PROVIDENCE – The nonprofit community arts group AS220 is planning to join a high-profile Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative that will bring a hands-on high-tech workshop to the city. Backers hope it will become a new center for innovation in Providence.

David Ortiz, AS220’s development director, confirmed today in a brief telephone interview with Providence Business News that plans are underway for the organization to partner with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms in the creation of a Fab Lab here. The city’s tech community has been buzzing about the idea for months.

The Fab Lab will be part of a $12 million mixed-use development project that AS220 hopes to complete by the summer of 2010. The organization recently took ownership of the facility it is planning to develop: the Mercantile Block, a 50,000-square-foot building on Washington Street next to AS220’s recently refurbished Dreyfus Hotel building (READ MORE) and the restaurant Local 121, Ortiz said. According to Boston-based real estate research firm The Warren Group, AS220 purchased the building for $1.6 million on Aug. 8.

Lucie Searle, who works on development at AS220, told The Providence Phoenix the organization will fund the development through loans, affordable housing grants and tax credits, and said support already has been pledged by the Providence Economic Development Partnership and Rhode Island Housing.

AS220 was honored for its efforts to rehabilitate the former Dreyfus Hotel earlier this year with an award from the Providence Preservation Society.

Ortiz said he could not provide further details about the Fab Lab because discussions with MIT are ongoing. AS220 will need to raise about $110,000 to get the Fab Lab up and running, according to Oritz.

AS220 already has a workspace, AS220 Labs, on the second floor of its Empire State complex, which is used by teachers and the community for open hardware and software projects and led by former AS220 managing director Shawn Wallace. The AS220 Fab Lab would provide tools and training for personal fabrication projects.

The potential of small-scale, hands-on technology work was also a theme stressed by Mitch Altman, an inventor and innovator who was Artist in Residency at AS220 in August.

The idea for a fabrication lab came out of research by MIT scientists into a home “fabrication center” – a small machine that people could use to make any other machine. “In the end, fabrication [centers] will be just like PCs – just technology that people have,” Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, told The Boston Globe in 2005.

The initiative grew out of the famed MIT Media Lab, where John Maeda, the incoming president of the Rhode Island School of Design (READ MORE), was an associate director before coming to Providence. RISD officials also have been involved in the Fab Lab discussions. (Maeda’s RISD inauguration is scheduled for this Friday. READ MORE)

A Fab Lab makes available to the public computer-controlled fabrication tools, open-source design and manufacturing software, and electronic components and test equipment. Gershenfeld and others have said they will empower people, particularly in developing countries, by giving them access to high technology.

Besides the original Fab Lab on Columbus Avenue in Boston, labs are currently up and running in Chicago, the Bronx, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, as well as overseas in Norway, Spain, Costa Rica, India, Ghana and South Africa, according to the Fab Labs Web site.

AS220 describes itself as a nonprofit commmunity art space in downtown Providence. For more information about the organization and its exhibits, performances and other programs, visit AS220.org. To learn more about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Fab Lab initiative, visit fab.cba.mit.edu.