Fabby the FabLab Robot
2022 · Culture Night · FabLab Limerick
Fabby was the FabLab's mascot and it kept breaking down. A two-minute timer, a cloud of smoke, and a life-sized screwdriver suspended on ropes: visitors had to work together to fix it before the clock ran out.
Culture Night opens labs and studios across Ireland for one evening. FabLab Limerick wanted something that captured the spirit of the place: machines, making, the pleasure of understanding how something works by playing with it. Fabby was already the lab's mascot. The piece gave it a story.
Fabby kept breaking down. Smoke poured out. A two-minute countdown began. The only way to fix it was to keep feeding screws back into its body, and the only way to do that was to work the pulleys together.
A pulley on each end of a suspended frame held an enormous screwdriver in the air. Pull both ropes at once and it rises straight up. Work one against the other and it swings across. Players had to read the physics quickly, moving the screwdriver through space to collect a screw and deliver it into Fabby before time ran out.
It was immediately intergenerational. A child on one rope and an adult on the other, strangers calling out instructions, working out the coordination in real time. Fabby kept breaking. The queue to fix it did not empty all night.
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