After announcing it would shut down in mid-October, Fab@CIC, the makerspace and fabrication lab at the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), is coming back to life, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Fab@CIC was originally conceived of as a community space that would bring all kinds of makers together — 3D printers, sewing enthusiasts, laser cutters and more — with no cost to enter or use the space. But as a project of the CIC, a coworking space that has been slammed by the pandemic and consequently forced to cut costs, it began to wind down operations this past fall. The team originally planned to give almost all of Fab@CIC's equipment to the Fab Foundation, a partner organization, and hunker down.
Then, they rethought things. Fab@CIC handed over just half of the equipment to the Fab Foundation and began strategizing instead. Now, the team is moving Fab@CIC to a separate location within the CIC. It's smaller — a maximum of about six people could probably work out of the space at any given time without Covid-19 restraints — and it's also, at least for the moment, private. The makerspace will only be open to CIC members for the foreseeable future.
For the team, it's a relief that one of Boston's only makerspaces has a guaranteed path forward.
"There was a community built around it," said Leo McElroy, assistant fab lab manager at the CIC, who has been overseeing the transition. "For a lot of people, [the shutdown] left them without access to these expressive tools that they came to use regularly. It needed to live on in some form. For me personally, it was also nice to have an opportunity to stay involved with CIC. I come from the makerspace world; I like the company a lot, and I like having the community of the makerspace but also of the CIC generally."
The new fab lab has a laser cutter, a large-format plotter and a collection of hand tools. It also has 3D printers capable of handling resin and filaments. McElroy said there are plans to bring in a vinyl cutter as well.
In the meantime, McElroy has been hard at work making things even without the larger makerspace. He and CIC fab lab manager Julia Hansen coordinated a major effort to sew masks for frontline health care workers and vulnerable populations in Greater Boston. To date, the team has distributed thousands of masks and provided sewing patterns to volunteers so they can create their own.
This fall, Fab@CIC also received a grant from the Booz Allen Foundation’s Innovation Fund to run a training program in small scale-automation for tailoring businesses in the Boston area. Called "Masks & Robots," the program teaches people with backgrounds in textiles to use computers to run robots that can cut patterns to scale up small manufacturing operations. The team partnered with the Lena Park Fab Lab in Dorchester to run the program when the Cambridge fab lab shut down.
"A makerspace — it's a place and community that cultivates the development of the skill of turning thoughts into things," McElroy said. "This space, it's part of CIC. There will be an emphases on helping early-stage, and any-stage, startups."
