Here you will find the space and tools for experimentation & for designing bio-based prototypes. Accomplish your own ideas or cooperate with scientist, artist, activists, geeks and other enthusiasts. As part of the machBar-Potsdam facilities you can combine bio-design tools with digital prototyping tools typically available in fab labs. Connect with us on social media over forum and newsletter or just come over. #Explore!, #Grow!, #Make!

The bioPUNK.kitchen is a 30m² studio with basic kitchen equipment from a grinder to a micro-wave, but combined with specific biology lab tools, like a DNA workbench, digital Microscopes or biological cultivation facilities for indoor and outdoor; mobile and modular.

You can build your own project, but a variety of active groups already exists. These range from growing fungi and insects to fermentation to aquaponic gardening and digital beekeeping.

From years of experiences in facilitating our community to face urgent issues of the time, concerning it, we realized something new is needed. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity, chances and risks of new technologies & digitization, health & food, equality - for all these the understanding of living systems and their interaction with our surroundings become more and more important.

Hence, our answer is to design a place that offers an interactive environment and supports creativity & collaboration for actively framing a sustainable future within a bio-based society. We upgraded our machBar-Potsdam (fabLab) in Oct. 2018 with open bio-lab facilities to cultivate organisms and grow own biological raw material, design bio-based ideas and build prototypes.

Our DIY bio-facilities @machBar are embedded in the community of a self-governed cultural center; freiLand-Potsdam. Here more than 50 stakeholder are acting on an areal of 12 000 square meters and 5 buildings, whose mission it is to empower young people to actively create a sustainable future.

The NGO Science Shop Potsdam funded the machBar Potsdam fabLab in 2012 @freiLand and is since the legally responsible entity. In addition the Science Shop acts as a local network HUB for the freiLand community to regional partners in academia, tech, arts & economy (SME) as well as global networks for open science, open education & open innovation. Within a research project to regional strategies for bio-based economy (DiReBio) funded by the German Ministry for Education and Science (BMBF), the Science Shop Potsdam is partner with the University Potsdam and Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy. Here we utilize the bio-lab facilities to include kids and young people in a future designing session for a regional bio-based economy.

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