Peer2Politics

"As Tomás Diez, director of the Fab Lab Barcelona project, explains in interview at owni.eu held in November 2011, their idea is to make Barcelona a Fab City. The current urban layout of Barcelona can be seen as a product of major events like the 1992 Olympics and the Universal Forum of Cultures in 2004. For the future of Barcelona, Vincente Guallart (former director of the IAAC and chief architect of Barcelona), and Antoni Vives (deputy mayor in charge of urban planning and information and technology) aim to build Barcelona 5.0.

The maker movement is on the rise. There are already over one million Etsy sellers worldwide. Together, they sold over $1.35 billion worth of goods in 2013. The emerging maker movement offers the tantalizing promise of a better economy—one that puts people at the center of commerce, promotes local, sustainable production, and empowers anyone to build a creative business on their own terms.

* Paper: A systems and thermodynamics perspective on technology in the circular economy. By Crelis F. Rammelt and Phillip Crisp. real-world economics review, issue no. 68

New section to focus on the link between open hardware, distributed manufacturing, and ecological/sustainability concerns

"The city council expects to open at least 12 labs in the coming years. There are emerging community based initiatives like MADE, and private initiatives as Fab Café (brought from Tokyo and Taipei by MOB). We have been pushing hard to get the city council to support those community and private initiatives in order to build a richer ecosystem around digital fabrication, it seems that will work, right now there is a lot of collaboration being built, and it is hard not to fall into the dynamics of a “small” city like Barcelona, and move from competition to real collaboration, I think is a matter of time and will happen at FAB10 and the Mini Maker Faire, will bring different communities together and help to build the Fab City, which is not one-side vision of the city as a laboratory, but a complete ecosystem which includes also industry, universities, commerce and many more actors which could benefit and participate of it. The municipality is a big entity, and they have their vision of creating their very own spaces, which are being also called Ateneus de Fabricació (in a more local basis), my concern is the interpretations that the public sector can make of Fab Labs, we are try to work as close as possible and is working, but there are always risks.

"After two hundred years’ development, the capitalist production mode evolves into a new shape---network economy. The traditional mode of production features the vertical control of final product producers, while the new global production network allocates resource effectively around product standards on a global scale, forming modular production and composition under the control of standards. The rise of ICT provides the conditions for transnational production. If the second industrial revolution, by introducing science into production process, enabled capital to stand, for the first time, on the material bases belonging to capitalism’s own nature, then today’s technology network comprised of autonomous computer terminals, fiber optic cables and digital technology, once again constitutes the technical basis in line with the nature of contemporary market economy agents. Modular production network not only incorporate enterprises into organizational structure with fuzzy borders, but also integrates national and local economy, resulting in complex geography-economy. The network effects inherent in network structure subvert the negative feedback mechanism of market competition, leading to multi equilibrium, path dependence and lock-in effect, which hastens economic change and increases uncertainty.

"Hackerspaces and medialabs in unusual and traditional cultural places seem to be the alternative to the educational and digital gap between rich and poor in Brazil. Raquel Renno analyses this gap and reconstructs the subversive potential auf heterotopic spaces.

"The factory is designed as an integrated system. It brings together multiple production steps from raw materials and energy to finished items. Each part of the factory produces resources needed by the other parts to function, making it self-sustaining. Since the parts are all in one place, the whole production chain can take advantage of automation and robotics. Integrated processes can also take waste outputs from one step, and use them as inputs for another. The combination results in a highly efficient design.