PROVIDENCE — AS220, a nonprofit organization for artists, is working with the city to bring design and fabrication technology developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to a downtown space for public use.

The plan is to enhance the AS220 Labs, a teaching and community workspace in the organization’s Empire Street headquarters, with technology purchased from the Cambridge, Mass., university.

Eventually, AS220 plans to move the lab to a larger space on Washington Street, where it purchased a building earlier this year with a $1.6-million loan from the city.

AS220 Labs expects to join MIT’s network of fabrication laboratories, or Fab Labs, which provide public access to training, technology and equipment to design and build new products.

The university has at least 25 such sites worldwide, including in Boston, New York and Chicago, and in rural and underserved communities in India, South Africa and Norway.

“This enables artists, technology and design professional, youths, and the general public to come in, train, and experiment with industrial-grade hardware and software so that they can go from an idea, to a model on a computer, to a rapid prototype,” said David Ortiz, a spokesman for AS220.

Projects being developed and produced in other Fab Labs include solar- and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers — network computers without a hard-disk drive — and wireless data networks, and analytical instrumentation for the agricultural and health-care industries.

The AS220 Labs, according to its Web site, is “interested in freeing the means of fabrication from wasteful, inequitable industrial processes and promulgating the idea of ‘folk technology’ as an alternative to corporate consumer technology.”

Ortiz says that the package of fabrication tools from MIT includes a laser cutter, milling machine and wood router, all built on a small scale and for personal use. There will also be videoconferencing technology for the lab to link with other Fab Labs.

AS220 is fundraising to cover the $50,000 cost of the equipment, which it hopes to have ready for public use by January.

The lab will become a major component of a $12-million mixed-use project that AS220 has planned for the Mercantile Block building, a 50,000-square-foot space on Washington Street. That project is to be completed by 2010.

The building is next to the former Dreyfus Hotel, which the organization refurbished and opened last summer for artist studio and living space and which houses the restaurant Local 121 on the ground floor.

pmarcelo@projo.com