Results from Amsterdam workshop

1. Place Lab
Brainstorming report

2. Main activities: what does a Place Lab do?
• Addressing social needs serving from textile industry
in certain geographical area
• Employment, social status
• Give motivation to social exclusion
• Community building
• Map out the needs, what the place lab will offer
• Make sense, hold ups for problem solving on local
area
• Education/skills
• Focus on what people can bring
• Craftsmanship
• Differentiation
• Synergy/Summer school
• Test tinkering
• Produce selling myths
• Fashion/textile education
• Competitions

3. Facilities
‣Common space to experiment
‣Social space/ community
‣Sewing tools
‣Tutorials/documentation
‣Sample of textiles and accessories
‣Knowledge, libraries
‣Literature/web/study
‣Repository

4. Setting
‣ In geographical areas that have been hit hard by
textile manufacturing crisis
‣ In geographical areas of high creativeness/
skills/knowledge
‣ Search where knowledge about T&C is
‣ Census, door to door survey
‣ Team up with other fablabs (hackspaces)
‣ Depend on local situation
‣ Design, manufacture, marketing
‣ Train, exchange & experience
‣ Transnational cooperation, common products
‣ Eco-impact, sense of material, sustainability
‣ Access to fablab network

5. Service concepts & tangible results
‣ Start comprehensive
‣ socio-manufacturing service
‣ Innovation service
‣ Place to come together and have fun
‣ Find cross-cutting topics with other sectors
‣ Co-designing of local reality, collaborative & based
on collective intelligence
‣ Can be on-line? Yes (ex Etsy)
‣ Tutorial
‣ workshops (zig-zag)
‣ Tangible results: community together

6. Audience
‣ Local stakeholders
‣ Cooperatives
‣ Tailors, unemployed, young unemployed, students,
home workers
‣ Running institutions
‣ Diversification of labour as strength.
‣ Place labs take up social diversification and
strengthen their special opportunities

7. Supervision
‣ Shared ownership
‣ Employees volunteers
‣ Supervision depends on the level of support
‣ Give more, ask more
‣ Give nothing, ask nothing

8. Sustainability & enviroment
‣ Innovative network, the capital
‣ Start with something that already exsists
‣ Fab-school model
‣ After school? So parents can go to work?
‣ From low tech to high teach teaching
‣ Jobs
‣ Summer schools
‣ On-line shopping platform
‣ Market + social national support
‣ Reuse material for new products

9. Fairness
‣ Test models of fair production and fair trade
‣ “Manucrafting”
‣ Danger of the “Social stigma”
‣ Shared ownership?

10. Openness
‣ Walk in / walk out