A makerspace is a place stocked with tooling and equipment for hands-on projects. This could include hand tools, 3D printers, laser cutters, consumables, sewing equipment, electronics gear and more. But why build a makerspace? Here’s a few reasons:
- Learning Hands-on Skills: Working with tools is something often taken for granted but requires practice to gain experience and get it right. Picking the right tool for the job and learning proper technique has huge benefits in safety and productivity. Hand tooling experience builds independence and confidence with basic maintenance and repair.
- Building up prototyping experience: Project-based building builds passion. Picking something out from instructables.com or other great websites means students can work towards the goal of building something for themselves. With just a few clicks, students could be learning how to build their own infinity mirror, ball balancer, weather lamp or door alarm. Importantly, these projects could be the start of a job-ready portfolio.
- Collaboration: Working with others on a large project is a great way to aim higher and build something you wouldn’t be able to alone. Large projects build leadership skills and result in inspiring, functional assets for your local community. Some great collaborative projects include the Ikea Growroom, 3D printed sculptures and the Boomerang Bag project.
- Decentralised Production: New digital fabrication techniques like 3D printing, laser cutting and more means that everyone can be an innovator, a designer. Making beautiful, functional things locally reduces transport costs for ordering goods in and often can result in a higher quality, longer lasting product. Mass manufacture is something we, increasingly, don’t need to rely upon. You wouldn’t download a car, but for now, you could download a stool.
- Entrepreneurship: Learning to build and prototype opens the door to designing your own products. Find a problem that needs solving, and use iterative design skills to make a prototype. This means to design, make and try until the product works well. School leavers like the team behind BOP Industries launched into a career in Holograms through expertise learnt at school in prototyping.
