Greetings to you, visitor

A brief introduction on the Fab Academy

Welcome to my documentation as an active participant of the Fab Academy 2020.

Fab Academy is is a fast paced, hands-on learning experience where students learn rapid-prototyping by planning and executing a new project each week, resulting in a personal portfolio of technical accomplishments.

Fab Academy runs in more than 70 Fab Labs, for more than 250 students per year in the largest campus of the world. Fab Academy Program is part of the Academany, the Academy of Almost Anything.

The long & short of Why I am doing Fab Academy

The Centre of Gravity of the world economy has never been through a bigger flux. While countries vie for the leading position for their share in the global balance of power, technologies are shrinking (or even WARPING) space & time - the transnational corporations are in constant conflict and collaboration with the states in the process.

At the same time, the concept of a united humanity has never been stronger - given the universally accepted awareness of calamities such as climate change, environmental disaster and even epidemics - with much of the disasters created in the industrial revolution of the last two centuries. From automobile industry to individual consumption - the need for social & environmental responsibility & conscious consumption that shifts the Centre of gravity from global economic contours to a strange, invisible space. Movements like the FabLab are emergent institutions within this space - & their occupied space in the human and community centred invisible flux between the explicit demands of state vs transnational trends - is bound to be extremely valuable in its massive peer to peer knowledge sharing network and the self confidence to be independent of market rhythms.

Since graduating from the Aalto school of Arts & Design in 2014 in Sound in New Media, I have been interested in Academic exploration of Design Process in creating broad synergies between disadvantages communities that are resource limited & resource rich highly progressive maker spaces - and a possible ability of the Fablab as offering a link that combines Materiality as well as Virtuality in a peer to peer network.

In 2014, I interned at the Aalto Fab Lab for 2 & half months as a FabLab assistant - during that phase I was involved in the Design & Development of a indigenously developed medical device project, with an international peer Development - with Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences. The lack of version control, interdisciplinary communication, and non human-centric “technology first” approach.

As of 2020, I had applied to Fab Academy Cochin to study FabLab - due to delay in my residence permit application I am thankfully able to start my Fab Academy at Aalto Fablab.

The institutions I am keen on collaborating with span between India and Nordics - In India, these are Ammachi Labs (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham) & Amrita TBI(Technology Business Incubator) & India’s main design school the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. In Nordics these are the Aalto Fablab and FolkLab in Stockholm.

For my Final Project, I am interested in building a device that has a cross cultural quality - as well as qualities predominant in the new media such as interactivity, cloud management and a mediating display.

Some Technical Banter

A key aspect that runs in parallel with the projects, are the documentations. This website is written in Markdown format is for instance, & run on Gitlab - a bit like a human being and his “avatar on display”. Everytime the human “upgrades” (or occasionally even downgrades) himself, the Avatar is updated. The Avatar only takes the form the human wants to represent to the outside world.

Similarly, this analogy can be applied between my local terminal and remote terminal. The process/tool used to control this is called Version Control using GIT. This means that you I have all the different versions of my page saved and available all the time in the Gitlab interface.

Most importantly for those who are going to use MkDocs and MarkDown as a language - this would be a useful tip sheet for designing the layout.

  • It does so thanks to Mkdocs a static site generator written in Python
  • You must start customizing the file mkdocs.yml with your information
  • You can change the looks of your website using mkdocs themes, you can find in the mkdocs.yml the options for the Material Mkdocs theme
  • If you want to start from scratch, you can delete everything (using git-rm) in this repository and push any other static website <<