From the Beginning to Today: Everything About Academic Makerspaces

07/19/2019

In the history of makerspaces – those places where the creative community can learn, build and share skills - World War II, Sputnik, and Make magazine all play a role.  Things really started taking off in the 1990s as access to tools became widely available, and those with a DIY bent started organizing and pooling their resources and knowledge. 

These are a few insights to be found in a new overview of academic makerspaces by SEAS Deputy Dean Vincent Wilczynski, director of Yale’s own makerspace, the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design (CEID). It’s one chapter in the new book Design Education Today (Springer), an international collection of essays related to engineering design education. 

Academic makerspaces first started showing up on college campuses about a decade ago, and Wilczynski traces how the broad access and community-focused aspects of these spaces have since had a major impact on academic design education.

Wilczynski’s work provides a look at “academic makerspaces – locations on college campuses for teams of students to design, fabricate, assemble and test components and complete systems – and explores the impact of these spaces on design education.”  In addition to detailing the role and benefits of facilities and resources for developing student design skills, the chapter also profiles six programs from across the world as models that advance design skills. The Yale CEID is featured in the profiles as well as throughout the chapter.

The chapter also goes over the roles that staff and other components play in the academic makerspace, the social aspects of the makerspace, and the importance of giving members “ownership” of the space. 

For more information about the book, go to the publisher’s website.