On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, the whole of France entered a period of confinement with a new sociability lexicon: “barrier gestures”, “rules of social distancing”, etc. The media wave preceding the COVID19 tsunami announced the scale of the health challenge that was coming to France: nurses, cashiers, storekeepers, delivery personnel had neither masks nor protective visors in sufficient quantity to fulfil their frontline role. A coordination between the FabLab and makerspaces Parisian workshops was gradually established to produce masks and visors for these professionals. ARS LONGA took part in this project called Makerscovid.paris.

At the peak of demand, several workshops were quickly faced with the limits of volunteers on our sites, while looking for more manpower for assembly operations. With no need for special skills, ARS LONGA thought of a way to outsource tasks that could easily be performed at home. After initial conclusive tests with volunteers, we proposed the idea of manufacturing a Factory@Home kit in a network and very quickly.

Thought as a unit of time available for construction (1 kit = 100 visors = 3h30 of assembly), this kit is composed of 100 units to be assembled at home. Each participant has defined his or her home assembly capacity by committing to one or more kits. Within 48 hours, 41 people located in Paris and its North-East suburbs volunteered to participate in Factory@Home. We organized the distribution to each participant on D-Day for a collection of the 100 units assembled on D+2.

To accompany this domestic support, graphic communication documents have also been designed as part of the kit but also as a mediation tool.