Fab26 – Reimagine the Future. Fab26 Research Papers Stream

FAB26 marked the 25th anniversary of the Fab Lab phenomenon, its network and movement. The conference was as much looking back at that legacy as looking forward to the next 25 years. The fifteen papers in this year's research stream stand at that watershed, building on the past and for the future. The papers fall into three clusters, presented across three sessions: Teaching & Learning, Making with Communities, and Sustaining and Scaling.

Teaching & Learning: From First Stitch to Education 5.0 — pedagogy, tools, and AI across the learner's journey — opens with a small piece of hardware: Leirado et al. develop sew:bit, an open-source expansion board that makes the BBC micro:bit work for e-textiles much as the LilyPad once did for Arduino. LaPrade proposes The Armature, a community-first framework carrying middle-school makers at a Title I school in Cleveland toward a professional CAD credential. Yalçın reports seven years of a K-12 FabLab in Istanbul in which students become co-authors of peer-reviewed HCI research. Llàcer Caro and Muñoz Zanón ask what critical thinking means once generative AI is ubiquitous, and offer a toolkit built on deliberate friction. Hernández-Montoya and Miranda close the session with an AI-mediated model joining remote, physical, and mobile Fab Labs at a Costa Rican distance university.

Making with Communities: From Visiting to Becoming Infrastructure — resilience and sustainability transitions on the ground — moves outward. Liu and Liao use a seven-day Fab City Challenge to read Shenzhen's Nantou Ancient City through fabrication. Espinoza Gómez et al. ask honestly what it would take to evaluate an itinerant digital fabrication programme in rural Peru, having first run one without a baseline. de Castro Lacerda and Tenório Ramalho de Abreu describe a participatory method for textile waste with women upcycling decommissioned bus-driver uniforms in Brasília. Regina et al. explore village-scale green hydrogen in coastal Bali through five co-designed interventions, built on the existing governance of the Balinese banjar. Anaya Hernández asks whether maker networks actually hold the data needed to be activated in a disaster, and finds the answer uneven.

Sustaining and Scaling: From One Workshop to the Full Stack — governance, stakeholders, and measurement of fab initiatives — turns to what makes any of this last. Stadlmann and Holzinger treat maker workshops for children as multi-stakeholder services and find that stakeholders do not agree on what those services are for. Doyo draws on ten years of a Japanese university FabLab to argue that openness is a three-layer achievement of place, governance, and participatory mediation. León Lucano proposes Fab Lab venture studios as a university investment framework for Peru. Freundt et al. report a national faculty-development programme reaching 27 public technical institutes. Vivanco closes with the Fab City Full Stack Metrics Framework, an attempt to make local activity measurable without severing it from the systems it sits in.

Twenty-nine papers were submitted to this year's stream. The stream's policy is double-blind peer review, with each paper receiving at least two reviews; on that basis fourteen were accepted and one was rerouted as a preprint. Their thirty-one authors work in twenty-two institutions across thirteen countries. Each paper is deposited separately and carries its own DOI, listed in the contents that follow; this volume gathers their abstracts and is the citable record of the stream as a whole. The research papers stream has run since Fab8 in Wellington in 2012, a history set out in Troxler, Fab Lab Research Papers. From Experiment to Expression (10.5281/zenodo.1344101); the most recent volume was Fab25 Czechia – Bridge the Gap (10.5281/zenodo.16789442).

The editors thank the reviewers, who each carried six to eight papers: Serena Cangiano, Pablo C. Herrera, Jan Peuckert, Ivan Sanchez Milara, Alessandra Schmidt, Jessica Stanley, Sarina Till, and Liz Whitewolf.