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For as long as we've had recorded history, we've been really interested in how
we make things that change the way we live or change the way we can
interact with each other or with our environment.
The industrial revolution introduced the idea of making things on a huge scale,
and making things that couldn't be made in any other way.
And what the Maker Movement is pivoting on is the fact that some of these
emerging technologies have made it possible for us to make things
that used to only be possible in an industrial mass production model
and actually make them in our living rooms or in our studios or our classrooms.
We can actually make things that we simply couldn't make before.
>> I think the Maker Movement is a way of just people being able to
be creative.
It's a way coming up with an idea and then building a device, coming up with a
concept but you end up with a prototype very quickly
and I think the difference from 15, 20 years ago is we now have technology
that allows people to do this very rapidly.
>> The Maker Movement is kind of a correction I think, in education.
The Maker Movement is I think an outgrowth of our dependence on
technologies based on screens and software.
It's a yearning to have more interaction with the real world.
>> What I think is important about the, the Maker Movement is
that is has brought together.. the science and the engineering aspects of
what we call additive manufacturing
with the creative aspects and that's what's new about the
the Maker Movement.
And what I think is happening here at the University of Texas
is that we're bringing the creativity and the engineering and technology
together in very unique ways.
>> We started our Longhorn Makers studio just about 18 months ago.
And it was essentially a prototype for us --
allow us to try out different technologies
before we go large scale in our new building.
And we're really excited because the first semester it opened we had
ten different classes using this facility.
>> One of the things that was really lacking was a central place to do this.
That is really what this space is about, is a central facility where students
can come in here and tinker, and make, and use their hands.
It is important to have things like our 3-D printers and our laser cutters,
they get used a lot.
But they produce objects, if you really want to integrate them into
structures or into devices, you need more than just the 3-D printers
and the laser cutters. And so although things like hammers
and screwdrivers are relatively simple they're really important.
You got to be able to assemble these objects into something more than
just the sum of the pieces.
>> Here in the School of Architecture, we have a variety of
maker space kind of tools.
And they're pretty particular to what we do as architects, right, so
we for instance run a furniture studio every semester. So we have a variety
of woodworking tools, traditional hand tools,
but also more modern tools like we have a CNC router that you can use
for doing wood working. We have 3-D scanners,
we have laser cutters, we have a CNC knife cutting machine,
we have three 3-D printers.
So we have a pretty wide variety of tools, but you know each of those
tools had to fit in to the way that we structure our curriculum
and the things that we care about.
>> Here in the scenic studio
we're using primarily traditional tools.
We're still using the same wrenches and hammers here
that we were using twenty years ago.
We're blessed here with one of the best scenic artists in the country,
in my opinion, and she is so giving with all of her time
to teach the students like how to paint, and draw by hand.
How to paint scenery by hand.
>> One of the most interesting things about the way the Maker Movement
is emerging on campus is that you know each of the sort of traditional disciplines
in the university has their own driving forces behind what kind of maker spaces
they're developing.
>> Several times today I've gone to other students and asked you know,
where's this one tool? You know, how do you upload this to this machine?
I mean it's very important. Team work's very important in engineering
I mean you can't do something like this by yourself, you've got to
have communication skills, you've got to talk to other people.
That's really what it's all about.
>> By collaborating across silos and across departments, we enable
you know mechanical engineering students who want to do a project in wood
to come use our facilities and our students who want to do a project
in metal or in glass or something that they have in Fine Arts
or something that they have in Engineering
you know we have those communication channels opening up to allow
those students to take that project and go to another facility,
work with the faculty and the staff and the students in those areas,
gather some of that expertise and then bring it back home
along with a completed project.
>> In a previous CAD class, I had heard about the 3-D printer on campus before
but I hadn't gotten involved with the Maker Movement as of yet.
But when I was doing this case study, my friend who was the editor in chief
of Spark Magazine, which is a fashion magazine on campus,
had a student contributor who was an engineering student.
As designers, we sketch things and we have a lot of loose intentions
when we draw things because it's more about the overall look and the feeling
that we want, but once I had to have a discussion with an engineering student
and he literally asked me what tangent angle do you want on the heel?
I didn't know what to respond to that so that was really cool to
get out a caliper and look at rulers and really understand how
a shoe works from a designer perspective.
>> I think there are tremendous opportunities going into the future for
for example art students to work with engineering students,
and do some really creative things. Architecture students
with art and engineering, and all those areas are tremendous opportunities
in the future.
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>> The Maker Movement for me is just, it's kind of an umbrella,
or a reason for people to get together and work on something collaboratively.
And so I think for a university to be embracing the Maker Movement
like UT is, is a really smart decision for the future of
what we think a university education is.
>> The first ideas about 3-D printing came out of a research lab peer
from the Cockrell School. It's called selective laser centering
and it's a way of making metal parts using a laser.
This has now morphed into many other types of 3-D printing.
That would not have been possible without some of the work
that is done here in the Cockrell school.
>> The Maker Movement is game changer for the University of Texas because
it fundamentally addresses how the university needs to move into
the 21st century.
>> What I do hope to see is that our students graduate, and
because of the experience they've had here including this creative,
experiential learning in the maker type activities, will go on and do great things
once they graduate. And then we hear 10 years from now,
20 years from now an alumnus who's been very successful, prominent
says "ah it was that experience that allowed me to explore and to create"
and led them on a path of success. That's what we're really here for.
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