Fab labs : places for sharing to boost innovation

New production methods are at the heart of today's social challenges. Technological developments over the last thirty years have considerably increased the opportunities for users to innovate. The concept of the fab lab, short for "fabrication laboratory", is an example of this new approach, where the users of innovations will be those who design or even produce them themselves. This approach is associated with three major challenges: digital manufacturing, the creation of a vast repository of collective knowledge accessible to all via the Internet and, finally, the transition to personalized flexible production. As a result, the "maker" movement is growing rapidly around the world.

The number of fab labs has exploded since their creation in 2001 by Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Although they are often associated with other digital fabrication workshops, fab labs have their own identity and, above all, their own network. Indeed, fab labs offer the possibility of sharing resources and projects on a global scale within the network they form, unlike other creative spaces which are very often independent and unrelated. As Neil Gershenfeld puts it, the primary philosophy behind the creation of fab labs was "to get people all over the world to become protagonists of technology rather than mere spectators". In order to fully understand what underlies this idea, we propose here to use a contextual analysis enabling methodical and exhaustive questioning of the main characteristics of fab labs, namely the QQOQCP method (Who? What? Where? When? How? Why?). First, we'll look at the "what" and, more precisely, at what a fab lab is, its material and non-material components, and their diversity. Secondly, we'll look at the "why", and through this "for what", we'll present the projects developed in fab labs. After geolocating them, we'll go into detail about the management and governance methods that apply to them, and end with a few ideas about how they might evolve in the future.