Grenoble: a different way of life ?

In France and particularly in Grenoble, one can find a lot of active associations that usually do not have a strong online presence, but are very active locally. These are sport, culture or teaching-directed associations. A good example is the “ptit velo dans la tête” organisation. This association is running bike repair workshops where the members can come and repair their bikes, and buy spare parts or full bikes at very reduced prices. While everyone in Grenoble seem to know of their existence, I did not find it online before coming.

The low-tech lab is another example. I did send emails and wrote in the online forum, but it is only when I went to the lab itself that I could start a conversation and foster discussions, starting a collaboration (see below). This is also visible in the lab-life at G-Scop, where numerous discussions happen -mostly in French- at the coffee machine.

G-Scop and INP

I was set in a small office on the third floor in the G-Scop offices, close to Prof. Boujut office. It was relatively close to the place I stayed and I could go by foot almost daily. The campus is quite in the center of the city, close to the main train station, but quite far from the main university campus in the east and to the ENSE3 space where Prof. Hodencq (former openmake fellow) is working in the west. The atmosphere is quite relaxed, with a central coffee machine close to a terrace where we could still have lunch despite the cold. I could spend quite some time with our colleague, learned more about the history of their research and the organisation.

We also had a webinar with other French collaborators from the LAUDS Factory project in the university of Lorraine, who presented their paper (Osorio et al., ‘Exploring Team Roles for Social Innovation Labs’, doi: 10.1016/j.jengtecman.2024.101799). The paper describe roles and competences necessary to run a social inovation lab, both discussing the framework (developped from their own experience and a literature review) and its application in fablabs in South America. This is particularly interesting for the development of the BUA mobile lab we are setting up in Berlin.

Fablabs

I visited three fablabs, one at G-SCOP, one at ENSE3 and ‘la casemate’. The machines available were slightly different but all presented some digital manufacturing machines (3D printers, lasercutter,..), space devoted to electronics, and some more manual conception machines (mostly wood workshops). The obvious characteristics of these places were their emptiness. While G-Scop and ENSE3 are places dedicated for students and their use may depend on the teaching activities (which would explain why they were not used), ‘la casemate’ is an open fablab. This latter fablab has about 130 members and organize a lot of training workshops, so one could think we were only unlucky, but the student present told us that they did not see much activities in the fablab.

An interesting point is the close relation of fablabs and science communication: ‘la casemate’ is both a fablab and a museum organizing expositions. We found a similar connection with the low-tech lab (see below) that share a space with an association devoted to science communication.

The ENSE3 space is used for “repair workshops” organized every months by the fablab team (2 Full time equivalents : one manager and one technician). To expand the opening time of the space in the evening, students are hired to replace the fablab manager. They are trained for security issues by the fablab manager, while the school promised to organised more thorough training. The fablab is used one third of the time for specific courses, one third for block courses, and one third for students coming in their free time, either working on the projects assigned in the courses or on their personal projects.

The G-Scop fablab is to date only used during specific courses in the school, but they would like to open it more.

Low-tech movement

One characteristic of the French ecosystem around research hardware and open source hardware is the low-tech community. This movement, that got more organised about 10 years ago, is trying to implement a philosophy of efficient design. The low-tech ideology is well described in the “age of low-tech” book writen in 2014 by Philippe Bihouix (ISBN: 9781529213270 for the translated version). Interestingly, the movement and its structure is studied by several students working at G-Scop and there is some common teaching activities (most people working for the Grenoble low-tech lab studied at the INP). Interestingly, the gender ratio in the low tech lab is pretty well balanced, even if the “makers” tasks in this space are taken mostly by the male members.

In brief, the low-tech philosophy wants to question needs (do we needs this or that object), and provide solutions where the technology can be understood and mastered by the users, and where there is a minimization of the effect on the ecology, especially in term of material used. The community is very “franco-française” and there is very few examples outside France. This is probably due to political, historical and cultural aspects that foster these kind of initiatives.

Pedal powered toolkit

I could collaborate with the Grenoble low tech lab, and we have built a pedal-powered toolkit. After discussing the project for one day, researching existing designs, we sourced an old bicycle, some belts, poultry and wood and we started building the object. We documented the work on https://codeberg.org/openmakeXlowtech/PedalPoweredMachine-4fablab , using a template I had work on during the first week of my stay. This was highly useful to:

• test the template
• understand the specificity of low-tech workflows
• build a tool for our fablab in Berlin

We also had very thorough discussion about open source hardware licenses, and the difficulties people have when they see their project taken by a large company that outsource production in China. (While I do not think having online tutorial would change anything to it, inventors are angry when this happens, and have then bad feelings about their openness attempts).

Back to Berlin

Now that I am back, I could finalize some material sourcing for our fablabs, feeling some gaps I could recognize during to my stay in France. I am looking forward to get feedback on the use of Git forges for the documentation (as low-tech labs usually provide tutorials via a wiki, but no organised documentation of their projects), and apply some things I learned. It is also time to finish the papers I have been discussing with our collaborators in France. It is both nice and sad to be back, being in France has been very pleasant, but Berlin Winter has his charms.