ULB - How To Make (almost) Any Experiments / FabZero inside#

We live in a very challenging time of rapid change and uncertainties. The United Nations have made a list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals that we, as a world society should urgently act on in the next decade to make a more equitable and sustainable society.

There are many strategies that we can adopt and many ways our society can evolve. Rob Hopkins 1 who has founded the transition town and Riel Miller 2 at the UNESCO urge us to dream, imagine, design and build the future we desire.

In this class, you will take foot as a social inventor and entrepreneur working in a team. You will join an interdisciplinary community to tackle a challenge you care about.

We will work at the crossroads of disciplines and community movements:

  • the digital fabrication revolution, the rise of fablabs and the maker movement. In this class, we learn to use generic tools and workflows that are common in Fab Labs connected to a wide interdisciplinary community and network. This allows us to develop and design projects globally and collaboratively and to fabricate locally.

  • the Frugal Science movement which goal is to solve planetary scales problems using cost-effective scientifically based solutions that are scalable to meet the problem scale. You will learn the importance of basic science, tinkering and creative play to tackle design challenges.

  • the growth of creative, practicing and learning communities, stimulated by collective intelligence, able to adapt, collaborate and solve problems. This class will mix undergrad students from different background that will team up with global collaborators and mentors all around the world to solve the identified challenges.

Class scenario#

In this class, you will start by identifying a set of problems that you are passionate about as an individual and as a team.

You will learn organizational and managerial skills in collective intelligence to solve problems, in interdisciplinary teams, that are bigger than you.

You will learn to use digital fabrication tools that you can find in a makerspace or a Fab Lab to build experiments or scientific tools.

Supported by mentors, in teams, you will design, fabricate and document a scientifically-based and frugal proof of concept of a project to solve the problem that you have identified as a team.

Learning Community#

ULB students#

List of FabZero-Design student websites#

Lucia BABIC BERMÚDEZ
Matthieu Debruyne
Noah DEBUS
Antoine Depré
Lawra DERHAAG
Othman EL KAZBANI
Lou FERIR
Simon HANIN
Ben Robin IMENA
Mohamed Lamouchi
Hac LE
Thibault MAUCQ
Alexandru MELNIC
Martin MOLITOR
Sergio NOTARBARTOLO
Altay ORALARKAYA
Matilde PERALTA GONÇALVES
Calirie Kate PLAMENCO
Félix WALLENBORN
Jonas GRIMAUD
Paula ZAMORANO CEÑA

FabZero-Experiments Teaching Designers and Coordinators#

FabZero Mentors#

Fab Lab ULB is a community of researchers, teachers, technicians, students and citizens from all disciplines from all disciplines always ready to volunteer, share their knowledge and mentor students. We would like particularly to thank :

Archives#

References#

  1. From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, Chelsea Green Publishing Co, 2019 ↩

  2. Resilience Frontiers. Riel Miller. A futures Literacy Laboratory @UNESCO (video) ↩