Thingspace

Audience

• Teachers College faculty, staff, students, and external audiences
• Faculty: Need a space to run classes
• Students
  • Need a space to be inspired and do their work
  • Fear of getting distracted, not being able to complete their projects
  • Need a space to be able to come to outside of class and get assistance
• Staff and external audiences need to be able to use it and potentially have workshops
• All: Easily find tools, have a clearly organized space; help people become familiar and comfortable with technology; help people see technology as something that can be integrated into non-technological art media

 

Purpose/Goal

Create an environment conducive to supporting new technologies that can be merged (and used independently of) physical 3-dimensional art and design.

 

Challenges & Successes

Working with ambiguous roles and a wide variety of stakeholders with shifting levels of investment. Garnering useful feedback; no definitive deadlines.

Successfully brought in and implemented and created a variety of training resources for various technologies and how they merged with other material. Created technology workflows for working with technology (e.g. use illustrator, then convert). Successfully supported students. Successfully designed studio organization based on media and function, and collaborated with a wide variety of staff to implement furniture/renovations. Successfully ran workshops and helped in promotion.

 

Technologies Used

Digital Fabrication Technologies and software that supported them (Illustrator, Photoshop), Electronics, Asana for project management, WordPress for Blogsite 

 

Role

I was a key figure in founding the space. I collaborated with a wide range of individuals (facilities, other faculty, students, etc.) in order to provide a space that was usable by all and activated everyone’s curiosity around digital fabrication.