Designers and architects Anne Filson and Gary Rohrbacher of AtFAB created an innovative and fun destination at this year’s “flagship” Maker Faire in San Mateo.

As Anne explained, “We designed the AtFAB Open Source Living Room to offer Maker Faire visitors a place to take a break, and to learn about CNC fabrication, distributed manufacturing, and open source design. The Living Room featured several old and new AtFAB designs. Some were fabricated by ShopBot’s Bill Young, who added flair to the design by creating them in various colors…”

….as well as a very diverse set of versions of our 5-30 Minute Chair.”

The big idea for the Open Source Living Room was to put Fabbers around the country to work, demonstrating the notion of sharing files and encouraging community creativity.  AtFAB advertised the idea to the fabbers who use 100kGarages.com.

Anne said, “We enlisted several 100kGarages.com shops from across the US to fabricate customized versions of our 5-30 Minute Chair, and the fabbers didn’t hold back! They featured their creativity and craft, by showing many different digital techniques, materials, finishes, and design customizations. The chairs were a clear illustration to visitors of what CNC machines can do, how distributed manufacturing works, and made it easy for us to talk about its potentials as a new manufacturing paradigm. The array of chairs also delighted visitors throughout the weekend, and became a very popular place to take a rest during the busy days! Where else have you seen people standing in line to sit down in a chair!”

Here’s the basic design of the 5-30 minute chair that AtFAB shared with the fabbers…

And here’s what some of the fabbers came up with…

On the left in the photo above, the 5-30 minute chair as fabbed by Eric Andracke’s students at Mahomet-Seymour High School in Mahomet, Illinois. The students, who are in Eric’s STEM program there, decided to add a cut-out handle to the back of the chair.  Learn more about Eric’s STEM program at the 100kSchools.org blog.

To the right is the chair as “tweaked” by fabber Justin Wright of Sun Valley, CA. He added the detailing of Celtic knots.  Here’s Justin showing off the chair…

Then there’s the red version of the chair you see in the center. The highlight of the day came when MAKE Editor Anna Kaziunas-France awarded Greg Flanagan of Tree on a Hill Workshop’s “Queen Anne AtFAB Remix”  an Editor’s Choice Ribbon. You can download this version of the chair here.

Here’s how Tree on a Hill’s chair looked prior to painting.

Editor’s choice…!

Want to fab the 5-30 minute chair yourself? Visit AtFAB’s site for the files...