Design/Fabrication Lab

Digital fabrication and open design in a networked society promise radical changes to design professions. Together these methods have serious impact on producer-consumer and professional-amateur relationships; it creates opportunities for shared authorship and democratic economy; it promises a shift from a supply to demand-focused process; it enables global thinking followed by local actions. With the rise of the maker culture and makerspaces across the world, many of these changes become visible in product design. However, industries are adapting slowly.

D/F Lab

The Design/Fabrication Lab was an initiative to build an urban digital fabrication laboratory, school, and factory for the future. Based in Amsterdam, the D/F Lab endeavors to advance the Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) Industry through applied research, construction manufacturing innovation, and maker-focused education. We envision an urban digital laboratory-school-factory that builds upon Amsterdam’s climate of design-driven, bottom-up, interdisciplinary, pragmatic applications, as well as The Netherlands’ well-established cultural and institutional infrastructure. It brings together highly complementary Dutch and US designers, technologists, educators and architects. The aim was to discuss the synergy between Dutch strengths in design, technology, open culture, and American innovations in business and technology.

Goal of this project

Through this project, Waag and partners& One Architecture and Filson and Rohrbacher architects wanted to stimulate digital fabrication and expand it to the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry.

Inspiration for the D/F Lab came from the "A Mies for all (AMFA)" project, that aims to develop a business that will make the serial reproduction of iconic architecture possible – starting with the Farnsworth House. Shouldn’t everyone have the possibility of living in a Farnsworth, or any classic house for that matter?