Sherry Lassiter is the President of The Fab Foundation based out of MIT’s Center for Bits & Atoms. The Fab Foundation supports a network of fab labs around the world whose mission is to provide access to tools, knowledge, and financial means to educate, innovate, and invent using technology and digital fabrication. In her discussion with Venture Café Presents host Christine Dunn, Ms. Lassiter discusses the global fab lab network and how it supports entrepreneurship and education.

After building a robust two-decade career as a writer, producer, and director for scientific documentaries for a variety of television series, Ms. Lassiter felt driven to become part of creating the stories of science and innovation rather than just telling the stories. She found the Fab Lab organization that was emerging out of MIT’s Center for Bits & Atoms, and immediately recognized that “this was going to impact so many people in the world from an educational perspective, an innovation perspective, and give people the ability to take control of technology in their lives.” She’s been working with the Fab Foundation, which supports the fab lab network, for about 15 years now.

Currently, the network of fab labs encompasses an open, creative community of fabricators, artists, scientists, engineers, educators, students, amateurs, and professionals of all ages located in more than 78 countries across approximately 1,000 sites. These sites range from community-based labs to advanced research centers. All sites abide by a set of guiding principles as outlined by the Fab Foundation:

1. Collaborate and share knowledge with others across the network of fab labs.
2. Use the same tools and processes that are shared across the fab lab network to enhance and support the collaborative process and support the established global infrastructure.
3. Subscribe to the charter that says I will do no harm, I will share knowledge, I can protect my own intellectual property but I will also pay it back and/or forward to my community.

The fab lab network is committed to keeping up with the fast-paced changes in today’s technology and applications. They have access to MIT’s cutting-edge research in a variety of fields including “digital fabrication and the marriage between computer science and physical science.” Ms. Lassiter added, “We’re about democratizing access to the tools for invention” and “global applied research collaborations and business opportunities are growing out of this kind of dissemination into the network.”

The Fab Foundation will be working with the Roxbury Innovation Center outside Boston to open a new fab lab focused on:

1. The entrepreneurial community by creating a “beautiful place for new and young entrepreneurs to find and create new business opportunities” and by giving access to tools and education so they can design and build prototypes while using the Innovation Center to network and secure funding, and
2. The student population at the nearby Boston public schools to “empower them not only for personal expression but to take control of the technology in their life and take control of the technology development in their life.”

Ms. Lassiter believes that the fab labs are teaching much-needed 21st century skills and are working to create not just a skilled workforce, but leaders and technology innovators. “You have to know how to present yourself online, you have to know how to collaborate across many different languages and cultures and countries, you have to know how to document, you have to know a little bit of everything,” she said. “We’re going back to a Renaissance model where you have to know a little bit about a lot of things in order to survive the 21st century workforce” and become a leader.

Related Links

For more information about Sherry Lassiter, the Fab Foundation, and fab labs, please visit www.fabfoundation.org..

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