POP-UP FACTORY: FAB12

Every year, Fab Lab members from around the world converge in one city to show off what they have been working on as well as discuss what is to come in the future of personal digital fabrication.

The 2016 edition of this conference was held in Shenzhen, China. As an organizational volunteer, my experiences in shipping product from the "world's factory" of the Pearl River Delta as well as running the Pop-Up Factory at Solid 2015 came in handy when a logistics snafu resulted in the lack of circuit boards and mechanical systems for one of the conference's cornerstone workshops.

Armed with a pocketful of cash and my trusty WeChat rolodex of suppliers, we acquired tooling from Shenzhen's legendary markets and reconfigured the conference hotel's ballroom as an assembly line operated by the attendees themselves in order to produce the required devices on demand.

Special thanks to Nadya Peek, Calvin Zhong, Neil Gershenfeld, and Sherry Lassiter.