About Dilijan Fab Lab.

Dilijan Fab Lab has been established in 2015 with support of Central Bank of Armenia. Dilijan is a spa town and urban municipal community in Tavush province of Armenia. The forested and reclusive town is home to numerous Armenian artists, composers, and filmmakers and features some traditional Armenian architecture. The vision of the lab is to develop Dilijan into a maker city and foster maker movement in Armenia.

Fab Lab’s mission is to create maker community, foster interest in fabrication, provide space and facilities for fabrication, educational opportunities, and prototype assistance to local companies, and encourage sharing projects, tools, resources among the maker community, innovative entrepreneurship among people in the regions.

Fostering the interest in innovation and making, Fab Lab team organizes different trainings, workshops and events for people from Tavush region. Educational part of the program is very important, as people from regions have very limited knowledge. During the trainings and workshops students get necessary skills and knowledge to design, develop, and prototype.

The trainings have beginner, intermediate and advanced levels. The lab is organizing trainings for kids, young people and adults (6 to 66 years old). During the educational process each student should design and develop projects/ products / devices, which are useful for the community. The duration of the whole educational process is 6 months. Students learn project management, engineering design, electronics, programming etc. The lab organizes professional courses like modeling and developing of unmanned aerial vehicles, 3D design of jewelry, etc. During last year fab lab had more than 200 students, organized about 12 trainings. For this year we have registered about 300 new students.

“Dilijan Fab lab” implements different projects, events, community development programs. The lab collaborates with educational centers, schools, colleges, universities, startups, public organizations and others.

Here is some of “Dilijan Fab Lab’s” projects for the community:

  • Plastic recycling – students of the lab collect and classify plastic, after send it to a company, that grind it and send back to Dilijan. Students develop molds and make different boxes, jewelry and other things made from recycled plastic.
  • UAVs for forest monitoring – students design and develop different types of UAVs for finding loggers and poachers in the forests.
  • Wood architecture – Dilijan has historical heritage of wooden architecture. Some of our students interested in architecture develop project for renovation and construction of new wooden buildings and other city places.

    • Startups make their prototypes in fab lab using equipment and involve lab’s students in the process. During the prototyping process students to use their knowledge and get necessary practical skills for their future projects.

    For the development of the region and fostering maker movement in Tavush we have established idea incubator. Incubator fosters innovative entrepreneurship in the regions. Startups located and projects developed in the regions are promote creation of new job places and economic development. In the idea incubator, through a focus on practical applications, participants will learn:

  • How to develop and commercialize a product,
  • What is important for establishing a company and etc.

    • The teams/individuals with the best ideas get the support of Fab Lab team (Mentorship, crowdfunding campaign, etc.) for the commercialization.