Description:
Our talk at the Fablab10 about how start-up work with Fablab Hi！We are Flexbot. Our Fab Lab is intertwined with our startup, and the two have helped each other move forward. In 2012, we established our first Fab Lab in our hometown of Guiyang, a somewhat remote inland city in China. At the time, when we were just starting our work as a startup focused on "software defined manufacturing", we had a 1000 square foot office and only one 3d printer. On weekends we made our equipment available to the public, and occasionally scheduled workshops and talks to promote personal fabrication. In a small, underdeveloped city, 3d printing was a fascinating technology to a lot of people, and we met future teammates through our workshops. In 2013, we launched our first open source project on Kickstarter, and raised over 560,000 dollars. To ensure that the our design files were suitable for the users to share, we used desktop-style digital fabrication for our project. Because of this, we added more 3d printers, CNC,laser cutter, and a robotic arm. Now we have a larger office, and through holding more workshops and talks, more and more people in our area are learning about digital fabrication. Among the audience of our talks were representatives from traditional fabrication firms as well as from the local government. Our story has inspired an interest towards digital fabrication among them. One week before we arrived in Barcelona, they agreed to provide a 30000 square foot factory space where we can build a fab lab, and they will sponsor the purchase of all kinds of digitally controlled equipment. We hope that in the future, we can organize the local craftsman of our hometown to participate in workshops about digital fabrication, and hope that fab labs from all over the world could come to our workshop to learn from each other. Thank you! I'm looking forward to sharing more of our story at FAB11.
