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 societal challenge.

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 in the thematic of the class as an individual and as a team.

You will learn organizational and managerial skills in collective intelligence to act on 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 act on the problem that you have identified as a team.

Learning Community#

ULB students#

Afnane ABBACHE
Tomas BEATRIZ
Gabriel BERTRAND
Vincent BURNS
David DE MEESTER DE RAVESTEIN
Ariel Marcel IGIRANEZA
Sorin GHERASIM
Peace KABAREGA SHEJA
Adam KANOUN
Rodrigue LEMAIRE
Jules PONCELET
Henock MBOLITUMBALANI LIKOYO
Marin Delatte
Yassin SAIDI RAIHANI

Groups#

FabZero-Experiments Teaching Designer and Coordinator#

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) ↩