Workshops

This workshop is a survey of digital fabrication processes through the lens of making a custom skateboard deck. We use SK8CAD to create the mold for a custom deck which is cut from foam on a CNC router. Maple veneers are stacked up with waterproof wood glue and placed on the mold in a vacuum bag while the glue cures. The formed deck is placed back on the CNC router where the truck holes are drilled using the mold as a jig. The deck is then bolted to a 3d printed fixture through the truck holes which is screwed to the spoil board on the CNC for the profile of the deck to be cut.

Who did that to my bike!? In fall of 2016 some unexpected visitors arrived at Artisans Asylum. They explained that the were from M-Labs a makerspace in Vilnius, Lithuania and they were on their way home from Burning Man. They had just started a project called Art Bike Invasion where they had just shipped a container full of abandoned bikes from Burning Man back to Lithuania where they planned to teach kids how to fix, modify, and upgrade these bikes. They found SCUL and immediately invited us to join them.

I joined the staff of the Product Design Lab in the mechanical engineering department as part of the shop staff. I assisted students with design feedback and ran the Shopbot CNC router to cut student designs. I also worked to provide fabrication support to students using the woodshop, electronics and other hand tools.

I worked on these classes:

2.00b! Toy Design Spiring 2023

2.009! Product Design Process Fall 2023

2.00 Intro To Design Spring 2024

In January 2020, Artisan’s Asylum once again became a creative hub for international collaboration, hosting a group of bright, curious students from South Korea for a two-week deep dive into design thinking and robotics. The students were a mix of high school and university level and a few had some lego robotics experience but the group as a whole was largely non-technical. Our primary goal was to teach the concept of design thinking to encourage brainstorming and creative problem solving. The technical aspect of the workshop was a mix of hands on fabrication and robotics programming. We used the recently released Sphereo RVR robotics platform which can be programmed using the block coding MakeCode platform which enabled students with no programming experience to get up to speed quickly. There was a goal to utilize the serial control and Raspberry Pi integration to add some advanced sensing to the platform but that turned out to be too ambitious to add on top of everything else we accomplished.

In January 2019, I had the opportunity to assist with a truly inspiring international workshop at Artisan’s Asylum, a vibrant makerspace in Somerville, MA. A group of ~20 students from South Korea, ranging from middle school to university level, traveled to Boston for two weeks of hands-on learning in design thinking and robotics.

The challenge? Build a prototype robot that could prepare a meal.

With little to no prior experience in programming, electronics, or fabrication, the students dove into the deep end. The challenge was intentionally open ended to encourage the students to build their brainstorming capabilities. We introduced the concept of Design Thinking with the key steps of Ideate, Refine, Prototype, and Test.

Fab Academy is a course from the Fab Foundation which spun out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. This class is a survey of digital fabrication and design. The course is taught in a distributed model where each student signs up with a node or Fab Lab local to them. Each week for 20 weeks a new topic is introduced in a global online lecture and then students meet their local instructors for hands on practice in their lab. The first subject in the course is website development. Each student has 1 week to customize a portfolio they will use for the rest of the class and each subsequent week they must document their work on their site.