2nd & 3rd week of internship @ fabguru Fab Pro trainee, an intensive train the trainer programme for Saint-Gobain Bristol-Suwa-Wayne
Hello! During the last 2 weeks, fabguru, yourownlab and Fablab Willich hosted Fab Pro training. FAB LAB PRO is a Train-the-Trainer program developed by Your Own Lab and Alex Schaub. It It is an intensive training which gives participants opportunities to learn the theory and practise of several techniques (2D, 2.5D, 3D, electronics) touching on all the modules of the regular Fab Lab Academy. In this time my task was to support the whole programme, wrapping up the end of each day, and portrait making by laser cutter.
There were 10 enthusiastic participants at the new fablab of Saint Gobain, from Bristol (5p), Wayne(4p) and Suwa(1p). The course was given 4 times in 2-day sessions in 2 groups running parallel. Wayne will open a fablab this spring, Bristol plans to open it this June and Suwa is preparing to open it next autumn. The participants' backgrounds were very mixed, some were from engineering, packaging, storage control, or production etc. It meant that many of them never used applications such as Illustrator, Rhino neither laser cutters or 3D printers so it was great challenge and an intensive time for all of us. Of course it was meant as a way of learning new techniques for all of them, but it was also very important to develop a good team-work within their own lab as well as a bridge between the 3 Fablabs including Fablab Willich in the Saint Gobain network. I must say they worked very hard and we succeeded to keep them all in a productive mode even if there was some critical/unhappy feedback from them during the period we managed to fix it (*1). For me it was an unforgettable experience as I could learn a lot of technical practise as well as that the participants taught me that a good lab could hardly exist without good teamwork in the Lab and how important it is to maintain it! They gained a great starting line to run Fablab. Questions remain for each lab (its not easy to answer, they say because Saint Gobain is a company it has to make profit from fablab as well. It makes the situation different than for a Fablab within a school or institution. ) about how much and whom each lab should be open to external participants. This is a good question to me as well, it is depending on where and what kind of digital lab space you want to have though in each case can be different.
Let me note next blog what happened in Fab Pro Trainee @ Willich (10 -19 Nov 2015).