IFM-lab is a platform for managing access to IFM’s FabLab machines and rooms. It was designed for a community of more than 1,200 students, who can check equipment availability and book the machines they need.

The platform brings student bookings and staff management into the same place. Students can reserve machines according to their availability, while staff can manage the machines, rooms and classes through an administration interface.

The project had to support two sides of the same service: a simple booking experience for students and a flexible way for staff to keep the FabLab’s resources up to date. By centralising this information, IFM-lab makes it easier to coordinate access to shared equipment and spaces.

More than a booking tool, IFM-lab was designed as a natural extension of the digital environment students already use at IFM. Its interface follows the visual language and familiar patterns of IFM’s main website, so moving from the public site to the FabLab platform feels continuous rather than like learning an entirely separate system.

The goal was not only to make the platform functional, but also to make it immediately understandable and approachable for both students and staff. IFM-lab was built with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, HTML and JavaScript.