Fab City Store: 2 years working on sustainable comsumption by distributed design
On 8,9,10 october the members of Distributed Design Market Platform will gather in Budapest. Being part of DDMP since 2017, formed by different structures and Parisian maker spaces: Ars Longa, Volumes, Villette Markerz and WoMa, the Fab City Store starts its third year of existence, working on establishing a support network to contribute and build towards more sustainable consumption and production methods. Progress report.
Sharing and promoting the Fab City values
The Fab City Store supports designers, craftmen and makers that envision and build the city of tomorrow; sustainable, open and social. Whether they offer a new life to our waste or manufacture locally, the makers of the Fab City design a new production and consumption paradigm, more sustainable, fair and inclusive. The Fab City Store connects creators and their public through its global network of responsible manufacturers and thoughtful resellers.
The Fab City Store gathers makers and consumers around a more sustainable production system sharing common values:
HYPER-LOCAL PRODUCTION : Looking for products fabricated as close to the place of consumption as possible to avoid unnecessary transportation and energy expenses.
RESPONSIBLE MATERIALS : Value the use of sustainable and sourced materials from re-use, recycling or upcycling.
DISTRIBUTABLE : Open collaboration for a better distribution of knowledge and resources and more efficient designs.
For the Fab City Store, addressing the social, economic and ecological issues of today’s city results in a recontextualization and resignification of design production in the city. In the Parisian makers ecosystem, there is a convergence in the development of small structures, supported by the territorial and political policies. This strong community strategy defends virtuous and economic interests: Through the last few years there is a growing interest of introducing specific aids to support local manufacturers and the local dynamic in general.
“Producing locally and virtuously implies a new relationship with our products and consumption patterns. The challenge we face is two folds: First the need to recreate the symbolic attachment to our objects, followed by the need to facilitate the infrastructure economically and logistically to realise those new fabrication paradigms. It is imperative to invert the relation between perceived value and production costs.” tells Michaël Araujo, fabmanager at Volumes.
“The symbolic and emotional value added by the relationship with the craftmen, the uniqueness of the fabrication on demand absolutely needs to be appreciated. Likewise for the ecological concerns : The materials are sourced and the product is made close to its place of consumption, with less transportation of material. The journey of the object, from its conception to its manufacturing, must be visible to the consumer.
The viability of urban and open fabrication needs to be strengthened and completed, where all facets are coming together, reaching from material sourcing, through accessible fabrication tools to open and shared knowledge.” adds Soumaya Nader.
Building a global knowledge platform
Rather than a physical store, The Fab City Store is a support network. It aims to be a global and shareable knowledge platform to develop local networks, specific to the characteristics of each fabric, metropolis, region or community in which it would be applied.
Since 2010, various initiatives have been formed in maker spaces in the north-east of Paris, seeking to come together to pool know-how, skills and desires. An initial group has gathered around 2014, but it is in 2016 that the network came together around Fab City Grand Paris and the Fab City Summit, from which the Fab City Store emerged.
Their relationship is not only a pool of means, machines, suppliers: It is more a combination of desires and good practices shared around the questions of urban manufacturing, on the mission to catalyse the actors of a productive city and to explore global solutions.
To reach this objective, it is necessary to be integrated in a fabric of different actors helping them all, creators but also manufacturers and users, to improve their work ethic and consumption. The actions are two-folds : help designers create and help them sell their products.
The goal is not only to offer ethical products to consumers but to help designers make those products. Through the knowledge of the Parisian local fabric, the Fab City Store build the ecosystem necessary for creators to design and fabricate their products as easily as possible. It also helps the designers through the organisation of meetups and workshops on topics such as communication or business development.
The Bootcamp in Paris
That was the aim of the Bootcamp organized last April in Paris. During this bootcamp, 6 selected projects worked with different mentors to identify development strategies for their projects. Marketing mentors helped to evolve the value perception of their project, while manufacturing experts took a fresh look at production opportunities.
The Fab City Store Bootcamp (Paris, april 2019)
“To help creators sell their production, we try to participate in a wide array of events in order to find the best context for them to promote their design, from B2C pop up stores, as we did for example at MAIF Social Club — to B2B museum shop exhibits. Through our network of architects and designers, we also try to create relations between products prescribers and creators. Finally, the goal is also to sensibilize the public to the values we hold dear and encourage them to make a committed purchase, thus working on creating a visible and understandable label.” tells Michaël.
A 3 days workshop at Re:Publica 2019
Participating in Re;Publica 2019 was for the Fab City Store the opportunity to think about ways to share the idea of the Fab City Store Grand Paris to other cities, European or global. The aim is to transfer the knowledge and good practices discovered in the fabric of Greater Paris to other urban fabrics, to build bridges between the makers communities across borders in order to be able to move towards more sustainable consumption models, limiting the transport of materials in favor of information, ideas, models of operation.
The workshop organized for Re:Publica2019 aimed to crowdsource the map of the Berlin’s manufacturing ecosystem, as well as opening the ethical charter to the problematics of the Berlin fabric. The charter and map became two artefacts to share the principles and ideas of the store, in the hope to create a local initiative to support the various creators and responsible manufacturers.
The Fab City Store is a member of Distributed Design Market Platform. DDMP is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Other members are : IAAC, Innovation Center Iceland, P2P Lab, Pakhuis Dezwijger, Happylab, Polifactory, Other Today, Re:Publica, Danish Design Center, Opendot, Politecnico de Lisboa, Copenhagen Maker, Fablab Budapest, Espacio Open
