The Fabrikarium fulfills its promises
19.11.2019
In October, 30 employees of ArianeGroup, together with 25 volunteers from the “My Human Kit” association based in Rennes, got together at the Innovation Hangar at Les Mureaux to design, develop and produce equipment to make life easier for five disabled people. The fruit of three days of collaboration at the “Fabrikarium,” a pop-up workshop devoted to handicaps and innovation, was five superb prototypes.
Much like a hackathon, a Fabrikarium is a creating and digital prototyping workshop designed to accelerate the design, manufacture and technical documentation of equipment to assist for the disabled. The solutions that emerge are mainly simple and cheap to make. They can be reproduced easily because their specifications are freely available on an Open Source basis on the association’s web site. Anyone interested in reproducing an item can, using the on-line documentation, create or develop it in any fablab.
At the Fabrikarium, organised at Les Mureaux at the initiative of François Le Berre and Fanja Rabiazamaholy, five multidisciplinary teams of ArianeGroup employees and 25 “makers” (in the language of start-ups) from the My Human Kit association, got their heads together to work on five development projects for disabled people on the teams.
They worked for three days to provide solutions to difficulties that disabled people must face every day, and came up with five innovations: