This dissertation addresses practices and processes present in independent spaces of digital fabrication, highlighting that the main contribution of these experimental laboratories is to promote cultural change in their surroundings. This analysis is inserted in the context marked by the democratization of additive manufacturing and prototyping, a consequence of the evolution of computational capacities, which allowed the popularization of personal computers, access to the internet, the dissemination of small digital manufacturing machines, electronic components and other devices that were nonexistent or exclusive to industry and major research centers in the past decades. As a result, there is a scenario in which any citizen can materialize their ideas, express their creativity and build knowledge from the interaction with artefacts – which represents a return to values presented in pre-industrial production. This work dialogues with the fields of Education, Technology and Society, and understands Design as the facilitator among those areas, emphasizing its essential role in designing futures and its political dimension in expressing human intentions.