As a part of District 3 Innovation Center, Concordia’s hub for innovation and entrepreneurship which provides guidance and mentorship services to students wishing to start their own businesses, “MAKE” strives to empower Concordia’s community to conceptualize, design, and make almost anything. Project “MAKE” is a physical space within D3 that supplies tools to create affordable and easy to develop technology.

Being part of a university with huge body of graduate students and researchers, “Make” is not only a maker space, but a knowledge driven community that shares, and engenders peer mentorship. MAKE also serves D3’s teams with fast prototyping techniques, fostering the translation their ideas into tangible products.

MAKE allows open access to its tools and services to all student of Concordia University regardless of their background. After participating in few workshops and a two week supervised stage, any student can have full access to our MAKE facilities. This is the first time that students are able go to a laboratory and begin designing, assembling and testing their ideas immediately. These ideas will unleash the creative and sustainable potential of Concordia students that otherwise might never have been explored. MAKE relies on community participation to implement its two principal strategies. We generate “know-how” knowledge through community participation, documentation, and sharing. We can work quickly when it comes to hacking new technologies. We promote and invent new approaches to design and make using up-cycled tools, parts, and materials as much as possible. In this way we are not only cost-conscious, but community and environmentally conscious as well.

Years funded: 2013-14

Amount allocated: $5,200.00

Project leader: Sydney Swaine-Simon

E-mail: info@d3center.ca