Abstract

The fab lab movement has given people around the world access to digital fabrication
tools, letting them produce prototypes, products, and even small businesses. Efforts
like Fab City have tried to widen that impact to the scale of cities, but top-down
engagement with local government has so far struggled to reach the community level.
Making, however, is only half of what a local economy needs. To build and trust their
own solutions, communities also have to be able to measure and prove them - yet the
protocols and tools that assist in assessment remain centralised, proprietary, and often
out of reach. This thesis asks what the smallest set of capabilities lets a community
evaluate the efficacy of its own hygiene products, and demonstrates that such a lab
can be built, operated locally, and governed by the communities it serves, by being
developed in unity with an existing fab lab. The work develops through HyTech, a
collaboration between the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, fab lab Peru, fab lab Chile,
Indigenous Amazonian communities, and Procter & Gamble, in which low-cost field
labs are used to test the efficacy of community hygiene knowledge - from mosquito
repellents to hair care. The technical work is paired with a co-creation and alignment
methodology and a documented pathway to a benefit-sharing agreement grounded in
the Nagoya Protocol and Peru’s ABS framework.