Interview to Manuel Moritz FabCityHamburg

What’s LAUDS means and how do you envision the future of production in Europe?

All over Europe, we have a large number of creative and digitally connected maker communities, some of them are organized as Fab City or Fab Region with a local governmental embedding. They meet and collaborate in one of the many Fab Labs, use digital (fabrication) technologies and share designs and knowledge. While those networks are fertile grounds for innovation, for STEAM education and for circular practices, they lack capacities and processes for local production serving local needs using local resources in a professional way. With the LAUDS project, I envision unlocking the full potential of an open, distributed and digital production model by bridging the gaps between makers and businesses, between Fab Labs and SMEs and between different regional maker ecosystems in Europe. In my opinion, this mode of production can strengthen Europe’s productive capacity and resilience and at the same time contribute towards a sustainable development and production in the spirit of the New European Bauhaus.

What’s the role of FabCityHamburg?

Fab City Hamburg is both: a project, a community and a concept. In the context of the LAUDS project, Fab City Hamburg e.V. as the regional hub of the maker scene coordinates a distributed LAUDS factory setup. The New Production Institute at Helmut Schmidt University as a leading research institution in the field of open source hardware and open production contributes with research on technical requirements of LAUDS factories with regard to digital and physical infrastructures. And finally, the innovation agency HIWW supports the open calls with innovative tools for collaborative decision making.

What expertise you can offer?

Fab City Hamburg was established in 2019 as the first German city to become part of the Fab City Global Initiative. We have a diverse regional network comprising a vivid maker scene, research institutions and startups in the realm of open source hardware and digital production. In addition, we can draw upon a rich experience from recent and ongoing research projects, e.g. developing the Open Lab Start Kit, developing a digital infrastructure for Fab Cities, operating an open microfactory. With this setup, we hope to contribute to the success of the LAUDS project.