Last day started with Cardboard Furniture and Projects, an eco-friendly and innovative furniture design company based in Madrid. They explained how new technologies enable new products. In such sense, the base material of their products is a more rigid, lightweighted and strong kind of cardboard called Re-board that they cut using tools like a Zünd digital cutter. They produce on-demand and in small scale highly resistant and adaptative furniture for home, office, fairs and exhibitions.
Directly inspired by the noted Italian designer and Open-Source furniture pioneer Enzo Mari, the Madrid/Roma based company mmodulUS invited us to hack furniture and enjoy the co-creation experience. Advocates of new sharing economy, they make modular and reconfigurable furniture for people willing to participate in the creation of their own day-to-day spaces.
The Madridian design and digital fabrication agency Mimétrica presented their integral solutions that go from design and prototyping to digital fabrication, placing emphasis on their lighting solutions as the Sea Lamp.
After a coffee break, Tomás Díez from FabLab Barcelona made a forward-thinking and encouraging Lecture, talking about a new era right now happening, where new postdigital technologies are empowering people to become from mere consumers to producers of their own stuff. That will make us less dependent on big brands and, in this new scenario, Fab Labs have a crucial role to play. On the other hand, Diez presented the plan to transform Barcelona in the first Fab City in the world by creating Fab Labs in every neighbourhood. In a close future, he said, public Fab Labs will be as libraries of today. He also talked about the 10th International Fab Lab Conference taking place next July in Barcelona. This Fab10 event promises to be huge and of course we will be there.
Closing the Festival, the Dutch furniture designer Michiel van der Kley introduced us the collaborative Project EGG, a totally 3D printed space, consisting of 4760 stones. Each stone is unique. People around the world with a 3D printer, are invited to collaborate by printing one of them. Once printed and collected, all these stones, placed in a precise order, will give birth to the space.
Overall, Replic_age 2014 had the flavour of a brand new world blooming. All speakers were passionate, deeply involved agents of this upcoming Third Industrial Revolution, knowing that their words and acts imply a substantial change in the way of thinking and creating the world around us. They are not playing the easy game of creating bubbles in front of wannabe audiences, but sincere experts that remark both the groundbreaking force of their works and the dangers of a shallow use of these new means. Even if the attendance was not immense, everybody there was very aware of the importance of these voices arising. We hope to have transmitted the essence of these invigorating ideas with this three-day recaps, and we will continue searching and spreading the many proposals that are hatching full of force everywhere.
PostDigital Node
Postdigital Node 