The contemporary atelier: The study upon Fab labs

The cultural universe consists of man-made objects. The processes of creating objects have differed throughout cultural history. With the Industrial Revolution, standardized products produced by machines attended to the cultural universe that consist of only craft products in pre-industrial period. Today, the use of binary representation in production technologies has affected the structure of production processes and has been effective in the emergence of an alternative production technique, called post-industrial production. With the new technical basis, a new "paradigm of creating objects" appears in the reconsideration of several concepts defined in conventional production techniques. In this context, from the beginning of cultural history to today, production techniques can be studied at three bases: 1- Craft production in pre-industrial term, 2- Industrial production with mechanization, 3- Post-industrial production with digital fabrication. The one of significant changes between these three technical bases has occurred in human factor that creates the object. This study examines the changes in human activity in object production processes on three technical bases and evaluates the production process on post-industrial basis in terms of human activity. In this context, the focus was on the fab labs as a post-industrial production fields and the activity of the craftsman of the 18th century who had not yet met with the industry in the event of human activity was sought. Also, a questionnaire was applied to 78 participants from 22 countries who were involved in the production and/or design process of the fab lab and thus the relationship between the two different bases is concretized by the interpretation of the quantitative data.