Fab City as a distributed learning space
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”. — Gregory Bateson, British anthropologist, and linguist.
Fab City Foundation is enabling a new form of learning using the power of distributed education, innovation, and design. Our approach aims to integrate human needs with the balance of our planetary ecosystems to nurture life locally and globally. We are launching a distributed (online and onsite) master program, the Master in Design for Distributed Innovation, in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), Fab Lab Barcelona, and local nodes in Paris, Puebla, Shanghai, Bali, Hamburg, and Lima (with more to come.) Thanks to its distributed and hybrid format, it will allow participants to learn and apply new knowledge to local challenges connected to their cities, communities, and bioregions.
The program will be delivered online by an experienced and recognized faculty in the fields of biology, digital fabrication, ecology, urban design, innovation, product design, and strategic design. Hosted locally, working groups will experiment in their closest Fab Labs, prototyping and testing new approaches to design and innovation to address climate change, social disenfranchisement, economic loss, and community degradation. Through this innovative distributed learning space, Fab City is building connections between global knowledge and local needs, bringing access to advanced knowledge and study accreditation to students without them having to relocate to other countries or centers around the world.
Why should we learn how to learn?
Interdependence between species is fundamental to maintaining the systems that support life at the planetary scale. It is not a new discovery that our planetary ecosystems and human society need to radically transform the way they relate to each other, otherwise they are at risk of extinction. The last 500 years of human history have been based on the expansion of human control over natural resources on a global scale. The rise of global expeditions in the search of new worlds was fueled by the promise of finding new treasures, from gold and jewels to spices, to the “discovery” of new cultures. The dominant Eurocentric view that followed these expeditions is still present today in every product we consume, from smartphones to food and energy in our homes. Since the beginning of the first industrial revolution, there were warning signs exposing the possible risks related to this technological paradigm when the rhythm of consumption of planetary resources started to put some species and ecosystems in danger.
Our material ecology (mostly dependent on fossil fuels) and industrial complex that sustains the current global trade is built on extractive principles, control, and financial gain. In order to enable a true transition towards a regenerative, productive, and inclusive economy on a global scale, we need to detach from the current paradigm of production and unlearn what we have learned from the last half millennia. This does not mean to turn our backs to technological advances, or the progress gained thanks to these the same systems we want to transform, but to evolve their role in our society and to recalibrate the purpose for which they have been built. Society at large needs to relearn how to be able to inhabit ecosystems that are fundamental for its well-being, including forests, watersheds, networks of mycelium, or other species’ territories, while balancing the comfort and convenience built by the exploitation of these same resources and other populations.
Cities need to transform their relationship with their immediate bioregions and with other bioregions that are affected by the consumption rate of their human inhabitants. With the combination of physical and digital realities, design plays a fundamental role in changing the way we live, work, and play in cities. It is through design, and its interface with technology and biology that we must envision how to take action in cities, in conjunction with the agents and systems that make them possible. Cities cannot be understood through anthropocentric rationales, since in themselves they are living systems that depend on other living systems whose purpose does not revolve around serving human beings.
Transformational change must be understood as an evolutionary process between biological and synthetic life, with human, artificial, and natural actors. This is not an easy task, and it cannot be achieved with traditional planning or old fashion formulas of prediction and control. Instead, neighborhoods and cities need to become learning playgrounds of experimentation, where global knowledge and local wisdom work together to help improve the quality of all life. Through local prototyping, we can learn from a new material culture that is tested within everyday consumption patterns; we can experiment with peer-to-peer energy networks, or with new modes of on-demand production from recycling and reintroducing waste materials in local supply chains to emerging modes of production using digital fabrication. By enabling incremental innovation that can be tested locally and shared globally, we can accelerate the transition towards emergent forms of reorganizing our economy at multiple scales, and provide new opportunities for people to create a living out of regenerating their livelihoods.
Taking such an approach needs to start from the small scale first, focused on the power of local innovation but at the same time connected with global networks of knowledge that are available today thanks to the internet. Three facilitating pillars are already in place: the access to knowledge (online repositories), the access to new prototyping tools (Fab Labs), the power of networks (online articulation). Fab City is connecting these three pillars, and incorporating others, to enable new forms of learning. MDDI is the first program that combines these pillars to design and innovate with and within offline and online communities. We are building a Full Stack of elements that build from and for each other, in order to enable the mass distribution of almost anything.
Beyond the Master in Design for Distributed Innovation, Fab City Foundation foresees a distributed learning platform, developed with its partners in order to bring the distributed approach to learning and innovation to other fields of education, such as vocational training, executive training, and complementary learning programs for schools and universities.
Stay tuned to learn how to learn while transforming your world, and our world, together. For more information on the MDDI program, visit the website.
