Zen and the Art of Microscope Maintenance
One man’s quest to restore a busted scanning electron microscope.
artisans asylum
15-Foot-Tall Paint-Cannon Equipped MegaBots Come to Life
All three MegaBots will be at Maker Faire Bay Area, with the largest firing its giant paintballs at cars.
So You Want to Make a Makerspace?
Makerspaces are fantastic resources in their communities, offering classes and tools to aspiring and expert makers alike. But how do you start a space?
Making Makerspaces: Creating a Business Model
This is the second in a series of posts called Making Makerspaces, a distillation of the information gathered for a series of How to Make a Makerspace workshops produced by Artisan’s Asylum and MAKE. These posts will appear on a more-or-less weekly basis, and will focus on mission-critical topics related to founding and running creative manufacturing space. Today, we’ll be discussing common types of expenses and income that makerspaces around the world experience on a regular basis in order to help you create a business model for a space of your own. In the process of identifying these expenses and income, we’ll review examples from several well-established spaces across the U.S. for reference.
Making Makerspaces: Acquiring Insurance
This is the first in a series of posts documenting how to start a makerspace of your own in your local community. This post is focused on the one question almost everyone asks when starting a space – how do you get insurance for your makerspace? We’ll start with a quick introduction to the series, and then jump into the meat of the question.
Is it a Hackerspace, Makerspace, TechShop, or FabLab?
The past decade has seen the sudden, dramatic appearance of community spaces offering public, shared access to high-end manufacturing equipment. These spaces are interchangeably referred to as hackerspaces, makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs. This can lead the intended audience to become incredibly confused as to why there might be so many names for a single concept. I’d like to take some time to untangle the mess, explain the concepts behind each title, and talk about why I now make significant distinctions between all of these types of spaces.
Maker Pro: Building Community at Scale
Shared workshops can have a feeling of community. I used to think it was a matter of scale, that the larger groups would have more community. I now realize it’s more a matter of how much people will linger. The more people engage with each other in a workshop, the more likely the sense of […]
