Citizen Labs for DIWO Prototyping

During the last years we have witnessed the proliferation of a great variety of initiatives that use the term laboratory to define themselves: media labs, hack labs, living labs... These new labs are inspired by and give an answer to the possibilities offered by digital networks to create meeting places and collaborative experimentation.

Unlike the cultural institutions that we have inherited like museums and cultural centers, these new labs have the goal of offering platforms that facilitate the participation of users in experimentation and the developing of projects.

As it occurs in the internet those that take part on the collaborative prototyping process have different backgrounds. There are artists,  designers, architects, physicists, biologists, educators, economists... This mixture of knowledges allows the development of very diverse projects such as a photo-bioreactor, a platform for the automation of urban farming, an open source 3D printer or a data visualization of the air.