In October 2022 a team from Green Lab took part in the 2022 Fab Festival in Bali, part of the annual gathering of the 1800 Fab Labs worldwide; to network, collaborate, share ideas and experiences. During the 10 day festival an Island challenge was launched aimed at helping accelerate the transition of the island of Bali toward a more regenerative economy.

The Fab Island Challenge, hosted by the Fab City Foundation and Meaningful Design Group, was one of the key events of the Bali Fab Fest aligned with its core purpose. Green Lab participated in a team of eight (alongside nine other teams) as part of the ‘Water for Life’ IDEP Foundation developing a LoRa sensor to detect the height of the water table across Bali through bore wells.

Working with local communities we travelled to Pandak Bandung, Tabanan and Munduk to understand the context better, meet people, prototype activities first hand and immerse in the context.

As a consequence of our participation the ‘Water for Life’ team were awarded a Helium Grant (sponsored by the Helium Foundation) for the innovation and design of a Gravity Water Sensor; a device prototyped over four days using open source hardware, LoRa cloud services and locally available materials.

The ‘Gravity Water Sensor’ is now an ongoing (January 2023) distributed design project being designed in India, Bali and the UK; The technology is developed in conjunction with the IDEP Foundation to support water protection and education programmes across the Balinese Province.

Read more about the Fab Island Challenge on the Fab City blog.