Ideas, innovation, and making it real.

It all started one year ago when I asked a group of coworkers if they were interested in hardware. Little we knew that that question would end up turning into an actual maker space. We four soon became close friends and presented the idea to the company leaders. So, after a couple of months, we began building our beloved space.

Some render made by Koko Dominguez and Eze Rolla, the Industrial Designers that created the furniture.

We had to throw down a wall, paint, change the floor, set a proper electrical installation, change the fire sensors, buy machines, tools, components, and more.

All the furniture worked as a system; 3D printed pieces that linked the wood and the
aluminum profiles. Mobile drawers for 3D printers, built using the same system but using different connectors.

After a couple of months, it was almost finished. Quite fast considering it was a side project. So we had all we need it, but nobody within the company knew what it was, or what it was for. We thought -Oh no! What are we going to do? How do we get them involved? We thought we had everything planned; the projects we were going to do, how it was going to grow, but we didn’t think that people might not know what a digital manufacturing space was.

So, the first thing to do was to make an official introduction. Explaining why we build this space and what was it for. Also, we added a whiteboard with the phrase: “I would like to do this project in the lab…”

However, it didn’t quite work. People still didn’t know what to do about it. We started asking for advice from people who managed collaborative spaces. Among them, Beno Juarez, from FabLat, who told us about his experience with FabLab Lima and helped us join the Maker community. With the support of iúnigo and Women of Wearables, we held our first Workshop together with Eliana Guzman from Ceiborg.

Some images from our first workshop on soft circuits.

And that’s how it started. We realized that these types of spaces are still far from the everyday life of most people and that the way to approach is learning by doing. So, this first stage is based on showing that teamwork and freeing ourselves form the fear of failure it’s an incredible way to acquire new knowledge. Sometimes, it seems that we do projects that have nothing to do with our “real” work, but on the contrary, this kind of space allows us to really explore our creativity and train our minds to think outside the box.