The latest news

Oh my goodness have we been busy the past several weeks!  The Fab Lab Tulsa team has been going all out following the opening on September 13.

We've hosted over a hundred guests, dozens of tours and several smaller group meetings.  The response has been fantastic.  The Tulsa Hackathon was at the lab recently, and Tulsa Start-Up Weekend is coming up.  Fab Flight has started meetings there (global team building a UAV), and several engineering club meetings like the Engineering Society of Tulsa have held meetings.

Jumpstart classes are humming along too...join in the fun!

Our educational programming is off to a great start having had a successful Phase One program with San Miguel Middle School.  Phase Two starts very soon.  Further, we've made a great connection with Tulsa MET, an exceptional alternative school...and we hope to have one of there students working the lab in the coming weeks.

On the community side, we've got a great idea for an enhanced partnership with Philbrook...a bit more planning but we're on the right track.  Our volunteers have been canvasing the TU area with flyers and we're getting great response.  Josh Moseby was just at TU giving a great talk to some new engineers.

For the business arena, we're ramping up our outreach.  We're making great strides but need some help.  We're happy to take referrals for business or corporate memberships.

Along those lines, the Tulsa Metro Chamber has offered scholarships for memberships to Fab Lab Tulsa.  If you or anyone you know is interested in a scholarship let us know and we can work with the Chamber to determine your eligibility.

In other news, we still have to raise money...almost $100,000 before Dec 31.  We're a 501(c)3 organization and can write tax receipts for any donation.  See our Support tab to get more info.

That's all for now!

City 5.0: The Economics of Personal Fabrication

Fab Lab Tulsa opened on a hot September 13th in 2011 amid the bussle of central Tulsa's Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood. It is incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit operating a 3500 square foot public access fabrication facility, making it one of the largest Fab Labs in the world.  Geographically, the nearest operating Fab Labs are in Kansas City, MO or Albuquerque, NM.  Remarkably there are no other operating Fab Labs in the entire Southern US. Its organization, its size and its location make Fab Lab Tulsa a truly unique enterprise.

This is all the more important because we are encountering a rapidly changing social and economic world. When dealing with change I like to quote a recent comment from the Executive Director of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK, Randall Suffolk, which is “if you dislike change then you're going to hate irrelevance.” Economically, our nation, our states and cities must confront the notion of irrelevance with a robust response. This response, I believe, should be in the form and practice of personal fabrication.

Personal fabrication, like in a Fab Lab or Hackerspace or Makerspace, is making things you need with tools which are accessible to you.  This IS the next industrial revolution, except that it won't be industrial, it will be personal.  People will use and develop custom products or technology which will impact their lives in ways profound and ordinary...from creating your own smart phone to building a kitchen table so your family can enjoy a meal together.

Fab Lab is short for “fabrication laboratory”. It originated with Dr. Neil Gershenfeld in 2001 at MIT and has since spread around the world embodied as over 100 Fab Labs where people “make (almost) anything”. Projects made in the lab range from furniture, to stickers, to environmental sensors, to robots, to UAVs, to sculptures, to small houses. Really you can make almost anything. Hackerspaces and Makerspaces function on similar principles as clubs or co-ops, and number in the hundreds as well.

Using a Fab Lab like the one in Tulsa is simple...don't postpone your first visit until you have an idea.  Come by Fab Lab Tulsa right now to see the machines, enjoy a tour and make a sample project like a key chain or bumper sticker.

In a broader context, making things you need using a local fabrication shop, like a Fab Lab, has radical economic consequences, analogous to the automobile and it's effects on the formerly ubiquitous horse and buggy. We live in a world now with fragile global supply chains, expensive fuel, increasingly complicated products and systems, and a growing ignorance about the basic computing tools and technology luxuries in our lives. Natural disasters, wars and the like show us that our lives are intertwined with global events.

Personal fabrication presents another outlook. If you can make almost anything from readily available raw materials then long, fragile and expensive supply chains could almost be eradicated; thus minimizing the effects of labor strikes or disasters in far away regions. Fuel costs could be drastically reduced because only raw materials and supplies are shipped, not finished goods. The benefit is that raw materials are typically durable, compact and cheap, while finished goods are typically bulky, fragile and expensive. Further, knowledge and expertise of our everyday tools becomes pervasive because we either produce or see the production of our own goods. Not only does production become personal, on a human scale; education becomes personal, through experiential and peer-to-peer learning.

The key opportunity is not the transmission of physical goods, as is our economy today, but the transmission of data, designs and ideas. For example, a transaction in the fab economy might be the purchase of a bicycle. Presently, the bike is bought “ready to ride” at one of several retail shops. In the fab economy, the transaction might be in a Fab Lab where the computer design files and raw materials are purchased, but fabrication happens right in front of you, either by you or by someone else. A bicycle is a simple example but complicated technology or robotic devices could be done the same way.

The implications for our economy are far reaching. City zoning for industry could be discretized from large and monolithic production sites into multiple micro-sites which, by comparison, are exceptionally scalable for output and product type. Industrial parks and long commutes could be reduced or eliminated. In essence, because the conventional centralized factory concept is democratized into many mini production sites the paradigm of the industrial revolution is broken. Data and information, which is very cheap to transmit, becomes the primary focus of the supply chain. The notion of the retail economy is changed forever because the functions of production, distribution and retail are no longer separated. They are combined into a single personal fabrication micro-site.

The fab economy is already growing in the US and internationally.  Fab Lab Tulsa is among about 34 in the US. In other regions, there are three Fab Labs in Detroit alone and five in the state of Ohio. These are “rust-belt” regions which now recognize the step change which is required to leap frog national and global competitors. The most ambitious global Fab Lab project is in Barcelona, Spain. Spain, as the news reports, is an economy and government in crises. However, the city leaders in Barcelona, working with the four Fab Labs therein, have devised plan to bring Fab Labs to nearly every corner of their metro. Quite simply, Barcelona will be the world's first Fab City.

The city planners in Barcelona would tell you that a Fab City can be considered City 5.0. Version 1.0 was an agrarian settlement. Version 2.0 had basic transportation infrastructure but no utilities. Version 3.0 has modern utilities and infrastructure. Version 4.0 of the city, today, is electrified with modern internet communications and zoning ordinances. Version 5.0 is a city networked with fab labs which import raw materials and data for producing the city's needs ranging from environmental sensors to kitchen utensils; and which exports designs, data and intellectual property to be used in production in other locales.

The next evolution in our cities and in our economy is the adoption of personal fabrication. This approach to commerce is the ultimate just-in-time system which minimizes environmental impact, empowers entrepreneurship and education with cutting edge technology, and brings resources to the public the likes of which they've never experienced before.

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Matthew Norris is Board President of Fab Lab Tulsa, Inc. and is one of the principal founders of the organization.  He and his wife Diama formed the Fab Lab Tulsa team formed in late 2008 and worked with local, national and international partners for three years to bring the Fab Lab concept to life in Tulsa.  He has dual degrees in mechanical engineering, and is a licensed professional engineer with over 10 years of aerospace experience in computer simulations, advanced material systems and biologically inspired structures.  He has one lovely daughter named Eva.

Creativity Summit a success + fundraising

Congrats and many thanks to our fine former Mayor of Tulsa, the honorable Rodger Randle.  The day which he and his comrades (Kevin O'Connor and Philbrook notably) organized was a great success with over 150 registrants and a day of stimulating conversation.  The topics ranged from art to theatre to education to business.

My talk on Fab Lab's was well received.  Our panel on rating Tulsa's creativity involved an artist, a journalist, a poet and myself.  Being one of the few technology guys in the room was a bit daunting but altogether exciting.

I can't say enough good things...the keynote speaker Nate Bliss, the lunch speaker Robert Sternberg, and the afternoon speaker Randall Suffolk were fantastic.  I was really struck by a statement by Randall, which was this "If you dislike change, you're going to hate irrelevance."

This really struck a nerve with me in my life, especially launching a new organization and plowing new ground in Tulsa.  It's all about relevance, and one of the chief motivations of our Fab Lab Tulsa team is to make our fair city and state more relevant in the days and years to come.

In closing, the event was great and I was honored to participate in the first one.  For a great audio piece, here's a link to a radio story on the event here.  Note that I can't control this audio link and I don't know how long it will be available.

Oh, yeah...if you want to come visit Fab Lab Tulsa, contact me.  My digits and email are on our website.  I'm always happy to give tours, especially if you're interested in making a donation!

Book Smart Tulsa, David Eagleman and the Philbrook Cats

So first, let me say WOW!  Fab Lab Tulsa hosted Book Smart Tulsa last night at the lab.  It wasn't our grand opening or anything but it was the first time we've really let the public into the lab before our grand opening later this year.  Get ready...there were an estimated 200 people at Fab Lab Tulsa last night!  The Fab Lab Tulsa team was so pleased and excited by both the response from our community and from Book Smart Tulsa.  Many thanks.

Again, WOW...the author, David Eagleman, was a great speaker.  He's a world renowned neuroscientist.  He was engaging, funny and well worth the time.  His book, Incognito, has been on the NYT best seller list for 30 days now.  Tulsa was city number 29 on a 30 city tour.  His final stop was NYC for a talk and a date with Steven Colbert on the Colbert Report.  See David's PBS promo clip here.

I had a chance to talk with him beforehand and he's a really nice guy.  Really smart too.  And he was totally intrigued by Fab Lab Tulsa.  His neuroscience lab is in Houston and he was a little disappointed that there's no Fab Lab Houston (yet).

All in all, I think Tulsa made a great first impression.  Kudos to Jeff Martin, Book Smart Tulsa and the whole Fab Lab Tulsa team.

Finally, I also learned about the Philbrook Cat Cams last night.  Apparently there are couple cats on the Philbrook Museum grounds which are now wearing little cameras on their necks.  I thought that was a pretty fun idea.  To see them go to YouTube and search for "Philbrook Cat".