Creating A College Makerspace

Makerspaces are multiplying on university and college campuses with good reason—they have the potential to foster innovation, creativity and collaborative learning in any field of study. Making can be fun for students, while also building their sense of confidence to dream up an idea and make it happen.

But designing, building and running a thriving makerspace, especially one that attracts a wide variety of students, can be a real challenge. What should a college consider as it dives into creating this kind of exciting learning space?

Makerspaces started out as exclusive, high-tech clubs two decades ago and soon appeared at large research universities. As equipment costs come down, makerspaces have been spreading to art schools, K-12 schools, liberal arts colleges, public libraries and community centers.

The growing number and variety of spaces, each with its own priorities, tech equipment, access and culture, now allows us to look at best practices for makerspaces. What works best for encouraging creativity and collaboration? What kind of culture fosters innovation? And most important to me, how do we engage groups that are underrepresented in makerspaces, such as women, students of color and first-generation students?  How do you create a makerspace that feels inviting and exciting to someone who has never ventured into one, never seen themselves as a maker? There are many students who are passionate about making; there are likely many more who would be passionate about making if they experienced the possibilities.

Harvey Mudd College considered all these questions as it set about designing and building its first true makerspace from the ground up – literally as the ground-floor centerpiece of the campus’s newest building. While most college makerspaces are built in renovated space within a particular department, and often seen as belonging to that department, Harvey Mudd had the rare opportunity to create a makerspace that is intentionally an all-campus, cross-departmental and interdisciplinary space, that by its very layout will be welcoming and easy to access for students of all skill levels.

I recently spoke with the inaugural director of the new makerspace, Professor of Literature Jeff Groves, and engineering department Chair Liz Orwin, both of whom were deeply involved in the planning for the space, about the process of creating an interdisciplinary, all-campus makerspace.

Maria Klawe: Why might a college want to create a makerspace?

Jeff Groves: The potential of a makerspace, for Harvey Mudd and for other institutions of higher education, is really about the value of hands-on, experiential learning for students. Hands-on learning should be an important part of college curricula everywhere, not just in the sciences and engineering but also in the humanities and social sciences and of course in the arts, too, where it usually already is. Making is all about thinking in a different way—thinking with your hands, thinking with materials. Creating is important to any field.

Liz Orwin: We wanted to create a makerspace for many reasons. Our vision was to create an all-college space, a kind of central nexus where we could bring the community together, engage students creatively and foster collaboration. We wanted to construe making as broadly as possible and include artists and musicians as well as scientists and engineers.  We also wanted to help students gain confidence in their abilities to be creative and to build things. There is a lot of research on how makerspaces can increase confidence in women and underrepresented minorities. Makerspaces help build confidence in all students but can have a differential impact on underrepresented students. I find that exciting.

Klawe: What should a college consider when it starts to plan for a makerspace?

Groves: One of the hardest parts of creating a makerspace is finding the actual space to house it. You need quite a bit of room. Often makerspaces are shoehorned into pre-existing rooms that are renovated for that purpose, like an old library. At Harvey Mudd, we are creating a makerspace that is not affiliated with any particular department but instead is a true all-college space, a full college resource that anyone will be able to come into and use. We have the advantage that we are building our makerspace from scratch. That to me is really exciting—that we were able to design the makerspace as a central part of designing our new building. That has given us enormous ability to lay out the space according to our vision of a welcoming, accessible, collaborative space. The fact that I’ve been named the director, and I’m from the field of literature, speaks to our effort.

Orwin: Jeff and I were involved in the early planning, and it has been a multi-year interdisciplinary process involving faculty, staff and students from across the college. Once we established that we would build it from scratch, we worked with the architecture firm on the design. In the initial phase, they ran sessions with boards and sticky notes and got community input on concepts like large open spaces, tables, windows, color, all kinds of things. Next a faculty committee that had representation from all the departments went through design iterations with them. Then a group of us visited makerspaces at other institutions and asked them, what are the great things about your spaces? What do you wish you’d done differently? We gathered all of that information.

Klawe: What were the most important factors for the final design?

Orwin: We were intentional about the layout of the space and how to draw people in. As you enter, you will first walk into a lounge space with comfortable chairs and tables and places to have a conversation. As you walk in further, it becomes a co-working space, with whiteboards, a screen for collaborative work and things like that. As you go a little further, there are electronics stations and a whole room of 3D printers. A little bit further, you get into a big fabrication space where we have a variety of materials and more heavy-duty tools. Then through an open doorway and large windows you can see into and enter the woodshop and the metal shop. We have really tried to embody the concept of pulling people in and attracting them into the space. Also, we’ve talked about the balance between an open and welcoming, accessible space and safety. It will be part of the job of the staff and student staff to make sure that people are using tools safely.

Groves: We designed the makerspace to be a welcoming place not just for Harvey Mudd students but also for students from our sister Claremont Colleges. We want to make learning to use new equipment as easy and straightforward as possible. There are going to be all sorts of opportunities where the barrier to entry is not too high.

Klawe: What kind of culture do you hope to foster in the new Makerspace?

Orwin: I hope the students take the space over and make it theirs. I think our students have wanted this kind of space for a while, and I know I would have loved it when I was a student here at Mudd. The makerspace has the potential to become a real hub of activity, a real energy center for the campus.

Groves: Once we’re up and running fully, it is going to be largely a student-run space. As the director, I’m not going to be standing there telling people what to do. The student staff will learn to use the equipment before we open. They will be the trainers, and we’ll have a train the trainer’s model, where students learn from them in the first couple of semesters. Our students are so creative, and I have such great faith in them, so I am sure that once we start to get them together in that space and start talking about possibilities that enter their heads, we will suddenly have all sorts of new programming ideas that never would have occurred to me or anyone else working on this from the administrative side.

Klawe: How do you think faculty will incorporate the Makerspace into their classes?

Groves: For professors, a makerspace can help us understand how we can have a bigger toolkit for our courses—new and different ways of getting students to encounter the things that we want them to encounter. I taught a Shakespeare course for many years in which students produced and performed a play, designing and making all the props, sets and costumes themselves. The course was, at its heart, about making. I think that you can find analogues to that kind of course in many fields, where students really benefit from having an experiential or hands-on component. It’s related to the educational use of prototyping, which engineering is really moving towards, but is applicable to any field because a making environment gives students the opportunity to try something, fail and try again in a new way. That opportunity is an important part of learning what it means to make for failure and then move on from failure.

Orwin: I think any class in which faculty include project work, team-based projects or any kind of creative work will benefit from using the space. We don’t plan to reserve it for particular class sessions—we want it to be accessible and open for students to come in and work on whatever they want, whether it’s for a class, a club or a personal project. The space provides opportunities for all kinds of classes. Students will be able to collaborate at a large table with say, sticky notes, boards and screens and then go get pipe cleaners and clay and make a model of their concept. And then go over and grab wood and a drill and make a sturdy prototype, or go 3D print the idea, all in the same space. Or storyboard a video or audio project and create it on the spot. I think the space could provide opportunities for faculty in any field.

Klawe: How will you know the makerspace is successful?

Orwin: I think that a lot of students at Mudd are interested in social justice and making an impact on the world. Our students often seek opportunities to do more in terms of societal impact, and the makerspace can provide the collaborative space and the tools to work on such projects. One of the things I find really exciting about makerspace is its potential to further College’s mission to educate scientists, mathematicians and engineers who understand their impact on society. I think success will be seeing the makerspace become a physical embodiment of our collaborative, innovative and impactful community.

Groves: The makerspace is going to need to be responsive to what we learn from students, both the students who work there and also the students who come to use it. We’re not going to have the mix and the environment quite right at the beginning; it will be an evolving space. We’re going to hear from students about things they would like to be doing in that space that we haven’t anticipated. And we’ll want to be as nimble as we can, to move to meet those ideas and those desires, wherever possible. The key point is the commitment of students to the space. If a few years from now we have a place where there’s a steady stream of students coming into the space, some of them working on projects from classes, some of them just doing things that they want based on their own interest, some just watching and some doing their homework because they like the space, some students just hanging out talking—if we’ve got that, then we will have succeeded, and it will be a space that will continue into the future in an exciting way.