Visits to Champaign-Urbana Makerspaces

I've been spending a lot of time working on Makers at Amherst Media. We shot a new show discussing the afterschool program and filmed our end-of-the-year show and tell, where participants from the afterschool program and Five College environmental sensing class presented about their projects.

While planning my trip to visit Phil in Champaign, I wanted to arrange to visit Makerspace Urbana. Phil had told me about it before, but I hadn't managed to get there. We posted a note on their Facebook page and a comment in reply suggested we stop by the Fab Lab too. (I was pleased to see that they have a Drupal site.) We actually ended up going there first.

It was incredibly cold with strong wind when we arrived at the Fab Lab -- so cold that the parking meters were all failing. Phil spotted the parking enforcement guy who assured us we wouldn't get a ticket, so we headed in out of the cold.

The FabLab is on the UIUC campus and is in an old building that was essentially unused. It had a few groups functionally squatting in it, but was so decrepit and dirty as to be unusable for most purposes. Someone with university connections pulled some strings to put the makerspace in there and found a pot of money to get it set up, although a lot was done with sweat equity by volunteers who did much of the cleaning and setting up.

The Fab Lab has several rooms. You enter between a computer lab and a 3D printing lab. Past the computer lab, is a textile room that also serves as a kitchen (coincidentally, they pointed out, and not due to gender issues.) In the textile room are several embroidery machines that can be used to make patches -- a particular interest of Phil. Past their 3D printers (they have a couple of generations), they have a laser cutter -- one of the few really big-ticket items. Beyond, is a room with soldering stations. In a back room, they have some milling machines, one made from a Dremel motor tool and an arduino with a motor control shield of some kind. They're hoping to manage this room in coordination with the architecture program that has common interests in milling, but it looks like the arrangements are still being worked out.

The kitchen was really just a spot on the counter where communal food could be prepared and shared. They indicated that this was important, especially in their space due to the layout. They mentioned that in some spaces, where people sat around tables, there were more opportunities for social interaction. But in their space, where benches were along the walls, many people would work on their project with their back to the rest of the room, so having a place with food, that could draw people away from their projects where they could congregate and socialize, was really important for building community.

The next day, we stopped by Makerspace Urbana, which is in the Independent Media Center. I was particularly interested because I thought we might find some commonalities as we're building our Makerspace with Amherst Media. It turned out, however, that the entities are actually quite distinct -- almost unrelated. The Makerspace pays rent (quite inexpensive) and is managed totally separately.

We arrived just as it opened. It was smaller than I had imagined -- only room for 15 or 20 people tops. They had an arduino-controlled illuminated pride flag near the entrance that had been an earlier project. They used it for a fund-raising thermostat earlier, which seemed like a great idea. They had a common room with small 3D printer and a sewing machine and a back room with storage, where people could keep projects and supplies.

Their financial model is to charge a sustaining membership fee of $15/month and give "key access" for $25/month, where an existing member needed to vouch for you to get key access. This was sufficient to pay the rent, which had been a big goal of the fundraising effort.

I was excited to hear about the Makerfest that they had organized and were organizing again. They had looked into using the Makerfaire name, but found that it was burdened with a lot of restrictions, so they called theirs makerfest so they could do whatever they wanted. They had drawn in more than a thousand visitors and gotten a lot of publicity from the event. This is a goal I think we could set for ourselves.

I asked whether they'd had any problems or issues that required them to create policy and they really couldn't think of anything. They had created a "code of conduct" to head off potential problems early on (as we've done), but hadn't really had any problems they could point fingers at. Their main suggestion was to not get discouraged when things were slow. They had found dips and ebbs in participants as old people moved on and new people got involved, but found that overall just providing a reliable place for building community was the most important thing. Although they agreed with the Fab Lab that food was important to.

I really appreciated the warm welcome of Colten, Virginia, Jeff, and Eric. I got a lot of ideas to bring back to help build Makers at Amherst Media.