The Fabless Manifesto is a document signed by Salvadoran makers in 2017, urging for a more appropriate view of digital fabrication in fab labs. The following is a copy of the manifest written by Mario Gómez with edits by Emilio Velis.
Fabless Manifesto: How to make almost anything with barely anything[edit | edit source]
The description under the name of the manifesto: "How to make almost anything with barely anything" is a homage to Neil Gershenfeld's paper and class "How to Make Almost Anything", on which he exposes the philosophy behind fab labs. However, the team responsible for this manifesto wanted to expand on the concept of barely anything, because the experience of digital fabrication in contexts such as our usually begin with exactly that, barely anything.
Principles[edit | edit source]
The Fabless digital fabrication laboratory bases its functioning upon the following five premises:
People build machines[edit | edit source]
Digital fabrication does not start by having a laser cutter, a 3D printer or a CNC router. Digital fabrication begins with an idea by an individual or group with the skills to utilize digital tools to design and prototype something that will eventually become a real-life object through digital fabrication or manual methods. This premise considers that, over time people will start to acquire or even build the machines that will allow them to design or create whatever they need. Over these five years we have seen how individuals have come from building their own RepRaps and CNC routers with spare pieces to the point of buying specialized equipment for 3D cutting or printing.
Digital fabrication capacities of a community are higher than of individuals[edit | edit source]
A community where each of us have our own tools, machines and knowledge, has a better capacity to build things and to generate solutions than an individual working separately would. Our experience at the 2017 Fab Academy demonstrated that although none of the participants had neither every tool, all knowledge or even the minimum equipment for a fab lab. Each member of the community had special abilities that were key for each task. The community included many times people who were external to it, and from backgrounds very different from digital fabrication, but that end up contributing with their knowledge in order to generate innovative methods and techniques for the existing resources. External communities and collectives include graphic and industrial design networks, hackerspaces and even private enterprises. A good example of this was how a new PCB fabrication technique was developed by Joksan Alvarado and perfected by Damaris Cotto to reveal copper plates by making the traces by using a laser cutter over acrylic lacquer and a vinyl stencil.
The digital fabrication laboratory exists wherever the community needs it[edit | edit source]
A garage, a red box full of electronic components, a 3D printer or a CNC router on a table on a remote village. A Fabless laboratory is not a fixed space, but rather an emerging space, mobile, ephemeral, that appears anywhere where digital fabrication is able to contribute to the creation of new things or the solution of problems. In the same way, it can dissappear or "go to sleep" until the community needs it again. During our Fab Academy experience, the laboratory emerged from a diversity of places. Although the majority of the activities took place at the INNBOX meeting room, all electronic components were brought from Hackerspace San Salvador, laser cutting was made at printEA, 3D printing was made at Spe3dy and CNC cutting was made at Don Bosco University. We even did some of the CNC cutting at La Granja Fab Lab in Quezaltenango, Guatemala. The laboratory not only lacked of a fixed location, but it even overcame country borders during our Fab Academy.
The result is more important than the methods or tools used to obtain it[edit | edit source]
Resources and tools available for each context can be completely different, and digital fabrication can be considered to be or not to be viable for all manufacturing processes. Perhaps design can be made digitally, but for its manufacturing we will have to use traditional knowledge or the experimentation with other types of manufacture that are not completely automated. Digital fabrication is usually coined taking only the method of manufacturing into consideration. Fabless proposes to consider design as part of the fabrication, and to gradually transit into processes of digital manufacturing as long as the resources and context allow it. Although digital fabrication certainly accelerates the processes of manufacturing when means for manufacturing are not available, the local fabrication knowledge and artisan fabrication are immensely important for turning an idea into a real-life object. Digital fabrication should not try to replace local knowledge and capacities but rather to amplify and integrate them as part of design and fabrication.
There can be a digital fabrication laboratory without machines, but not without people[edit | edit source]
The fact that people build machines is the first statement of this manifesto, and its maximum expression is shown in this fifth one, on which we affirm that the laboratory is not made up of, or defined by machines, but by people. If there is people, then gradually there will begin to be machines, but if there is no people, a community, a group of people interested in digital fabrication, machines will only serve to gather dust. During many years we dreamed with having a digital fabrication laboratory with all kinds of machines in order to build almost anything, but with time we realized that as we had barely anything, the work among the community allowed us to turn this "barely anything" that each of us had into a fully equipped virtual laboratory, not only with machines, but with knowledge and techniques at the same level that a physical fab lab would contain. This capacity from the community has allowed us for many years to develop many projects in El Salvador. In 2017 it also allowed the Fab Academy students to finish all required assignments.
