Fab Lab IUB

Context

Fab Lab IUB exists because, in 2017, Dr. Mahady Hasan at Independent University Bangladesh decided the country needed another working digital fabrication lab and was willing to chase the funding to build one. I came on under him while I was still a CCSE research assistant. He told me what the proposal needed to argue; I wrote it. He submitted it under his name — which is how academic grants tend to work — and we won, under the World Bank’s Higher Education Quality Enhancement Project (HEQEP).

The grant was USD 200,000 — enough to set up a real lab, not a demonstrator. Once the money came through, the work shifted from writing about a lab to sourcing one: specifying machines, vetting vendors, preparing the space, ordering the long-lead items first so they’d arrive in time, and gradually turning a room at IUB into a fab lab that matched the Fab Foundation’s standards.

What I did

• Drafted the proposal under Dr. Hasan’s guidance. Writing a grant in Bangladesh isn’t only a writing exercise — half of it is negotiating with the institution about what they will actually let you do with the money once you win it.
• Speced and sourced the machines. Laser cutter, CNC router, 3D printers, vinyl cutter, electronics bench, the consumables that always get forgotten in the first order. Some of this was Shenzhen-direct; some was local; everything had to make it through customs without becoming someone else’s problem.
• Set up the physical lab — bench layout, ventilation, electrical supply for the laser, dust extraction for the CNC. The boring parts of a fab lab are the parts that decide whether it stays useful.
• Brought it up to the milestones the grant required and handed it over to the team running it day-to-day.

Outcome

The lab is operational and has been running since it came online. It’s listed at fablabiub.com and is now run by Dr. Tarek Habib.

I wanted to also bring Fab Academy itself to the lab — that was the unspoken second half of the plan. Bureaucratic issues blocked it. I went to Fab Lab CEPT in 2019 to do Fab Academy there, and left IUB shortly after. The lab kept going without me, which is the right outcome for any institution-building project.