Abstract:

During the last academic year, due to the emergency caused by the Coronavirus, the digital fabrication laboratory based at CEU University, Fab Lab Madrid CEU, started teaching online classes. At the same time, the Fab Lab was also taking part in a citizen initiative that connected thousands of volunteers to produce medical equipment to be donated to health centers, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies and shops to protect vulnerable people from Coronavirus. In order to attend to both fronts (on the one hand, to facilitate our students the use of digital fabrication machines for their academic projects and, on the other hand, to keep the production of sanitary equipment running), we started a new program that allowed us to design and fabricate medical equipment, that was called: Open Fab Lab for Co-design and Digital Fabrication. The paper analyzes the initiative that was oriented to implement training skills linked to the state of emergency to respond to the demands for medical material, linking academic programs with volunteer activities to involve professors, researchers, instructors, students and volunteers through the inclusion of Service-Learning approaches where the academic curriculum was combined with community service to enrich the educational experience, citizenship teaching, and provide a pragmatic, progressive learning experience while meeting societal needs.

Keywords:

Digital Fabrication, Fab Lab, Co-design, service learning.