The Fab Island Challenge brings together local and global innovation communities to propose meaningful interventions that enrich, empower and scale Bali’s emerging regenerative economy. Teams from around the world are invited to focus and learn about a specific local initiative, propose and prototype design outputs for implementation. It is a key event of Bali Fab Fest, the largest gathering of digital fabrication communities, the Fab Lab Network and Fab City global initiative.

One of the participating team is Looking Closer with Prakash Lab. The challenge is about introducing new forms of learning and protecting local biodiversity from the approach of frugal science, low-cost design solutions that are accessible and democratises access to science tools for the local community.

CONTEXT
Indonesia is a maritime archipelagic country with huge biodiversity. However there are still mysteries and hidden potential yet uncovered within the Indonesian waters, especially in the realm of microscopic. Despite its size, micro-organism play a huge role in marine ecosystem. They are critical in maintaining the health and balance of the ocean and its complex food webs. The oxygen, nutrients, and biomass they produce also sustain terrestrial life — from the food we eat to the air we breathe. For this very reason, understanding what's within the water environment is very important, given the plethora of 150 million local coastal dwellers (they make up to 60% of the total population) whose lives are intricatelly linked to the ocean.

Ironically; despite Indonesia having abundance and wealth of marine resources - the coastal dwellers especially fishermen aren’t able to use these resources to improve their welfare. Around 53% families in coastal region are living below the national poverty line. 2.7 million fishermen in Indonesia has contributed 25% to the national poverty rate. Poverty that occurs on the coastal communities is caused by, among others, low education, economic access, and government policies that are less in favor of fishing communities. 

PLANKTON NETS



A plankton net is an equipment used for collecting samples of plankton in water. Plankton nets are considered one of the oldest, simplest, and least expensive methods of sampling micro-organisms in the water. However for an Indonesian standard, it is still relatively expensive. A professional plankton net could cost around $50 - $600. Given the context of Bali population, we aimed to create a low cost version the plankton net that shouldn't cost more than $2 - $10 range

We spent the first 4 days of the challenge scavenging for materials in the local markets and junk yards. Here are some of our design iterations and prototypes that we crafted before putting them to test out at sea.

Circular Plankton Net


Triangular Plankton Net


Paddy's Extra Frugal Plankton Net :)


SAMPLE COLLECTION
After crafting our plankton nets, we quickly head to Jimbaran Beach to test out our prototypes and deploy them into the water. They all worked out as intended although after several days in, some wear and tear occured due to our carelessness while towing. Over the course of the next 8 days, we spent the time collecting water samples in the different beaches and bays of Bali with three different types of Plankton Nets. We did our towings mostly in Jimbaran, Nusa Penida, and Karang Asam.

Check out this map showcasing the towing locations we did across the three areas!




OBSERVATION & MONITORING
The collected water samples were observed under the open-source microscopic devices invented by Prakash Lab; ranging from the frugal tool like the Foldscope and the high digital output automatic imaging devices like the Planktoscope, Octopi, Squid, and the Gravity Machine.


COMMUNITY AWARENESS
As a maritime country, Indonesia consists of 17,504 islands with approximately 95,181 km of coastline. More than 60% of the population live in adjacent or are very near to the coastal zone and there are approximately around 38 million children living in the coastal area. Based on our rough data scraping of Indonesia’s archipelagic province and region, there are at least 509,525 students in the coastal island and coastline zone of Indonesia that are still living within the poverty line.

The possibilities in utilizing an open and low-cost tools like Foldcope as a way to analyze and address the widely varied marine problems to assist the daily lives of coastal dwellers are extensive. By giving them access to frugal science tools, we can enable direct mass data collection from the local & indigenous coastal communities and include them in the marine conservation efforts.

To achieve this, we started running Foldscope and Plankton Surveillance workshops with local school kids and the fishermen community in Bali. Monitroring and observation are the very first steps into making better informed decisions when tackling planetary issues. The aim of the workshop is to foster the curiosity mindset already present in children as a way to start and promote a community driven environmental awareness that could hopefully enrich Bali fishing communities in the future! 


CLOSING
I'm closing this post with one of the most heartfelt and powerful words of wisdom shared by Manu to the local Indonesian students.

And here is a little selfie of the whole team too because I miss everyone and would love more than anything to experience the whole magic all over again!