This site is a small reference on makerspaces and fab labs: what the terms actually mean, what it takes to open a community workshop, how established spaces run training on their equipment, and why China — Shenzhen in particular — became such a large part of the maker movement's story.
The name comes from the domain's subject: China's makerspace wave of the 2010s was one of the biggest experiments in shared fabrication anywhere, and it left behind lessons that apply to anyone planning a space in a school district, library, or community group in the United States today. We cover that history in our guide to China's maker movement, but most of the site is practical and general-purpose.
If you're here because you're budgeting a space, start with the Makerspace Startup Cost Estimator on this page. It walks through the main cost drivers — floor area, equipment tier, buildout, and setup labor — and produces a rough planning figure you can sanity-check against the Fab Foundation's getting-started guidance.
From there, the guides answer the questions people actually ask: what separates a fab lab from a makerspace, what a startup budget really has to cover, and how spaces structure equipment training. Everything here cites primary sources — MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, the Fab Foundation, university safety offices, and a university-press history of the China scene — so you can go deeper than we do.