Anastasia Pistofidou, NGM Interview
"The thing is that we need to find more places that offer education. So we need to find some type of university or open university, places that already offer education, and then tell them the benefits of this program to become part of the community. This is not mainstream yet, but it will happen very soon. We need some more time to see that many different independent educational programs will pop up and will continue popping up until education is very dispersed, and then you can really make your own path."
interview host: Shih Wei Chieh
2022.12.20
Barcelona, online
Can you brief us about what Fabricademy is and what is its origin?
Fabricademy is a project that happens in a networked way with different laboratories. It is about education and training in the context of laboratories that have equipment, like Fablabs, maker spaces, universities.It started in 2016. I was already in the textile and digital fabrication field and I was giving a lot of workshops all over the world about different techniques and about different methodologies, and more innovative things that could happen in the lab. And then there were more people that were interested in this topic. So there was a moment when I and two of my colleagues from the Fablab network decided to make another program, which would be an educational program.So the offer of the Fabricademy is education, that’s the service. Of course, there is also the community, the opportunities, the collaborations, the synergies, but these are extra things that happen in a natural way, and the one that makes the project continue to work and allows us to work and further develop it is the service of education.And then we are basing it on an already existing setup which is the Fablab. They already offer education, how to make almost anything - the sub Academy program. So they have a very specific way of working which is both online and practical hands-on in the laboratories, combining the online learning with the physical making in a distributed way. In this case we took the basic elements of this format, which is that all the labs connect weekly and show each other what they've done, all the labs document everything in an open source way on Gitlab, or all the lab evaluate the students, so we basically have what I call infrastructure, I mean these kinds of assets that are common for the Fablabs, and on that we built upon the content of the program.
Fabricademy is a program, then you have different labs - Fablabs or textile labs or innovation labs or their different labs and Fablab, that you can participate in. We call them nodes.There are not so many of these nodes in the US actually. We had more in the beginning in Latin America. But actually it is mainly expanding in Europe and locally, now we also have it in Japan. Some years they have students and some years they don't. This year only a few of them are active. There are different types of labs, there is the Fablab, there is the textile lab... so these labs are partners, and they can even be universities. They are from the Fablab network. We promoted the program and we made an open call. Maybe many laboratories wanted to join because they wanted to get the training content so that they can innovate later in their location. So already from the first year we had 13 labs. Every year we make an open call for labs. But even if you apply to become part of this network, you need to fulfill some minimal requirements to be able to do the program, and these requirements are that you at least have the tools and the machines to be able to run the courses each week. And we help many labs to buy and to make the infrastructure.
Normally the labs have their own funds and then they come and they say, ‘we want to implement the textile Academy, what do we need?’ But the labs have the fund themselves. We don't get more and more labs, we just get a few because it is difficult to run the program.
It's very demanding. We have some labs that are more stable and then a few new ones that many times have a fund and they say, ‘I have a fund, I will work with you this year, use some part of the fund to get the training.’ But you need to be somehow a place that offers education because the service of Fabricademy, the ‘product’ if you see it from the business side, is education. And if you are like a hacker space that never did workshops before and you want to offer a six months training intensively, then it will be more difficult because people do not not know you. So it is a matter of understanding what is the identity of each stakeholder, of each partner, because if you are a university that offers only free education, then it is very difficult for you to suddenly offer a program that costs 6,000 dollars. Nobody will pay for it because everybody knows that you are a university that is free. But if you want in this case you apply to register and get the governmental fund for this program and then you offer it for free to the students, which is what happens with the educational programs. So there are many factors of what is the service that you offer and what is the identity of each member.
What is the difference between your education system or your service from the university or the conventional art science education?
Imagine that nowadays we see that the education inside the universities, the format and the models are getting very outdated. And also due to Covid, universities had to try to find ways of creating online education. And imagine that this inside the Fablab network is already 12 years old. Before the existence of broadcasting applications, the Fablab network already had its own SSH, its own Zoom or Jitsi in a very low quality ten years ago, and you were able to learn from the inventor of the Fablabs that is inside MIT and you are in India. And this is the concept. Basically, the whole educational model of ‘where do we learn from’ is going to radically change. And imagine that Covid made it so that even children stay at home and they learn from the national TV, they get classes like that now. And we have been doing this since a long time ago, so we have developed a lot of assets, infrastructures and tools to support it.
For example, we have our chat platform for the students, it is open source. It is on Git, it is like Slack but open source. It's very similar to what we use in the e-textile summer camp which is called Riot or Element. It's like a chat but through it you can also see the events and opportunities. So every day I send the Alumni and the current students open calls, artistic residencies, positions for Phds, working opportunities, conferences, symposium, festivals, I send them a lot of opportunities through it. And then in the platform you have the instructors which are the local experts that teach the program. Then we have each class, and then each one has their own lab, and then I can have direct messages, and you can also find out what happens every week, so it is a user friendly platform that combines learning and the social aspect, it's not like these platforms that they have in the universities that are like, ‘your grade was this’.
There is also another thing that we do. We have self-evaluation. So we tell the participants that they are not students. They are there because they want to be there, and nobody put them there, so if they don't want to do anything, it's their own loss of time and money and they have to self-evaluate themselves. And then the other thing is that we do not actually evaluate anyone from the way they perform but only from how they document. So it is as though if you didn't document it, you didn't do it. And everything stays there documented like a personal diary, but also like a reinformation for the next year. I think that the most radical thing that is different from the current educational model is to be able to have live updates on the contents due to the fact that you've documented everything. Every year you will not start from scratch, you will build upon what the last people did. And this is kind of nice because in the school you have to search for your references. They will tell you some links and things like that, but you will not be able to have a database that you will be able to learn from. And the other thing is that all of this information is open, so if you want to read it on your own and do the program on your own, you can do it. It’s all free. But if you want to go to the training and get feedback, and to get to know the community, and you get to learn all of these things, then you want to go to the lab and also get the physical training.
The thing is that we need to find more places that offer education. So we need to find some type of university or open university, places that already offer education, and then tell them the benefits of this program to become part of the community. A challenge is that many labs, or many nodes are unofficial, or more for hobbies, or for short weekend workshops and they do not offer long term education, and then they really struggle to make the program, to run the program to find students, because nobody understands this new type of education. It’s not a university. So at the moment it is not very sustainable but we hope that it will become more stable, let's say. This is not mainstream yet, but it will happen very soon. We need some more time to see that many different independent educational programs will pop up and will continue popping up until education is very dispersed, and then you can really make your own path. But this also needs to happen at a more governmental level. I mean in France they already give scholarships for Fabricademy because they want this informal - they call it vocational education, and they already support this kind of initiatives, but not everywhere in the world yet.
The impact of global networks on education?
Every week you will see that according to the topic, you will have a lot of cultural content that comes from… the heritage comes from the culture and it manifests in what everyone does. So there is this exchange. For example, now we do this class of natural dyes, and because of Fabricademy I know now what are the native plants in Brazil. Because when they present, we tell them to look in their history and to find local things that they have. So it is super rich culturally. And I think that the fact that you are part of a bigger community and you are not alone is very important, because it is very specific what we are doing as the textile digital fabrication, biotechnology, and the e-textile, so it is the same when you find, for example, similar colleagues in the e-textile summer camp, you feel that there is a community and that you are not alone, and at the end of the day if you see the textile community, you know more or less all the people. So when you put them together and you connect them, it is a nice thing because then you can have collaborations, learn from each other, have synergies, and that's about it I think. But at the same time, each lab, each location has their own identity, and they can do and orient the content to apply, because technology is broad, where you apply is the specific thing. For example, in Germany, we have a lab that only applies the program to Assistive Technologies. And they take an identity. They develop their identity. If you want to all be about circularity and natural sustainable solutions, you can work on that part and you can develop your identity. And that's also the nice part because each one is different and then they can share with each other and bring all of this diversity inside.
Can you tell us a bit about the Financial Aspect of Fabricademy?
Of course I can't tell you that it is a profitable business at the moment, but it can make enough money for it to survive, and it can give us at least something to continue working on it. I cannot work on it full time, it doesn't give me a full-time salary, but it can give me a part-time salary. It can give the three of us a salary, from the student fees. So afterwards we have the labs and each lab is actually trying to find funds for being able to offer the program in their location. Fabricademy as an entity in the global network cannot really provide any scholarships. We don't have partners that give us money for scholarships. But each lab can present Fabricademy for the local sponsors, or local unemployment funds, or local like gender equality things and then the lab can obtain a fund to be able to do the program. I'm not saying that we couldn't also find some funds globally. I'm saying that we didn't have time to work on the global level of how to be able to support the program. The values that we have is that basically everything needs to be documented and shared. We are building upon the knowledge of the previous generation, so everything is documented and open source. The new is always evolutionary, it evolves because the students from the previous year can see and they can learn, and it's kind of like a continuation of what has been done before.
Now, the program of Fabricademy has a specific cost that we define according to how much we think that education costs in the world nowadays, and this cost sometimes is not accessible. It's expensive. For six months you need to pay around 8000 dollars if you are in Europe and US and in Canada, and 6000 dollars if you are in South America or in Asia and other countries. And then one part of it pays the global instructors and the global tasks, and one part (around 65%) stays in the lab. So it is helping the labs to have some economical model and the more students they have, the less percentage they pay to the global fees, so let's say that I have one student and for the global Fabricademy expenses I pay 3000 and my lab keeps 4000, but then when I have more students I pay less to the global and my lab can keep more. So that's an incentive to have more students. And also it's an incentive for the labs because at the end, for example, with five students, you get 20,000 in six months, which is a salary for an instructor and the materials and it's enough to get the program running. Right now we have around five students per lab, and we have 10 labs, so in total 50 students.
Why do you want to get the program running since you are not making so much benefit?
Because it gives you a lot of content and it gives you a lot of opportunities afterwards. So, basically, the labs stay afterwards with the students. They collaborate with the students and many times they hire them for new things. It's kind of like a training that afterwards gives opportunities to the labs - they either are able to apply for new funds with the content they create, or connect the people and make opportunities for the students to work afterwards in the lab, and things like that.
Do you think it is possible to initiate or to reinvent to trigger the collaboration between this community and other local Industries?
We tried this and we thought about this a lot, the industry… they want fast production, less cost and when you enter into innovation, it's all like time loss, resource… for example, we asked them ‘do you want to train your employees?’ but they don't want to lose time. So I don't know how this could work, because if you want to work with industry, you need to offer a different product or service, not education. The whole thing now is the platform - how to make a platform? I mean if you want to go into this more systemic level, you should think more of a platform. So when we talk about a platform, for example, there is this platform called Make Works. It is a platform where you can find the local manufacturers and suppliers. And then you have another platform, which is a platform for talent, designers. You have a platform where you connect the makers and designers and you have different designers in the different fields. Then you have the platform of the labs - fablabs.io, this one is a platform where you can find all the labs of the world. Everyone can register their own Fablab. Then you have the S+T+ARTS platform, there you have a lot of opportunities, events, projects, and what they do. That one is cool for artists because it gathers all the opportunities there. There is also a platform called ‘JOGL: Just One Giant Lab’. So this one is doing biotech, they make DIY vaccines, COVID test DIYs, they have resources, it is amazing. So in general, if you want to put some kind of community together, you need to make a platform for this where people can learn from each other and share things and which can give them visibility. And then you can start talking with sponsors and industries because they will find this tool, which would be like Linkedin but it’s not Linkedin, more specific one.
links in the interview
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