Polifactory

• Director: Stefano Maffei (Department of Design)
• Staff: Massimo Bianchini (Department of Design)
• Website: www.polifactory.polimi.it

Polifactory is the makerspace of the Politecnico di Milano, created and coordinated by the Department of Design in collaboration with the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electronics, Information and Bioengineering. It is an interdisciplinary research lab that explores the relationship between design and new production models.

Located within the Candiani Campus (building B3), within the Bovisa innovation district, Polifactory has a 300 sqm space which combines a coworking - dedicated to its community of innovators - and a Fab Lab equipped with digital fabrication technologies, for the materialization of interactive product-service systems.

Polifactory deals with:

• competitive research, research and innovation projects at national and European level on open and distributed manufacturing, urban manufacturing, circular economy, digital transformation of products-services;
• experimental research, pilot projects with entities and institutions to encourage the transfer or updating of design skills and digital manufacturing to companies and professionals;
• applied research, consultancy projects for large and small businesses on topics such as open innovation, user innovation, making and design for digital manufacturing;
• experimental didactics, organization of workshops, hackathons, summer schools and didactic initiatives dedicated to organizations, companies, students, and professionals in which making practices are experimented.
• pre-incubation of talents and ideas, “Talents in residence” program aims to host and support a community of students and doctoral students engaged in the development of their research theses and experimental doctoral research.

Since 2016 Polifactory is part of the fablabs.io network, a collaborative platform that hosts the global Fab Lab community (over 1000 laboratories distributed in 40 countries), is a member of the collective that supports the Fab City Global Initiative (fab.city) and is one of the institutional partners of the Manifattura Milano initiative promoted by the Municipality of Milan (manifattureaperte.it). Finally, since 2018 Polifactory has become a Key Enabling Technology Center recognized by the European Commission, committed to supporting European SMEs in the use of enabling technologies in R&D and innovation processes. 

Polifactory has the following equipment:

• subtractive manufacturing: laser cutting machine, 3 axis CNC big milling machine and 3 axis CNC desktop milling machine
• additive manufacturing: FDM 3D printers of various sizes and a SLA (Stereolitography) machine for high quality 3D printing
• electronics and physical computing: microcontroller and microcomputer boards with kit of sensors, actuators and effectors and a workbench for electronics
• tools and electro tools: a work station equipped with hand tools and multifunction power tools