At the entrance of the Mobile Barcelona Festival booth (3C28 in hall 3) organized by mLove; IaaC and Fab Lab Bcn, together with MID and Hangar.org, features the Smart Citizen platform.

Smart Citizen is a device to generate participatory processes of people in the cities. More info here.

Come visit us!

To check the participating Fab Labs: http://academy.cba.mit.edu/2013/labs/index.html

To check student’s personal websites: http://academy.cba.mit.edu/2013/students/index.html

To access to the video archive of the class: http://academy.cba.mit.edu/2013/videos/index.html

To access to the Fab Academy 2013 content: http://academy.cba.mit.edu/2013/schedule/index.html

Fab Academy Barcelona first Class from Fab Lab Barcelona on Vimeo.

If you have any enquiries about the Fab Academy, please send us an email to: coordination@fabacademy.org

IAAC and the Fab Lab BCN were recently featured in a story about the future of 3D printing on TV3 Televisió de Catalunya. Tomas Diez, Project Manager in the Fab Lab BCN, and Marta Malé-Alemany, Co-Director of IAAC’s MAA Program, explained the work that went into the current exhibition on display at DHUB Barcelona, Full Print3d.

This exhibition will be on view at DHUB BCN until 22 May.

This week IAAC is hosting undergraduate architecture students from Universidad Iberoamericana in the Dominican Republic. The students, led by IAAC Alum Bianny Poueriet Galarza, have been taking a 4-day (express) Digital Fabrication class using CNC cutting techniques in the Fab Lab BCN with Tomas Diez, Fab Lab Barcelona Project Manager..

Smart Geometry 2011 just finished last Saturday, after an intense week of workshops, talks and conferences, all orbiting around the mean of Data, its uses and applications into architecture and design. Urban Feeds cluster, tutored IAAC community members: Luis Fraguada, Tomas Diez and Felipe Pecegueiro, was about the Personal Data Collection and the use of it to affect the behavior of city inhabitants. The workshop was an opportunity to develop a workflow proposal, based on a more protagonist role of the data production into the design process.

Personal Data Collection is the anchor point of the cluster, based on the use of the Ambience Sensor Kits (ASKit). ASKit are equipped with GPS antenna, Co2 sensor, light sensor, movement and temperature sensors, that allow to the user to capture and storage data into a memory card, while is scanning the city through paths. After collecting the data, it could be used as an input in Grasshopper and Google earth by the use of the G_Howl (developed by Luis Fraguada) plugin for GH, getting a real time visualization on site: hyperpresence + hyperrealism. The ASKits were then connected to Twitter and Pachube, for data streaming and information source for users to identify best places to go on the city, based on their interests and the Positive Ambience Zone Experience (PAZE). PAZED, PAZE + Devices, came out as a physical representation of the data flow and behavior, providing urban signs for people to move into the city. This whole workflow is creating a constant loop, where the user/data producer is the beginning and the end of the cycle.

Find more information about the cluster in the following presentation:

Following last’s year Smart Geometry conference, hosted in Barcelona, IAAC faculty Luis Fraguada and Tomas Diez and alumni Felipe Pecegueiro are leading the Urban Feeds cluster (assisted by MAA student Morten Bulow) at the Smart Geometry Workshops and Conferences 2011, which is taking place in Copenhagen from March 28th to 31st.

Urban Feeds cluster aims to generate design responses that scrutinize and analyze the relationships between two or more sensor parameters. Like traffic lights with sensors that are programmed to respond to fluctuations in traffic flows, the cluster aims to prototype urban interventions. These ‘behavioral prototypes’ allow the participants to design explicit behaviors and their varying degrees of expression in relation to the input parameters.

To achieve the challenge, Urban Feeds team pre-developed and produced the Ambience Sensor Kits (ASK) at Fab Lab Barcelona, supported and sponsored by IAAC.

Smart Geometry 2011 > Building The Invisible

Vast streams of data offer a rich resource for designers. User data, energy calculations, embedded sensing, material and structural simulation allows design to be situated and responsive. Design sits not separate from is environment but inhabits an ecological system, open, dynamic and interdependent. We now have the chance to instil design with an immanent intelligence creating new relationships between the user, the built and its ecosphere. From the simulation of megacities to the solid modelling of material systems, design has the potential to be informed by the real.

Since January a group of students from the University of Texas at San Antonio have been at IAAC with their professors Maria Solé Bravo and Natali Canas working and learning about digital fabrication. Last week students from this university had a Digital Fabrication workshop guided by Tomas Diez (pictured above) and Brian Peters, where they worked in teams in IAAC’s FabLab fabricating their projects and presented them at the end of the workshop.

Project: Light Modulator, by Steven Stanson & Chanel Ramirez.

Project: Lounge Chair & Book Shelf/Light Diffuser, by Sean House, Ayumi Nakagawa, Carole Zureik & Christopher Henderson.

Faculty : Tomas Diez

Guest Jury : Marta Malé-Alemany (MAA Co-Director), Luis Fraguada (Computation Design Faculty)

Fab Lab Collaborators: Luciano Betoldi, Guillem Camprodon, Carlos Castro, Fabio Lopez

The students Of the MAA 2010-11 completed the first 2 assignments for the digital fabrication class. The Bench and the brick were successfully completed with the use of a CNC laser cutter and a CNC 3d printer. The students with these design projects managed to get a first idea of digital fabrication techniques and the use of CNC technology.

Small, independent, and global. IaaC opens new opportunities for project development and collaboration in Brasil. IaaC team members Areti Markopoulou (IaaC Global School Director) and Tomas Diez (Fab Lab Bcn Project Manager) visited Sao Paulo to offer two conferences both at the post-graduate and undergraduate program of architecture and urbanism of the “Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo” of the University of Sao Paulo, and to define collaboration opportunities in the development of research projects pursuing the application of the new technologies in the construction of a more efficient, sustainable and advanced architecture.

An international cooperation agreement has been signed between IaaC and FAU-USP, and his Director Sylvio Barros Sawaya, reinforcing the relationship between institutions, by the knowledge transfer and support from IaaC on the development of new fabrication facilities and LAME-USP.