Alquimétricos - Distributed Design Platform

Useful information

Team members: Fernando Daguanno Sergio Aranda
Country: Spain
Keywords: STEAM DIY Alquimétricos OER Recycle Low-tech high-tech laser cut parametric design COVID19 lockdown homeschooling handcraft open-source.

Short Description

Alquimétricos is a community that develops DIY, STEAM, open-source, inexpensive, educational toys.

Detailed Description

We are an international movement of makers, educators, designers, artists, and open-knowledge activists devoted to make STEAM toys free to the world

We give workshops and provide blueprints, instructions, guidelines, tutorials and everything you need to know to make your building blocks system at home, at your local FabLab or at school, using the resources you may find in your context, like hand tools or laser cutters, including many low/mid/high-tech alternatives. You can use a wide range of materials including recycled packaging, textiles, organics, and composites.

The project started in 2015 in Argentina, then moved to Brazil and now it has members in 50 cities at 10 countries in 4 continents.
After a 2019 tech-residency, FabLab Xtrene (Almendralejo-Badajoz) become one of the main Spanish hubs for Alquimétricos training and distributed production

Project Details

Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?: Alquimétricos is an open interdisciplinary community with collaborators in 50 different cities. Each of them contributes in design, fabrication, production, translation, instructional design, teachers' training, illustration, videomaking, legal and administrative affairs, so the project is adapted to as many local realities as possible

Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?: Very simple hands tools cheap (or recycled) materials could be used in case the audience doesn’t have access to fablab-grade infrastructure

Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?: Design is open and licensed under CC BY model to democratize access to information.
Even the business and branding model are open, in case anybody wants sell/train Alquimétricos toys and educational material as a self-sustainable endeavor.

Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?: We are inspired by permaculture principles. We try to use sustainable materials (recycled cardboard, plastics, and cardboard), organic materials (bamboo, textiles, twigs, willow, etc.) and recycled materials (plastics and rubbers) when producing or instructing how to produce toys. We also insist on material lifecycle awareness in our workshops.