Sustainable South Bronx recently co-hosted a neighborhood block party, as part of our work with the Active Living by Design Program. This was a great opportunity to have a good a time with our neighbors and also get the word out about all of SSBx’s programs, including our fab lab.

Ed Bringas, one our design fellows, worked on building a display table made entirely of cardboard. He used Google Sketchup to design the legs and base, lasercut the drawings, assembled it together. By cutting many copies of the same drawing file, he was able to glue layers on top each to form a strong structure.  Ed works closely with a non-profit design group in New York called Adapative Design, that specializes in building cardboard furniture for disabled children.

We set his table up at the block party in a visible place, and laid out some pieces of a cardboard toy called “GIK” on top.

GIK was developed at MIT by Neil Gershenfeld and his children, and is created using parametric design software that allows the pieces to snap together as a “friction fit” or “press fit.”

Click here to see the whole Flickr Album from the Block Party

GIK is currently being developed as a business by Neil’s brother Alan Gershenfeld, and partners Michael Angst and Larry Marder. A partnership between SSBxFab and this GIK business is being explored as a possible revenue raising strategy for fab labs.

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There’s alot of photos that have yet to make the SSBxFab blog, so I created a flickr stream with various pictures from the first few months here.

SSBxFab is still in phase 1. We’re doing fundraising and program development for Phase 2 (which will be in a permanent space, with more machines, including ones that will allow us to work with metal), and also working on projects to prove the viability and demand for community based design and manufacturing that is environmentally conscious.

Our Design Fellows have gotten the ball rolling on some great projects,  and we’ve also seen some great excitement and participation from youth and adults in the community.

Below are some photo albums from the SSBxFab Flickr stream, showing some initial work with making furniture from scraps, doing laser etching for printmaking, and teaching basic electronics to kids in the neighborhood.  Stay tuned for photo and video updates on other exciting projects, including concrete mold making for the South Bronx Greenway, urban irrigation pumps for NYC Greenstreets, rapid-protoyped wind harnessing devices, and solar powered robotics!

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