In this world where digital fabrication technologies are constantly evolving and enabling, designs are openly shared, fabrication labs and makerspaces are widespread and accessible to everyone, people can design and make things locally and collaborate horizontally to innovate and create individually, locally and globally meaningful design solutions. Such accessibility creates opportunities on many issues, especially for sustainability and Circular Economy, through enabling distributed design and production, personalization, engaging with a local or online community to collaborate, and so on.

This handbook you are reading is an introductory guide to bring together digital fabrication labs (e.g. FabLabs, hackerspaces, makerspaces, etc.) and the related practices enabled through digital knowledge sharing into design education for sustainability and Circular Economy. This handbook introduces terms of these newly espousing fabrication spaces and the communities around them, potentials of these spaces for sustainability and Circular Economy. The contents of this handbook were used for delivering masterclasses as part of two Circular Design Internships conducted in University of Limerick, Ireland and Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain.

As partners of the L4IDS Erasmus+ project, we are happy to share the output of our collaboration with you and we would like to thank you in advance for your interest in our work. Together, we have the power to make the world a better place!

Read it below or download it here.