FabCafe: Please Don’t Spill Coffee On The Laser Cutters
Last year the world’s first FabCafe opened doors in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. The place is an exciting environment furnished with a variety of digital fabrication tools, including a laser cutter. In fact it’s a coffee bar and a fab lab it the same time.
The FabCafe concept is a new kind of bar that we haven’t seen before. Nevertheless, it perfectly fits with our Everything Is A Coffee Bar report, that features different kinds of coffee bars with other functions on the side, such as a launderette, a bicycle repair shop and a printing service.
Coming up with this new concept, the FabCafe focuses on the design community in the city. Neatly designed by Naruse-Inokuma Architects, the bar is different from the fab labs that we know from other cities. The FabCafe is a bar in the first place, that offers the laser cutter and other fabrication tools as additional facilities. FabCafe is run by Loftwork, a digital media production company. The project’s goal is to provide a space where people can enjoy making things.
Customers need to bring an Adobe Illustrator vector file that will be plugged into the laser cutter, as Spoon & Tamago explains in their article on the FabCafe. This way three-dimensional sculptures can be cut using all kinds of materials, like paper, felt, acrylic and wood. It will cost you €17 to share the machine with up to three people for 30 minutes. Using the machine alone will cost you €44. This sounds pretty expensive, but when you need it it can help a lot.
