Maker faire girona 2020

Maker Faire Girona 2020

Organized by the Polytechnic School of University of Girona (UdG) and the SokoTech Digital Social Inclusion Laboratory, in collaboration with the Department of Culture of the Generalitat Catalunya – Catalan Institute of Cultural Enterprises, Girona will host its first edition of Maker Faire, the great international event of Invention and digital creativity, which was born in 2006 in San Francisco, and today unfolds across the five continents.

Maker Faire Girona 2020, born with the desire to consolidate itself as a benchmark in the city, emphasizes the need to take a plural view of reality, seeking encounter and dialogue beyond the artificial boundaries between subjects.

Generating solutions capable of creating social value

Engineers, artists, designers, hackers, chefs, scientists and technologists present at Maker Faire Girona 2020 their most advanced projects in an innovation ecosystem that brings together a wide universe of researchers and practitioners of maker culture, universities and training centers, research and socially innovative companies. All of them focused on generating solutions capable of creating social value.

Thus, the fair is set up in a program that includes 5 online conversations between 27 local and international creators and researchers and avant-garde on food, robotics, space, fashion or biotechnology, in a revealing dialogue that promises to be full of inspiration.

The program is completed by virtual visits to creators’ spaces, workshops and performances, which in a transversal way include the Fet a Girona label, which aims to make the projects created in Girona visible.

Maker Culture

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, human-machine interfaces or biotechnology show that technology is not only technical, but is linked to the social, cultural, political and economic. Technology is fundamentally a human issue, requiring frontier, human-centered approaches.

Although interdisciplinarity and the person are rooted in the very DNA of maker culture, Maker Faire Girona 2020 emphasizes diversity, collusion between plural creators who, despite using technology and science, engineering and arts, initially start from different perspectives.

The Conversations

The conversations will be held in Catalan with simultaneous translation into English.

Great experts and creators in each field, as well as Gastronomy, will come together. The first of the activities that inaugurates the fair, under the general motto “Research and Innovation at the Crossroads of Science, Cuisine and Technology” gathers Paco Pérez, chef of the Miramar Restaurant; Héloïse Vilaseca, director of Innovation and Research at the La Masia R&D Center in Celler de Can Roca; Salvador Brugués, cooking teacher at the Sant Narcís School in Girona and head of the Low Temperature Cooking Workshop; Toni Massanés, general director of the Alícia Foundation and Tomás Díez, director of FabLab Barcelona, ​​all of them in a final conversation with the journalist and gastronomic critic Salvador Garcia Arbòs.

The “Human and Robots Coevolution” conversation is scheduled for Thursday with Mónica Rikic, new media artist and creative programmer, llah R. Nourbakhsh, of the Institute of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Martí Sánchez Fibla, researcher in artificial intelligence neuroscience and neurobotics at UPF and, in conclusion, a conversation with “the multimedia adventurer,” Antonia Folguera.

Friday is dedicated to space, under the general motto “Space technologies for a better future on Earth“, bringing together Rafael Jordà, founder and president of Open Cosmos -London; David Colby, of the MIT Media Lab; Ignasi Ribas, from the CSIC and Institute of Space Sciences of Catalonia (IEEC); Guillem Anglada, from the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and Mariona Badenas-Agustí, from the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department at MIT, who will close their presentations in conversation with Cristina Sáez, a journalist specializing in science, health, environment and digital culture.

On Saturday and Sunday, Technological Solutions for the Challenges of Sustainability in the Textile Sector and Democratizing the Practice of Biotechnology will take place, which will bring together in the same virtual space Aloma Lafontana, designer of sculptural clothing; Aldo Sollazzo, founder and director of Noumena – SokoTech; Gerard Rubio, co-founder of Kniterate London; Zoe Romano, craftivista, artisan and digital strategy, founder of We Make, Milan, all in conversation with Daniel Cantó, expert in audiovisual communication, photographer and creative consultant.

Closing the Conversations is the Democratization of Biotechnology, Computational, and Synthetic Research program, which aims to guide participants to use engineering principles to design and assemble biological components in the context of small, networked laboratories. The practice of science is changing radically, the knowledge that was previously only generated within large institutional laboratories has become accessible on a small scale and in a network, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary environment of biologists, technologists, geneticists and designers.

Sharing their experiences, are Núria Conde, researcher at the UPF Complex Systems Laboratory and director of DIYBIO BCN – SokoTech; Marc Güell, Principal Investigator and Professor at Pompeu Fabra University, a benchmark in synthetic biology; Tom Peeters, senior scientist and founder of the DIYbio Open BioLab Brussels and Núria Montserrat, ICREA research professor and principal investigator at the Institut de Biotecnologia de Catalunya, who works with stem cells, generating micro organs to understand development of human diseases.

Visits to Creator’s Spaces

Many really interesting visits are accessible during the Faire, such the La Fábrica de Galletas, a building that treasures the memory of Bilbao and  bears witness to what happens when makers, artists and designers gather in the same space.

It will be possible to access the glass urn where the MareNostrum supercomputer is housed and walk through all its corridors.

Visit the Masia I + D of the Celler de Can Roca by the hand of its director, who will show us how to “cook” and implement innovation between transversal creators.

We can also check out Noumena-SokoTech, dedicated to generating technological solutions sustainable in robotics, 3D printing and wearables, and thus discover a multipurpose fabric capable of absorbing CO2 from the air.

Spend some time with Pere Ridao, the director of the Center for Research in Underwater Robotics at the University of Girona, (UdG) who will update us on advances in the design and construction of autonomous underwater vehicles for scientific and industrial uses and without leaving the UdG.

Meet ONCOen3D biomedical engineering project, with important results in research against breast cancer carried out by the group of Quim de Ciurana.

Talk to Marc Delgado, who asks us, Can you print wood? and shares the processes that allow us to obtain sustainable materials by 3D printing. Rafael Garcia will show us how the maps that build underwater robots help to detect skin cancer, while showing how the results of the research are interconnected

Finally, we don’t want to leave out the laboratory led by Núria Montserrat, principal investigator at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), where they cultivate cell masses to create small organs with properties similar to those of human organs that, in the midst of a pandemic, have tested an experimental drug that deceives the new coronavirus.

Workshops

The fair offers participants introductory workshops on videomapping and madmapper as an easy and accessible tool for transforming a space using simple techniques of optical illusion or experimental flute to learn how to make all kinds of flutes with reeds that can be found on the banks of a river or wetland.

It will also be possible to design a space mission in the short term of an online workshop; create worlds with virtual reality; know all about IoT: Identify emerging social needs due to Covid-19; Explore Micro: bit to improve people’s lives or hack public art with Scratch, with Eduard Muntaner of UdiGitalEdu, (UdG) to bring a sculpture to life, among others.

Performance

An invitation to an audio, visual, performative and reflective journey with Sex Machines, with actress and narrator Jordina Biosca, which will be followed by a promising dialogue based on a real case; Topographic Ensemble, which explores the link between movement and sound through technology; Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi, in concert and Lolo & Sosaku, which through the use of mechanical prostheses installed on the artist’s body and different motor mechanisms programmed into pianos and other objects will make us experience a difficult experience to forget.

Fet a Girona

The Maker Movement is an open innovation ecosystem that uses new technologies to revolutionize the way natural resources are used and promote local production and global digital distribution, hence its interest in promoting invention and production in the territory. To this end, Fet a Girona was born, a label that we want to promote in successive editions.

Open source, the distribution of global digital designs, local manufacturing, the circular economy and interdisciplinarity that are at the core of maker culture foster the digital transformation of society, social inclusion and lifelong learning, while they alleviate global pollution and promote self-sufficient and sustainable societies, adjusting production to the scale of true human needs.

Learn more about the Maker Faire Girona 2020:

makerfairegirona.soko.tech

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