Projects

Try out the Fab Lab adventure with your class! Are you a teacher and want to start a unique project mixing science and technology? The STEAM Lab invites you to enter the doors of ULB’s digital fabrication laboratory to participate in an immersive project.

Research for development project with the University of Havana funded for 5 years by ARES and in collaboration with UCLouvain. The goal will be to develop low-cost measurement buoys to monitor water quality in Havana Bay. This will include the installation of a Fab Lab within the University of Havana to strengthen their development and research capabilities.

TRIPI TRAPI is an interdisciplinary teaching project funded by the FEE (Fund for Teaching Encouragement) which aims to Convey Interdisciplinary Reflection on Intellectual Property (‘TRIPI’) and Test Applied Research in an Innovative Project (‘TRAPI’) using Fab Lab ULB resources and methods.

IPSAM is a research project funded under the ‘Actions de Recherches Concertées’ framework (ARC) and supported by the Benelux Office Office for Intellectual Property (BOIP). It aims at proposing an open source, supervised and transparent model for IP Similary Assesment (IPSAM) in relation to 2D images that falls within the realm of Intellectual Property. Through this interdisciplinary project, lawyers (JurisLab) and engineers (LISA) will review the methodological, technical, legal, and ethical challenges of building such tools, in order to provide a critical study of the currently available technological solutions. Expected findings of the project will make an original contribution to the general debate on algorithmic regulation and its ramification in the specific field of IP.

Triaxes+ is an interdisciplinary, inter-university and inter-faculty teaching project within a collaboration between the Polytechnic School of Brussels ULB, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management ULB, the Faculty of Law and Criminology ULB and the Industrial Design Workshop of ENSAV La Cambre. The Faculty of Law and Criminology ULB has participated in the project since 2017-18. As part of the Triaxes+ project, as part of their Final Project, groups of four students from each of the four participating Faculties imagine, design and develop an industrial product together. Thus the project allows students to go through, together, the complete process of the development of such a product, from the raw idea to the product marketing strategy, including the realization of a prototype and the analysis of legal issues.

To share our culture, our values, our work within Fab Lab ULB, we are active in the Fab Lab network through the Fab Academy since 2017. The Fab Academy, initiated by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld professor at the MIT CBA, is a 6 months, fast paced, hands-on learning experience where students learn rapid-prototyping by planning and executing a new project each week, resulting in a final project and a personal portfolio of technical accomplishments.

More info about FabAcedmy@ULB on our dedicated page.

A multidisciplinary team from Fab Lab ULB developed protective face shields in collaboration with the CHU Saint-Pierre Hospital in Brussels, for hospitals and medical staff. Supported by the Michel-Cremer Foundation and with the help of many volunteers, more than 100,000 masks were manufactured at Fab Lab ULB. More than 100,000 other masks were able to be manufactured and distributed in Wallonia and elsewhere in the world thanks to our online tutorials kept up to date in real time.

Facing an uncertain and rapidly changing future, Fablabs are a great environment to teach social and technical skills that are relevant for the 21st century.

At Fab Lab ULB, Victor Lévy, professor of architecture and Denis Terwagne, professor of physics, have experienced and developed an agile teaching method to make students work with digital tools in interdisciplinary teams and to make a real-world impact.

Starting with a “real world” problem, we guided the students to define their own assignment. To run the class, we used collective intelligence and tools from sociocracy. We helped the students to use the digital tools within a Fablab and have a conversation with authentic audiences from all around the world.

• 2019-2020 Fab Labs x Resilience in Cuba
• 2018-2019 Fab Labs x Humanitarian Aid
  • [Conference Paper] Terwagne, Denis, & Lévy, Victor. (2020), Fab for Kerala : how Teaching in Fablabs can help in the real world, the Making Of, Zenodo.
  • [Press Coverage] RTBF, La Première Radio, Tendances Premières, 17 juin 2019 (french)
• 2017-2018 Fablabs x Water Harversting
• 2016-2017 Architecture x Physics