FabLab Digital fabrication and Open Innovation lab SUPSI
The FabLab is the Digital Fabrication and Open Innovation Laboratory of SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. The lab facilitates the development of digital skills in various domains including architecture, construction, design, interaction, and creativity. The facility actively engages with students, lecturers, researchers, companies, organizations, and citizens to promote the Open Innovation model through the utilization of digital technologies.
With a 300 square metres space, FabLab SUPSI offers training to local and national creative communities on emergent technologies to demonstrate how fast prototyping can be simplified and made accessible to designers, artists and maker who create new kind of products and experiences.
The lab collaborates with Design Institute and other units of the Department of environment construction and design at SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, on topics that span from robotic, interactive products, reuse of constructions site materials to regenerate the territory to a program on co-design with AI. The Institute and the FabLab collaborate at regional, national and transnational level with innovation foundations.
Our role in the project
Within this project, SUPSI Design Institute and FabLab will contribute to:
- The application of the human centred design and participatory design methodologies to guide the multi stakeholders sessions aiming at defining the LAUDS factories framework. In particular, the lab will work on the creative methodologies for facilitating the sessions and it will coordinate the collaboration with the artists and designers who will join the sessions to define the speculative futures.
- The FabLab SUPSI will set up and develop one of two replicators to demonstrate and transfer the outcomes of the LAUDS factories framework. In particular, as a replicator, the FabLab will focus on how to create local goods through regenerative design principles based on reuse of materials and sustainable productions. The replicator will expand the existing use cases and build upon the development of open source tools to make the technology accessible to artists, designers, creative industries and local, national and transnational SMEs.
- SUPSI Design Institute will lead and contribute to the overall dissemination and communication strategy developing the tasks with an expertise on the design of transdisciplinary workshops and the application of visual methodologies to visualise contents through creative web interfaces based on AI co-design.
Our expertise
Design Institute (University of Applied Science of Southern Switzerland) is a research institute specialised in applied research projects on creativity, design and technologies through open innovation, participatory design processes and transdisciplinary education formats. By applying human centred design and open source methodologies, the Institute carries out experimental and applied projects on how to engage the creative communities on the use of open technologies for data literacy development, artificial intelligence, open data and creative coding. Since 2012, the Institute manages the SUPSI FabLab, the laboratory for digital fabrication dedicated to the design and testing of educational and collaborative design programs.
