Skidmore Scope Magazine Annual Edition for 2017

16 SCOPE ANNUAL 2017 “You will be designing and building a campus resource from the ground up,” reads the syllabus, which also stipu- lates an 8:10 a.m. meeting time and just one credit. Yet 13 students and three professors from a range of disciplines willingly dove into the minicourse on “making a maker- space.” It was meant as a dry run, a prototype, or a part- ner for the Idea Lab in Skidmore’s Center for Integrated Sciences, coming soon with help from the Creating Our Future campaign. The CIS’s Idea Lab will offer a wide range of equipment, tools, and collaboration and will coordinate with existing programs from the Tang Museum to the Freirich Business Plan Competition to the Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative. Echoing other seniors in the class, Hadley Haselmann ’17 says, “Even though I’m graduating, I am so excited to see what comes out of this space.” For her the project was about its “potential to add to our campus and encourage collaboration and innovation.” As if born from a makerspace itself, the minicourse was invented, engineered, and launched by a business professor, IS IT AN ART LAB, OR IS IT A SCIENCE STUDIO? YES! a chemist, and a physicist: David Cohen, Kim Frederick, and Jill Linz. As members of the Idea Lab planning task force, Cohen and Frederick had attended a 2016 confer- ence at MIT, where their exposure to other college and university makerspaces, and the makers of them, generated “lots of ideas for both the physical and the philosophical considerations,” Cohen says. The conference visit, and the minicourse and other projects it inspired, received support from a two-year $100,000 Arthur Vining Davis Foundation grant for pedagogical innovation expressly with the Idea Lab concept in mind. Cohen cites “three core ideas for me: preparation for designing the CIS’s Idea Lab; engaging with the growing social movement around ‘making,’ including concerns that hand-crafting and manufacturing are disappearing skills in today’s economy, whether because automation is taking up such jobs, or because high technology is expensive for individual makers to afford, or other factors; and the op- portunity to establish an all-discipline, student-operated venue to foster ‘making’ as a way of further interconnecting BY SUE ROSENBERG TEACHING TEAM Business professor David Cohen, chemist Kim Frederick, and physicist Jill Linz pose in the new “Hub” makerspace. Erin Covey