About
“A Fab Lab, or digital fabrication laboratory, is a place to play, to create, to mentor, and to invent: a place for learning and innovation. Fab Labs provide access to the environment, the skills, the materials, and the advanced technology to allow anyone, anywhere, to make (almost) anything.”
By comparison, a Super Fab Lab is more advanced in its resources, often requiring users to be formally trained on equipment before usage. This level of fabrication laboratory carries a 10x larger start up cost than a standard fab lab, allowing it to offer more advanced equipment and resources.
UNC Charlotte is the first public university in the U.S. to establish a Super Fab Lab, a distinction recognized by the fab lab concept founders at MIT and the global fab lab community.
With only six Super Fab Labs in existence around the world at its inception point, UNC Charlotte has entered an elite group of creative inventors and developers. Like the other Super Fab Labs, the Charlotte addition was designed to provide students an even deeper experiential learning opportunity. It features an innovation culture run by students who share best practices and learnings through a digitally connected global network.
The UNC Charlotte Super Fab Lab goes further by emphasizing an engineering and manufacturing environment, including industry grade equipment. Students and faculty from the university’s colleges of engineering and computing and informatics are primary users, designing and building solutions for manufacturing challenges of all levels.
Adapting from best practices within the makerspace community, the culture of the UNC Charlotte Super Fab Lab will be student-driven and managed. This facility provides students a place not only to create tangible items but also their own community made of cross-disciplinary individuals from around the world who are engineering the future.
The UNC Charlotte Super Fab Lab is one of only two such facilities in the United States and a handful of Super Fab Labs across the world. The ability to bridge the gap between the innovation of prototyping with the precision of manufacturing gives the UNC Charlotte facility a distinction that is not found in other labs of its kind. In the Charlotte Super Fab Lab, Niners will be able to take an idea from conception to implementation in the manufacturing process.
The greater Charlotte region and its 3,600+ manufacturers will also have opportunities to benefit. Through a funding agreement, local companies will be able to access cutting edge equipment, helping them learn to improve workflow and accelerate their manufacturing process.
The UNC Charlotte facility is designated as a “Super Lab” by The Fab Foundation, a non-profit based out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Bits and Atoms.
Example challenges and needs that students can bring to the UNC Charlotte Super Fab Lab:
Solution
- a concept, but no equipment or support to move to next step
- a community service project idea, but no ability to create a prototype to share with their potential partners
- a desire to continue exploring a particular technical skill after a course has ended
- an aptitude for creativity, building and growing, but no peer network and support structure
- career goals that include working in the manufacturing industry but no experience with industry level machinery
Expert Team
- Student employees working in SFL are experts because they’ve been heavily trained on how to use the equipment/machines as well as the global network.
Open Space and Creative Atmosphere
- SFL is open to students in the William States Lee College of Engineering and the College of Computing and Informatics who want to pursue their ideas and develop their skills.
Easy Training
- While training is thorough, it is also straightforward, helping students understand the purpose of each piece of equipment and how it is used.
Proven Continuous Development
- Technical skills gained in SFL are transferrable by design into the real-world remaining relevant, even as technology evolves.