As part of the scholarship received for the Fab Academy programme, we were required to spend three months at the Fab Lab working on a community project. After a break of about two and a half weeks, I joined Ardradevi, Ashtami, and Archita at the Fab Lab, Kochi.
We were asked to propose workshops and activities that could engage the public while creating more awareness, visibility, and accessibility around the Fab Lab and digital fabrication. We were also encouraged to make use of leftover materials from previous projects, whether for testing, experimentation, or incorporating them into new activities.
There was also a different kind of clarity that came from developing workshops around the new tools and processes I had learned. I was already familiar with teaching and workshop facilitation, but the community project gave me an opportunity to bring digital fabrication, new materials, and making processes into that practice, while experimenting with how they could be shared and experienced by others.
The Academy was an intense period of learning, with plenty of experimentation and curiosity, but within a tight framework of assignments, deadlines, and requirements. Even with a project like Penny Pal, there was always a defined goal to work towards, and at times it felt like a race to keep up. The community project felt more reflective, with more room for individual thinking, experimentation, teamwork, and, importantly, having fun while doing it.
I particularly enjoyed bringing the new skills from Fab Academy back into my teaching practice - the reason I joined the programme in the first place. The community project allowed me to contribute through teaching, facilitating, making, and creating shared learning experiences around digital fabrication.
For me, the community project became an opportunity to revisit what I had learned during the Academy and actually apply it in a more deliberate way. It was a period of experimenting with ideas, testing approaches, and figuring out what I could contribute while also learning from the people around me.
The ideas, experiments, and workshops developed during these three months are documented below.