Union-Tribune Tells the Story of the Evolution of Fab Lab SD

By Peter Rowe

San Diego’s Fab Lab, which reopens next Friday in a converted East Village warehouse, can be a bit baffling.

The 3,200-square-foot space is open to anyone who wants to fabricate — hence the “Fab” in the title — well, what, exactly?

Anything that’s not harmful or illegal, said Katie Rast, the director: “From circuit boards to fine jewelry.”

The lab is stocked with costly, high-tech gadgets, including six 3D printers. These boxy are — well, what, exactly?

Katie Rast, standing, advises Fab Lab client Carol Willing. (K.C. Alfred)

“They’re like robotic hot glue guns,” Rast said, pointing to the spools of thin, ropelike plastic behind each printer. “They melt the plastic and form the shape that you’ve programmed.”

Rast, 34, does a lot of explaining these days, but she doesn’t mind. She helped found the lab, which is part of an international network of workshops that aim to spin off creative products to meet a wide range of local needs. She and co-founder Xavier Leonard opened the Fab Lab’s doors in 2007 — a few months before a global financial crisis torpedoed most of the grants the duo relied on for this venture.

“We believed in it,” Rast said, “but we had a hard time selling it.”

It was her job to slash costs, re-imagine the lab’s mission and guide it through the Great Recession. If Fab Lab is now poised for success, that’s only because Rast saved it from failure.

Katie Rast, standing, advises Fab Lab client Carol Willing. (K.C. Alfred)
“She took on the job of trying to make the lab sustainable,” Leonard said. “She set out to build relationships with important people.”

Rast created tech-savvy courses for high schools and colleges, inaugurated a “Geeks in Residence” program and shepherded a flock of entrepreneurs who often were as confused as they were inspired.

Take, if you will, Lucy Beard.

“I’ve never seen a 3D printer and don’t know anything about making shoes,” she told Rast they met in October 2013. “But I want to 3D print shoes.”

Today, Beard’s company – Feetz — is taking its first orders for custom footwear extruded from her own 3D printer.

“When you have an idea, especially a crazy one, 99 percent of people would say ‘That’s crazy’ or even ‘It’s good idea, but you can’t do it,’” Beard said. “Katie was the one who said, ‘Absolutely, you can do that.’

“She’s fabulous.”

‘Go and learn’

While Rast wins high praise for her grasp of high tech, for years she shunned a technology embraced by millions: the digital camera.

“I am a die-hard manual photo and dark room enthusiast,” she said. “I loved reading light, taking measurements, the whole science-meets-art aspect of photography.”

Growing up in Marin County’s Novato, the oldest child of an entrepreneur and a flight attendant, Katie fell in love with photography. She also rocked to the Doors and Led Zeppelin, soaked up the art in San Francisco’s museums and served as a role model to a younger sibling.

“She was just really cool as a sister growing up,” said Cassidy Rast, now a 29-year-old documentary filmmaker in Los Angeles. “She inspired me to research and question things.”

At Goddard College in rural Vermont, Katie designed her own major, Digital Media and Society. In 1999, she moved to San Diego and joined Heads on Fire, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing that same digital media to some of society’s poorer members. Much of this work was done in City Heights, but a notable 2003 project took a band of San Diego children to Austria, where they helped introduce the Internet to Afghan refugee children.

Among those who noticed: MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, the parent of the Fab Lab movement. In 2007, MIT contacted Leonard and Rast, asking if they would like to start a Fab Lab in San Diego.

“We were the lucky recipient of the Golden Ticket,” Rast said. “But we had no idea what this meant.”

She soon learned. There are several hundred Fab Labs, scattered across the globe in a loose network. MIT neither funds nor runs the labs, but provides the philosophy and general guidelines. Each offers any and all interested parties some of the latest tools to create almost any and all things imaginable.

“From circuit boards to fine jewelry,” Rast said.

While the lab draws more than its share of Mensa members, it’s not meant to be a clubhouse for geniuses. “It’s not a place where we want people to be intimidated,” Rast said. “We get people who say, ‘I don’t even know why there’s a red wire and green wire.’”

Beard, a former Intuit executive turned budding shoe magnate, came to the lab with many problems and few solutions. She joked about posting “the question of the week that we have no idea how to solve.” The lab’s open approach, with every visitor a potential consultant or partner, allowed her to learn.

“Katie would say, ‘Here are the 3D printers, go and learn,’ or ‘Here are the people, go and talk to them,’” Beard said.

Aerospace engineer Tyler McGahee has followed this advice. He’s developing a company, Seraph, that intends to sell camera-equipped drones to athletes — runners seeking an aerial overview of a racecourse, swimmers analyzing their strokes, skiers studying their approach to a slalom gate.

The lab, he said, is “really the only place in San Diego where you can have access to tools and a great community.”

Survival instinct

Rast is surrounded by smart people — her boyfriend, Allen McAfee, is an inventor. But even by the creative standards of the “Maker Movement,” a term used to describe the do-it-yourself community, she stands out.

“She may be the smartest person I know,” Leonard said. “She has a great way of motivating people in a way that they want to be part of the process.”

This intellectual firepower is obvious. Less apparent, perhaps, is her survival instinct. The financial crisis hit soon after San Diego Fab Lab opened, drying up the grants and donations that were keeping it afloat in its first City Heights home.

Rast laid off staff, shuttered the office, stored her gadgets. She designed more than 40 courses, then got them accredited so could charge UC San Diego, San Diego State and high schools to bring her expertise and equipment into classrooms.

She won contracts with institutions as varied as La Jolla Country Day School, where she is helping to establish a mini-Fab Lab, to the San Diego History Center, which is using the East Village lab to construct an exhibit about the Panama Canal. Rather than focusing exclusively on underprivileged children, as in the past, she’s now assisting “makers” — a term used to describe all inventors and other creators — of all ages and incomes.

“By opening up,” Rast said, “it allows us to continue doing this work. And kids are kids — every kid should have a good education.”

Eventually, the lab’s finances recovered enough to rent temporary space in Kearny Mesa. In November, Rast and McAfee began moving their shop to an old East Village warehouse, where it will help anchor the I.D.E.A. (Innovation, Design, Education, Arts) District.

To make the lab self-supporting, Rast will soon sell $75-a-month memberships to those who want seven-day-a-week access to this facility. Nonmembers are welcome, but will be charged $5 to $30 an hour, depending on the tools and supplies they use.

The ideas keep coming. Soren Nielsen used Fab Lab to develop Pond, his wireless cellphone charger. Andrew Chika, a former Microsoft electrical engineer who is now a Fab Lab “Geek in Residence,” is tinkering with a better rat trap, sensors that will alert pest control companies to dead rodents in clients’ attics.

The lab’s new space has a work-in-progress look — there’s plenty of unpacking to do — and an air of can-do optimism. On a white board, someone wrote “Today’s Mission — Make Stuf.”

That’s spelled wrong, Rast notes, but sounds right.

Source: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/lifestyle/people/sdut-katie-rast-force-fab-lab-2015jan12-story.html
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