I’d like you to meet Amy Zell – mother, librarian, grief counselor, and maker. In this episode, she talks about the power of making to change things, to change people. She credits Casey Shea, a Sonoma County maker educator with telling her about “maker empowerment” at the Fab Institute in Pittsburgh in 2018. She understood “maker empowerment” to mean the wherewithal to change things through making, and she applied it to her own life to move forward after suffering the loss of her son. Now she works with others who have experienced loss and trauma and she is weaving making into mental health practices.
Susie Frazier created the Maker Town platform for makers and artists working in Cleveland and Northern Ohio so that more people can find them and learn about what they make. Susie is a maker, creator and artist. Her own journey led her to Cleveland, Ohio, where she began developing her own functional and decorative art, working with stone and then organic materials. She hosted a TV show. Then she wrote a book called “Designing for Wellness.”
Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, authors of Make: Geometry, explain how to use 3D models to teach geometry, which can help students visualize and grasp the basic shapes. Joan describes herself as a recovering rocket scientist who worked at JPL. Rich was an early RepRap 3D printer enthusiast. Together they have created a practical, hands-on approach to teaching geometry. Make: Books editor, Patrick DiJusto talks to Joan and Rich.
Victor Hwang organized the Right to Start movement that seeks to open doors for more people to become entrepreneurs and create an ecosystem in America that supports entrepreneurial activity. After many years of leading entrepreneurship efforts at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Victor started his own organization built around the belief that becoming an entrepreneur is a fundamental right that anyone can exercise.
How do you transform ordinary stuff into meaningful things, even beautiful things? How you make things that don’t yet exist, something original rather than a copy? That’s the topic of this conversation with New York-based industrial designer, Neil Cohen. “Some of what I do in my work is making something that starts out one way,” he says, “And then when you do something to it, it forms into something else or reveals something else.”
Jorvon Moss creates companion robots for himself, working nights and weekends. I had run into Jorvon at Maker Faire Bay area as well as at the downtown LA Maker Faire. He always had one of his robot creations on the shoulder. In this interview, I wanted to learn about how he got started making and get to know the person behind the robots and the goggles. He calls himself Odd Jayy on Twitter, because some people might think he was odd, but he and his robots have become quite popular.
Our current framework for multiple-choice standardized testing is about 20 years old, dating back to legislation signed by President Bush called No Child Left Behind. The name has changed but testing still rules, although it has been disrupted by COVID-19. In this conversation with educators, Pam Moran and Ira Socol, co-authors of Timeless Learning with Chad Ratliff, we discuss how our education system responded to COVID-19 and how students have responded by turning off their cameras.
As a maker, San Diego-native Scott Swaaley is a triple-threat. He can build things; he can teach; and he can start and run his own business. An electrical engineer who became a high school teacher, Scott started Make Safe Tools in 2018 to produce products that make workshops safer. One of its products is the MakeSafe Power Tool Brake. In this podcast episode, I talk to Scott about his experiences as an engineer, educator, and entrepreneur and “how those experiences overlap in unexpected ways.”
The last place you might expect to find a makerspace is at The George Mark House, a pediatric palliative care facility in San Leandro, California. It is a place that cares for families who are going through the difficult end-of-life process for their child. I talk with Dr. Joan Fisher, the medical director, and Dr. Gokul Krishnan, a pioneer in the practice of maker therapy who just received a NSF grant to design and build a makerspace at the George Mark House.
You can learn a lot about the health of a hive by listening to the sounds that bees make, as a beekeeper would do. The developers of the Long Hive project, featured in Make Magazine, Vol 75, tell us about their efforts to use machine learning to detect the presence of the queen bee by recording the sounds of the bees in the hive.
Italians have a love of innovation and design and it shows at Maker Faire Rome. In this episode of Make:Cast, I look back at Maker Faire Rome in October 2019 during a pre-Covid time when live events could happen. I was guided through Maker Faire Rome by Alessandro Ranellucci, the curator of Maker Faire Rome, along with Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino. Maker Faire Rome 2020 is happening as a virtual event this weekend.
Ten years ago, a community came together around a definition of open source hardware to be clear about what it means to share designs for physical things, and doing so in a way that allows others to make, modify, distribute or use those things. This definition has been managed by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). In this episode, I talk with Alicia Gibb, Executive Director of OSHWA, and board president, Michael Weinberg about the growth of open source hardware, its certification process, and the role of open source hardware in the maker response to COVID-19.
Tim Deagan, a maker in Austin, TX, is a polymaker with many interests and fabrication projects that range from from flame effects to ham radio to leatherworking. He is the author of “Make: Fire – The Art and Science of Working with Propane” and “Modern Leatherworking for Makers.” In this conversation, Tim joins me from his garage workshop and we talk shop.
In this episode, we talk with Sarah Boisvert, an entrepreneur with extensive work experience in manufacturing, laser technology in 3d printing, who has been focusing on workforce training. Digital fabrication technology is creating new manufacturing jobs that she calls “new collar jobs” which require digital and physical hands-on experience. In 2018, Sarah published “The New Collar Workforce: An Insider’s Guide to Making Impactful Changes to Manufacturing and Training.”
For anyone wanting to do something, open source makes it easier for you to get started, for creative ideas to flourish and for difficult problems to be solved by collaborating with others. I talk with Joshua Pearce about his new book, “Create, Share and Save Money Using Open Source Projects.” Joshua is a professor of materials science and electrical engineering at Michigan Tech University where he directs the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Lab – acronym MOST. He’s also the editor of Hardware X, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to open source scientific hardware.
The co-founders of Maker Works in Ann Arbor, Michigan have written an operations guide for makerspaces. In this episode, we talk with Tom Root, one of the authors of “The Intentional Makerspace: Operation” about how to think of recipes as a way of managing a makerspace, predicatably and safely.
Over the last year or two, mHUB Chicago has begun offering product development services that allow makers, engineers, and others to work on paid projects for corporate clients, filling a need for rapid prototyping for those companies and helping entrepreneurs bring in some money. At the same time, they get started on their own project. Recently, mHUB was awarded a three-year, $1.3 million grant from the federal government to scale these services, develop new opportunities for talent and provide a service to client companies.
