Campus vignette: Find your inner tinkerer at a U makerspace

For 10 years, Fisher-Price’s Little People Castle reigned as my sister’s favorite toy, until Lego released its Castle sets in 1984.

Being a snotty brother who’d rather die than share an interest with my older sibling, I told her that Lego bricks were for little-little kids, not serious little kids like me who reinforced model airplanes with globs of glue (before “Kragle” was a thing — how very Lord Business of me).

I’ve since come clean with my sister by admitting that Lego bricks are, in fact, extremely cool, and there’s a reason kits specify a minimum but not a maximum age. I’m active in the Utah Lego Users Group (ULUG), an Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL) community, proving whether you’re 8 or 80 years old, combing through a pile of classic bricks (“antiques” as my son calls them) can be very therapeutic. It’s also why I wasn’t surprised to find a table of Lego bricks in the ideation and prototyping section of Marriott Library’s Protospace.

Protospace, which now serves U staff in addition to faculty and students, is one of the most visible makerspaces at the university. A makerspace, broadly speaking, is a collaborative space where people come together to create or invent things using traditional crafts or technology. It’s where you can get in touch with your inner tinkerer.

There are five university-affiliated makerspaces (the following lists of available resources are not exhaustive):

• Protospace, located on the second floor of Marriott Library, is open to all U staff, faculty, and students. It features a virtual reality arena, data visualization wall, geospatial information systems services, One Button Studio media production studio, podcast booth, gaming consoles, small-scale fabrication tools, and 3D scanners and printers.
• Make Space is located on the first floor of Lassonde Studios and is open to all U students. It features hand tools, 3D printers, a large-format printer, work benches, and a wood and metal shop.
• A student and an advanced machine shop are located on the first floor of the Merrill Engineering Building and open to degree-seeking Mechanical Engineering students. The shops feature band saws, belt sanders, drill presses, grinders, shear cutters, milling machines, injection molder, manual lathes, jet cutter, vacuum former, and computer workstations with computer-aided design (CAD) programs.
• Big-D Construction Digital Fabrication Lab (Fab Lab) is located on the first floor of the Architecture Building and is open to College of Architecture + Planning students. It features tools to create construction mock-ups and prototypes from human scale to building scale.
• Prototyping & Design Lab is located at University of Utah Health’s Center for Medical Innovation and is open to U students, faculty, staff, and community partners. It features a computer numerical control (CNC) mill, CNC lathe, Epilog laser, 3D printers, and general prototyping equipment like drills, hammers, saws, soldering equipment, and oscilloscopes.

Please note facilities may require completion of mandatory online or in-person training programs.

While technically not a makerspace, Adobe Creative Commons, a multiuse space located on Kahlert Village’s first floor, occasionally offers “take-home” workshops that allow students to create items like stickers, postcards, and buttons. Visit its Instagram page for information about upcoming workshops.

 

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