Espace Fabrique: a new kind of collaborative creation space in Montreal 🇨🇦
MakerTour community has finally landed in North America! Eager to connect with local makers & incredible collaborative workshops, we were at Espace Fabrique launch in June. The perfect time to meet with its founders and tell you all you need to know 🛠 🌎
By Alina Grenier-Arellano, North America ambassador at MakerTour.
🇨🇦 Espace Fabrique mission in Montréal’s Ecosystem
Espace Fabrique has opened up on the maker scene in Montréal, Canada, in June 2017 and has launched a space to bring artists, artisans, small enterprises and designers together for collaborative creation. Holding the largest collaborative space in Montreal, the space is 12,000 sq. feet and aims to accompany members towards fabrication of their ideas worked on in support of the community. The new space offers a first batch of 19 machines, which represents an initial investment of 300,000 CAD, for wood and metal working as well as welding to encourage and educate a broad variety of expertise.
✨ A new opportunity for makers to bring personal projects to life
The co-founders are Emmanuel, Laurent, Christophe, and Anne-Marie. They and their expanded team, believe in opening the space for bringing together the manufacturing industry and technology through a “maker ethos”. In Espace Fabrique, Do-It-Together practices are employed, skill training is enacted informally by peers and staff, and making is fun, and for personal achievement.
This new lab hopes to create an opportunity for projects to grow by tapping into the engaged community of makers in Montréal. Particularly, by acknowledging the circumstance sometimes challenging for the community. Many machinists, artists, and designers are either unable to work on personal ideas in the workplace, are left to seek labour opportunities out of their field, or are missing the right contacts to drive a projects forward.
Five years ago, Emmanuel, who has a background in the arts, teamed with Laurent, an experienced metal worker, in an effort to solve the predicament many artists and machinists face when they don’t have access to campus or professional laboratories. Truth of the matter is that most artists are underemployed and are unable to work in their field due to the lack of local employment opportunities, while they are unable to become self-sufficient by creating their own professional projects without access to grade A equipment.
On the other hand, Laurent noticed how machinists need a space to work on their personal inventions, away from the workplace without sacrificing quality. In 2017, the team was able to bring this idea to fruition and leverage industry and governmental leaders in the aim to support local maker creation.
💼 A commercial shade of the traditional collaborative community lab
Within the Montreal maker ecosystem, Espace Fabrique is a commercial spin off of what other labs look like. Due to their aims of collaboratively creating inventions relevant for the Quebecois and Canadian manufacturing sector, this lab is much larger than other Montreal maker hubs like Helios, échoFab, FabLab du PEC, and District 3’s Design Lab, and looks to attract investors, small and medium sized businesses.
The spacious accommodations and the close corporate relations also signifies that crafty DIY makers may not be so attracted to Espace Fabrique as it trades relaxed intimate settings for grandiose modern habitat, ripe for entrepreneurial passions.
Jean-Éric Delarosbil maintains that collaboratively created inventions have a place in capitalist ventures creating a social good by enhancing sharing practices amongst inventors and small medium sized companies while remaining financially sustainable. Further, the vision is to engage makers to commercialise projects, inciting attention from audiences that could help projects be brought to market while still collaboratively sharing ideas, supporting fellow community members, and democratising access to production and industry-level prototyping.
🛠 A union of maker, manufacturing, and entrepreneurial interests
In essence, this lab wants to be the bridge supporting makers towards commercialisation by facilitating the union of maker, manufacturing, and entrepreneurial communities. They want to keep local inventions in the manufacturing sector innovative and competitive as well as giving professionals and artists the opportunity to realise projects they are passionate about in a sustainable way that leads to their personal financial security.
They believe that artists and designers deserve to be able to live off of projects created out of passion and created within a growing innovative and technically adept community. Furthermore, they want individuals outside of typical manufacturing corporates to also have the capacity and space to create meaningful products at industry level, thereby democratising means of production at a higher scale than other Montreal labs.
Membership recruitment is still ongoing and the lab has opened its doors on June 5th 2017! For the first 200 members, a discount is offered and allows access to all machines, workspace, and storage.
🎈 👉🏻 have a look at Espace Fabrique or check out their Facebook page!
🌎 🙌🏻 MakerTour - sharing & connecting the labs worldwide
At MakerTour, we explore, share and connect the diversity of collaborative workshops in the world! Started in France, our remote community has finally arrived to Montreal and explored Espace Fabrique as a starter for our mission with North American labs.
My name’s Alina and I’m MakerTour local ambassador, eager to connect with local makers and discover more incredibles places and projects! To connect with us, you can:
- discover all the makerspaces explored in Europe & Asia on makertour.fr
- follow our journey on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Instagram & LinkedIn
- or ping me at alina@makertour.fr to grab a coffee and talk about an awesome lab, a genius maker or a stellar project!
Take care & see you soon.
