A public fablab for Orvieto: designing the Hub Aula Multimediale of Palazzo Negroni

On Wednesday 10 December 2025, at Palazzo Negroni, the new Hub Aula Multimediale of the city of Orvieto was inaugurated: a space dedicated to technological innovation, training and digital production, hosted in the headquarters of the Fondazione Centro Studi “Città di Orvieto”.

During the presentation, the mayor and the municipal administration underlined the strategic value of the initiative for the territory: a space able to connect skills, research and production, contributing to new cultural and professional opportunities.

The project, entrusted to us by the Municipality of Orvieto in collaboration with the Foundation, kept us working in Orvieto for a long period, during which we took care of everything that precedes the opening of a public lab: from the design of the spaces to the technology model, from the supervision of the refurbishment works at Palazzo Negroni to the choice of the machines, up to the final fit-out of the room and the training of the staff who will run it. It was a four-hand job with the municipal administration and the Foundation, which coordinated the construction site and the institutional framework, while we took care of the technical and design dimension.

Three spaces, three working modes

The Hub is organised in three distinct spaces, each calibrated for a specific working mode.

The T-Room is the room designed for training: a central screen and two Wacom Drawing Pads make it possible to visualise and discuss creative projects together. It is the space for shared design, group review, and lecture-based teaching.

The E-Room is dedicated to electronics and robotics. It is equipped with workstations for the realisation of small electronic circuits, from prototyping to finished product. Here we work with mini robotic arms, programmable boards and components.

The Digital Room hosts CNC technologies, 3D printers and subtractive machines. Workspaces are organised by production cycle, and design areas are equipped with high-performance computers.

The split into three rooms is not just a matter of layout: it is a methodological choice. Keeping the environments separate makes it possible to run different user flows in parallel without activities interfering with each other. It is a lesson we brought from our Roman labs and adapted to the context and expected volumes of Orvieto.

Choosing the machines

Choosing the machines is the moment when a lab really takes shape. For Orvieto we started from the basic questions: what kind of processing will the room host? For which kind of user? With what level of technical support available?

The answers steered the choice towards a balanced inventory, calibrated to serve a mixed audience — schools, small businesses, artisans, associations, professionals — at a first level of access to productive digital fabrication.

All equipment is fitted with the safety devices required for use in a public context, and every machine was chosen against three criteria: reliability over time, ease of maintenance, and the availability of a sustainable market of consumables and spare parts on a non-metropolitan territory.

Training before opening

A public hub does not open on its inauguration day: it opens in the months before, when the space is prepared for real use. In recent months we have followed two parallel tracks with the Fondazione Centro Studi. The first was a training cycle on the use of the equipment, addressed to the staff of the Centro Studi and of the new public library “Luigi Fumi”, who will be the daily presence of the Hub. The second was a series of test and experimentation meetings with schools, businesses and associations from the territory, invited to use the equipment before the official opening to verify its potential.

The first real projects of the room were born from these meetings. On the day of the inauguration, the students of the classes involved — from year 8 of the lower secondary school “L. Signorelli” to the IT-track students of the Majorana-Maitani Institute, up to the students of the Maintenance and Technical Assistance track of the IISACP of Orvieto — presented the work they had already produced. The fact that the lab was already operational before the ribbon-cutting is, from our point of view, the best evidence of its functionality: the ceremony certified something that was already happening, it did not start it.

The Hub Aula Multimediale of Palazzo Negroni in Orvieto was implemented within the South-West Orvietano Inner Area Strategy (2014-2021 programming), commissioned by the Municipality of Orvieto in collaboration with the Fondazione per il Centro Studi “Città di Orvieto”.