Building the management and communication platform of the Cergy fablab
LabBoîte, the fablab of the Grand Centre of Cergy-Pontoise, needed a platform when it started out, both to present the place and to run it, with accounts for members, machine booking and workshop sign-up.
We began by assessing these needs and the existing tools. This led us to Fab-manager, a free software developed by Sleede for running fablabs, which already covered most of what was needed. Rather than rebuilding everything, we adapted it to the place.
With Valentin Socha, then LabBoîte's fab manager, who created its visual identity and mock-ups, we redesigned the whole interface and the visitors' journey. At the time the tool was built on AngularJS, and we had to rework its entire environment, from the front end to the database, to adapt it to the fablab's needs.
AngularJS later became obsolete and Fab-manager changed framework. After Valentin Socha left, the fablab's new team chose to go back to the original version of the tool, and the current website has returned to Fab-manager's standard look. LabBoîte still uses the solution we chose, and the screenshots on this page show the version we designed.