Fab City Challenge

A unique format of collaboration that brings together local and global innovation communities to propose meaningful outcomes that respond to urgent areas of intervention in cities and regions as a driver of change.

Fab Challenge Report 2022: Ideated, Prototyped Tested Solutions

🎋 Fab Island Challenge in Bali 🐲 Fab Bhutan Challenge 🦅 Fab City Challenge Mexico

The Fab City Challenge is a collaborative innovation initiative designed to address social, environmental, and economic issues, known as ‘Challenges,’ on a local scale. The program encompasses critical areas of intervention, where global teams collaborate with local initiatives to conceptualize and prototype design solutions. The methodology involves a well-structured organizational and implementation strategy, supported by tools, workshops, guidelines, and frameworks guiding participants through the entire challenge process—from initiation to implementation, evaluation, and knowledge sharing.

About the Challenge

FORMAT: Participants are invited to travel and join the challenge in person
LOCATION: The challenge takes place in a local context with global involvement.
LENGHT: The annual challenge runs for 10 days, but other challenge formats can range in length.
LANGUAGE: During the challenge both the local language and English are spoken

Anyone can launch a Global-Local Fab City Challenge in their City, Region, or Country by teaming up with local Fab Labs, community organizations, and educational institutions to tackle the most urgent challenges of their territory.

Participants Profiles

Local & Global Experts

Local and global experts and enthusiasts such as students, academics, professionals and other practitioners of design, making, digital fabrication, organising and activism who bring their skills to the challenge.

Technologies & Methodologies

Individuals from existing projects, technologies or methodologies that deal with or might fit into one or more of the challenge areas.

Networks & Organisations

Individuals from Networks and organisations of practice that add value in the form of specific knowledge, skills or experience including universities, advocacy movements and communities of practice.

Challenge Partners

Community Partner

Local organisations, practices, people that work in areas of intervention. They co-create and build a challenge with challenge hosts by situating it in context with real-world problematics

Remote Partner

Global organisations, practices, people that work in areas of intervention. Contribute to the development of a challenge related to specific focus in a another local context

Funding Partner

They contribute towards the organisation of a challenge, or sponsor an award or microgrant

Challenge Testimonials

Fab City Challenges create valuable outcomes and generate impact to benefit all stakeholders involved from the community to governmental levels.
The program offers the conditions for global-local teams to work on local needs with an innitiative to propose, prototype, and implement design outputs.

The Outcomes

Open-sourse design outcomes - developed during the challenge to tackle wickel problems
Seed-funding - to realise winning projects after the challenge"
Documentation - to analyse and generate evidence of the impact on the local context through global dissemination
Long-lasting collaborations - to kickstart promising and meaningful partnerships for a thriving ecosystem well beyond the event"

Team Curation

Teams are carefully curated in collaboration with the host organizations, based on several key criteria, including:

1) Alignment of participants’ interests with the selected areas of intervention.

2) A diverse mix of skills and professional backgrounds to balance expertise.

3) Equity in representation, ensuring diversity across age, gender, and nationality.”