the Open Lab Starter Kit

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By basing the OLSK on open-source principles, it is able to drastically accelerate the spread of open labs and rapidly increase access to manufacturing technologies, thus inspiring innovation (Teece, 2017). While there have been other initiatives for the development of a portfolio of open-source machines similar to the OLSK, they have a comparatively limited scope and do not reach the broad capabilities offered by the OLSK. For instance, the RepRap Project focuses on developing different types of open-source 3-D printers that can replicate themselves (RepRap, 2022). Another project called Fabricatable Machines mainly makes use of CNC machine tools that can be replicated in a Fab Lab setting (Fossdal et al., 2020). However, both projects focus on a single type of machine whereas the OLSK’s open labs offer a small ecosystem of five different types of machine tools with a broader range of digital fabrication technologies. The OLSK therefore enables users to access similar technological capabilities as Fab Labs while providing the benefits associated with open-source economics.

However, the use of OSMT is also associated with several challenges that will require further research and targeted action to be resolved. This includes difficulties in designing machines that are universally adaptable, as the lack of access to standardized machine elements in contexts of constrained resources can hinder the replication process even if most parts can be built from scratch. Moreover, due to the lack of open-source automatic documentation tools, the process of documenting the OLSK machines is difficult to sync with design changes. This leads to challenges in including changes and improvements in the machine design in the documentation. Another challenge is the fact that, while the OLSK repository aims to make its machine designs replicable by anyone without previous engineering domain knowledge, certain levels of skill and experience are required nonetheless for precise, accurate, and safe machine tools.

4 Conclusion

Compared to the conventional Fab Lab approach, the OLSK’s adoption of open-source principles has a few advantages. On the one hand, the machines are designed to be easily replicable for almost anyone, which drastically lowers the thresholds for machine tool access by eliminating the need to import them and making them widely accessible. This makes OSMT much cheaper compared to proprietary machine tools and resolves the need for long and complicated shipping processes. The machines included in the OLSK repository are furthermore highly modifiable and can be adapted to different circumstances and resource constraints. On the other hand, self-building the inventory of the open labs brings the additional advantage that users gain a heightened sense of ownership and a thorough understanding of the machines and are therefore better able and more likely to do maintenance and repair works themselves. As the OLSK further aims to prevent safety concerns by eliminating design flaws and ambiguous instructions, the approach of the open labs constitutes a pioneering alternative to conventional Fab Labs. While some challenges associated with the use of OSMT persist, the OLSK’s approach has the potential to drastically increase the global number of Fab Labs and lead to their more equitable spatial distribution. These open labs will likely serve as tools to inspire the innovation of countless derivative technologies whose inventions are made possible by the technical infrastructure provided by the OLSK, and they will further contribute to the spread of fab cities by localizing production and enabling a circular economy.