South African Fashion | Tshirts | Design & Designers T-shirts

Howdy all,

A not so new outreach program by the infamous Massachusetts Institute of Technology known as CBA (Centre for bit and atoms) have redefined the term ‘design’ in the Mother City. For the past couple of years now the FabLab as it’s more commonly known has been helping design students and innovators in the City of Cape Town by providing up to date commercial technology in easy to use and affordable Laboratories. And what’s also awesome is that these labs are all over the world including Norway, inner city Boston (US) and rural India, really implanting within us the concept of the Global village.

I’m not too clued up with the equipment myself but according to the FabLab site they supply Omax Waterjet cutters, Vinyl cutters, Alpha Lathe and generally an interesting and expensive array of equipment that is not the easiest of goodies to get hold of. Being situated on St George Street, in the Waldorf building, Cape Town the lab has recently been funded by the South African Government as well, about time the powers that be focused on the prospective designers of Cape Town J

All FabLab’s across the globe share ‘core capabilities’ so that people across networks can share designs, data and projects. These core capabilities include computer-controlled lasercutter’s; numerically-controlled milling machine as well as programming tools for low-cost high-speed embedded processing. In essence this means that a project in Cape Town can be uploaded and worked on from a lab in Norway. Really useful if you don’t know what you’re doing and need some ‘Black Metal’ loving designer to help you out on a new guitar design. Hehe, had to have at least one reference to music.

Otherwise in general, what I thought was a well thought out idea that empowers and encourages the growth and expansion of the design industry. One brownie point for MIT. J

All the best

Alex