It's all about working in new ways and being innovative. GDF SUEZ offers you the opportunity to discover new ways to be creative and experiment through collaboration. Fab Lab encapsulates the Open Source/Do-It-Yourself ethos, and provides a forum for discussion and innovation born out of a desire to democratize access to new technologies. The Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie at La Villette in Paris introduces us to a new take on creativity and innovation.

Fab Lab at La Villette is a glorious hotchpotch of a collaborative workshop that's open to the public and comes complete with prototyping machines. There's no doubt that the star of the show is the 3D printer. Once found only in industry, these machines are now available to everyone to create production runs of 3-dimensional objects to an accuracy of around one-thousandth of a millimeter... all from a computer file.

Although the Fab Lab at the Cité des Sciences is limited to the creation of small items, others have already changed up a gear to create artificial limbs and even electric cars. The University of South California Fab Lab is exploring a contour crafting project to construct houses by replacing plastic with quick-set concrete.

Jean Louis Fréchin, Chairman & CEO of NoDesign, designer and lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI) industrial design school believes that Fab Labs brings design together with production, which are often quite separate in France. The Fab Lab model is reminiscent of a startup, because it's a place of iterative design in which the expertise of individuals comes together to invent new routes to innovation.

The model works so well that it has become a pivotal component of engineer recruitment. Which is why more and more leading industrial companies are including Fab Labs in their innovation processes.

Visit of the Fab Lab of La Villette in Paris, a manufacturing laboratory open to the public where is provided all kinds of tools for the design and construction of objects.

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