I nuovi artigiani digitali

[Autom. eng. transl.] The Fab Labs (Manufacturing Laboratories) are craft workshops, open to the public, which offer tools and services for digital fabrication, that is, for the transformation of data into objects and vice versa. They are one of the most interesting manifestations of the so-called "maker movement". But who are the makers? We could define them as the new artisans of the digital age. Many of them are hobbyists and amateurs, while others are proto-entrepreneurs who use their creative and professional skills to launch new products and activities. Makers are often young people with a strong passion for "do it yourself", to which they associate the use of digital technologies, thus giving rise to new economic phenomena. In some cases these are activities that are not geared towards producing goods for the market; they follow a different logic, based on cooperation, on the sharing of knowledge, on the application of open source principles to the manufacture of material objects. In other cases, these are activities that do not exclude commercial purposes at all.