A Conversation with Jacqueline Karaaslanian the Interim CEO of Fab Lab Armenia
Fab Lab Armenia announces the launch of the new brand, website, and programs at the service of local and global communities. Jacqueline Karaaslanian, CEO of Learning Learning Architects explains the vision creativity, and new culture of collaboration.
Q: Tell us about the history of Fab Lab Armenia.
Jacqueline:
Fab Lab Armenia started in 2013 when the Central Bank of Armenia moved to Dilijan, making the pivotal decision to empower and transform the community through education and technological innovation. Fab Lab Armenia was created to support r a new generation of Armenians and ?foster creativity, collaboration, and entrepreneurship.
The Fab Lab concept and Fab Academy programs, were originally created by Professor Niel Gershenfeld and researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms, a sister lab to the MIT Media Lab. They started working in collaboration with the Grassroots Invention Group and together explored how communities can be powered by technology at the grassroots level. There are always wonderful people and talents to discover everywhere and all the time. This is why I enjoy this quote of Professor Neil Gershenfeld that says: "Wherever we open a Fab Lab, we've found that it attracts exactly the same profile of bright, inventive people.”
Thanks to the Central Bank of Armenia that founded Fab Labs in the country and sponsored the MIT Fab Academy program to be accessible by students and young professionals, the new culture of Digital Fabrication has been seeded in Armenia.
–Jacqueline Karaaslanian
Fab Lab Armenia is about a community of people with a wide range of educational experiences, lifelong learnings, limitless creativity, and groundbreaking innovation - all in the name of curiosity and problem-solving. We bridge the gap between local people, world-leading technologies, and a global learning community, so that anyone can come, play and explore. From school children to farmers, veterans and anyone with a curious mind. Everyone can be a part of this hive of creativity and entrepreneurship.
Fab Labs work best when they also have an on-going stream of students attending Fab Academy. This empowers people to discover new skills and embrace the digital manufacturing culture mindset that is necessary to contribute to the 21st century economy. Without the Fab Academy program and it’s powerful network it comes with, a Fab Lab is just a makers’ space or a robotic lab, not fully working at a connected and augmented capacity.
Q: What is Fab Lab and Fab Lab Armenia – Dilijan?
Jacqueline:
Fab Lab Armenia – Dilijan is part of an open global community of educators, artists, engineers, scientists, software developers, students, professionals, tinkerers, and curious minds. Inspired by the model set out by MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, we bridge the gap between local people and world-leading technologies so that anyone and everywhere can be empowered to create, invent, and problem-solve.
Through easy access to modern digital manufacturing technologies and fabrication tools, with open-source software, the Lab opens the door for learning through experimentation. It’s a playground for project-based learning for students, lifelong educational and upskilling opportunities for people of any age, and innovative product development and entrepreneurship for local businesses.
A key factor is sharing our knowledge, research, and discoveries with other Fab Labs within the global network. This means that we all benefit from a much faster, more dynamic, and exciting pace of research, design, experimentation, and iteration.
Fab Lab Armenia – Dilijan is a welcoming place for members of the community of all ages, genders, races, and cultures to come learn in a playful way, experiment, and co-create. There are no barriers to entry, and no limits to what’s possible. It’s a place where you can become a digital artisan and make almost anything…?
Q: What is the vision for Fab Lab Armenia?
Jacqueline:
We want to support curious minds and people who dare imagine the impossible and innovate. A new culture where it is encouraged to rethink the status quo.
Our vision is that the Fab Lab would be a multi-cultural, multi-generational hive of creativity and entrepreneurship, where people come together to imagine a better world and then make it happen. We also have a vision of community transformation, enriching education, stimulating small businesses, fueling aspiration, and raising the profile of the region.
Q: How do you even begin something like this and why?
"I see five core values, to guide our work through a rapidly changing world and be able to seize opportunities and scale up.
Community:
Nothing can be done without a community
Curiosity:
Keep an open mind
Courage:
Start, the time is now
领英推荐
Creativity:
Always innovate
Cooperation:
At local and global levels
We must always think simultaneously at micro and macro scales."
–Armen Nurbekyan
Jacqueline:
Values are always a good place to start, for Fab Lab Armenia the core value is community – first and foremost. We want to nurture a healthy, successful, and vibrant community.
Secondly, we do this because we want to foster the curiosity and courage to create something new or do something differently. It’s easy to complain or to focus on the obstacles, like financial limitations, but in reality, most of the world’s revolutionary inventions were not created by rich people.
Third, we want to support and encourage the creative economy. The creative industries are a significant source of economic activity and employment in the UK for example, contributing ￡116bn (US$156bn) to the UK economy in 2019 and accounting for 6% of UK gross value added (GVA). According to the USA Bureau of Economic Analysis, the creative economy provides $919.7 bn in added value, supports 5.2 million jobs, and represents 4.3% of the nation's economy. The creative economy contributes just over 6.1% to global gross domestic product (GDP), averaging between 2% and 7% of national GDPs around the world. According to UN estimates, the creative economy industries generate annual revenues of $2.25 trillion and account for 30 million jobs worldwide.
Now, that is a lot of dollars and cents. So, it’s not just IT, wine, and tourism – we also want to support the creative economy in Armenia. This nation is rich with creative talent, and we can nurture this through the Fab Lab, digital arts, digital fabrication, and digital manufacturing. We’re ready to join the 4th industrial revolution, which is happening right now.
Another critical factor is to change mindsets and ways of working, and to teach and encourage cooperation. When we learn to co-operate, we can achieve amazing things and build just about anything you can imagine – ultimately, the whole country will benefit from co-operation. When an artist co-operates with an engineer, a programmer, an industrial designer, branding and marketing specialists, IP lawyer… they can innovate themselves out of any problem, or bring to market just about anything if they can imagine it together.
I am proud to support a value system that empowers a network of communities to think big, act, create and share locally and globally.
–Nerses Yeritsyan
Q: What can people do with their new ideas, products, or inventions? Many say that it is a small market, and I often hear about two closed borders, no direct shipping ports, etc. And what about intellectual property?
Jacqueline:
Fab Lab Armenia, and the equitable access to digital manufacturing tools, will help to open the market for local innovators as their ideas, designs and code can travel the cloud and get manufactured anywhere in the world. The whole idea of a patent is to allow you to share your groundbreaking ideas with the world and receive the recognition you deserve as the inventor. It pushes the world of science and technology to make progress. This is exactly what the global Fab Lab network is all about, and the circulation of ideas and intellectual property, patents, and trademarks is one of the ways to drive wealth back to the people and the nation that generated those ideas.
Just like people who have both a physical and digital presence locally and worldwide, objects can not only be atoms in the physical world, but also become bits and travel through email and the internet. You can design and prototype and object at our Fab Lab Armenia in Dilijan, then send it via email to another location. It can be cut, assembled, and connected again at its destination point. Now ideas and things can also travel without the limitations of the physical world.
Fab Lab Armenia – Dilijan is opening a new world of possibilities for communities to come together and create their own solutions for emerging challenges.
–Jacqueline Karaaslanian
Visit our new website?www.fablabarmenia.com
Jacqueline Karaaslanian is the Interim CEO of Fab Lab Armenia – Dilijan. Jacqueline in partnership with The Central Bank of Armenia helped bring two Fab Labs to Armenia. Fab Labs are closely aligned with the DIY movement, open-source hardware, maker culture, and the free and open-source movement, and shares philosophy as well as technology with them Jacqueline Karaaslanian has accepted this interim role as CEO to select and train a new team of managers to help catapult Armenia into the 4th industrial revolution and a new era of digital manufacturing.
Jacqueline Karaaslanian joined the founding team of the MIT Media Lab at its inception. She worked with the scientific research teams of Professor Seymour Papert, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, education, and technology. Also, Nicholas Negroponte founder of MIT Media Lab, Marvin Minsky co-founder of MIT Media Lab and a pioneer of artificial intelligence AI, Glorianna Davenport co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, the Interactive cinema research group, the Media Fabrics research group and Tod Machover, the composer, and an innovator in the application of technology in music. Jacqueline gained an exceptional ability to sharpen emerging concepts and develop the corresponding strategic actions for quality prototyping and scaling into full development.
She is the Co-founder & CEO of Learning Learning Architects LLC, an emergent solutions development agency, translating visions into actions, projects, products, and services. working with innovators in the field of technology, AI, education, and constructionist learning. Based in Boston, USA. She was the co-founding CEO of the Luys Education Foundation, where she created and implemented visionary education programs that support the development of a new generation of critical thinkers and doers in Armenia where she managed 25 million USD in scholarship grants that enabled over 500 Armenian scholars from 18 different countries to pursue their undergraduate and graduate studies in the world’s top 10 centers of excellence. Jacqueline specializes in cutting-edge research group management. She received her education at training at MIT Media Lab in experiential learning and at the Sorbonne, Paris?in linguistics and comparative literature.