The FABLAB Movement

Abstract

The arrival of collaborative contexts to the global economic stage is a latent reality which threatens to change the traditional production models' operation. Likewise, concepts such as Industry 3.0 or even 4.0 refer to the possibility of providing customers and users with unimaginable possibilities compared to the industrial manufacturing inherited from the past centuries. Within this environment, the fabrication laboratories (FabLabs) emerge. In this chapter, the authors approach an exploratory perspective in order to make known the FabLab movement origin and further worldwide development with the intention to highlight their characteristics and the main difficulties they face nowadays. The growing importance that the FabLabs have achieved despite their novelty justifies the precise study of their characteristics according to the importance related to the strong expansion of these laboratories in this decade and its contribution to a major revolution in the collaborative environments associated with the digital manufacturing.