Blueprint for Urban Manufacturing – An Exploratory Multi-Dimensional Canvas

The term Urban Manufacturing (UM) is used to refer to the production of goods within urban areas using locally sourced materials, with the resulting products being released in the same location. Factories that adhere to these principles are known as Urban factories. Within the project LAUDS Factories – a research initiative focused on establishing guidelines for scaling up production in urban areas that embody the principles of Local, Accessible, Urban, Digital and Sustainable manufacturing – a co-creation approach has been explored focusing on the development of experimental urban productions that are both compliant with fundamental UM concepts and advanced LAUDS principles. This co-creation approach in designing future production infrastructures and models is significant; therefore, a specific framework has been designed and tested to comprehensively document how the experimental initiatives are set up and developed. The paper presents the work in progress on the design of a documentation tool called LAUDS Blueprint which has been designed, prototyped and tested as an initial step towards detailing the processes involved within LAUDS-centric factories, elucidating their objectives through the identification of challenges, proposed solutions, accumulated knowledge, and potential business opportunities. The aim of this paper is to offer insights into the development process of this LAUDS Blueprint through an iterative approach, alongside two real-case applications.