Creative thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration is encouraged within academic institutions, but often inhibited by resource availability and distribution, as well as interfaces and opportunity for exchange. We–students of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)–set out to improve this by creating a common open prototyping workspace for researchers, students, staff from all fields and schools as well as unaffiliated entrepreneurs, inventors and the generally curious. In this technical report, we present the origin of the Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab) concept and its realization as the FAU FabLab in Erlangen.