MOUNT VERNON — At one point, Foster Hall turned into craft time as community leaders put their minds toward what Knox Labs would look like 10 years into the future.
At one table, a string of balloons were looped over a hanging light with crafted symbols representing different areas of Knox County that would benefit from a makerspace. At another table, a group donned glasses made out of pipe cleaners as a symbol of seeing into the future. Yet another group created awards that would be handed out in 2028 for significant projects that improved life in the county.
Roughly 100 people attended the Knox Labs Appreciative Inquiry Summit at Ariel Arena Wednesday, a day-long event held to flesh out ideas for a makerspace in Knox County. A makerspace is a community workplace where people can gather to collaborate, plan, and create projects by sharing space and equipment.
Makerspaces are popping up all over the world. Already there are 6,000 makerspaces worldwide with one of the most well-known ones, the Idea Foundry, being located in Columbus. The CEO of the Columbus-based makerspace, Dr. Alex Bandar, served as the day’s keynote speaker. Cleveland also features six makerspaces and Case Western Reserve University is home to the think[box].
The Board of Knox Labs secured a federal grant to hire MIT-affiliated Fab Foundation to help launch a makerspace in Knox County.
“Fab Foundation is a leader internationally in putting digital fabrication laboratories in communities worldwide,” said Sonya Pryor-Jones, Chief Implementation Officer with the Fab Foundation and a Kenyon College alumna. “In this particular partnership, we’re supporting Knox Labs and the Knox County community as they design and dream for their own makerspace and becoming a part of the maker movement. Today is really about bringing people together from the community, from all walks of life … so that we can capture the ideas that they have.”
The Knox Labs board will take those ideas and use them as part of the design for the makerspace.
Pryor-Jones credited the work and collaboration done to create Ariel Foundation Park as a great stepping stone into designing a makerspace. “I think they are standing on the shoulders of that kind of work, so now (they) need to figure out how to do that again around makerspace,” Pryor-Jones said.
“Digital fabrication is all about taking the physical world and the digital world and bringing them together,” Pryor-Jones explained. She noted that tools like CNC machines, laser cutters, vinyl cutters, and 3-D printers weren’t accessible to everyday people. “The Fab Lab movement has been all about how do you democratize digital fabrication, making tools of technology that are usually for sciences and large corporations accessible to everyday people. They can take the ideas and the inventions they have, whether it’s for learning STEM or inventing a new business, and putting them into practice.”
It may sound like you need a larger-than-life idea to take part in a makerspace, but Pryor-Jones said an invention can be as small and unique as creating a new tool for a crocheting project. The idea, she said, is for communities – even rural ones like Mount Vernon and Knox County – to connect with one another all over the world and around the idea of invention.
Lori Wilkes’ group saw an abundance of opportunities for a variety of groups once a makerspace came to fruition locally.
“It’s a creative ecosystem,” Wilkes said as she gestured to her group’s balloon sculpture. Little handcrafted items tied to the balloons stood for different factions within the county, from a bracelet to represent jewelry-making to a dollar bill as a representative of tourism. “These are different groups in the community that could participate with the project.”
Wilkes, who works at the Knox Community Hospital, believed they already had people in the community that could take advantage of a makerspace. “This is may be the mechanism to bring it all together,” she said of the summit. “We have a lot of creative people in our county and this might be a way to get them to stay here … I just think this could be a real blessing to kids, elderly, the whole community.”
“I’m literally thrilled at how large a group we got and how diverse the crowd is,” said Jeff Harris, Knox Labs secretary. “We’ve got everything from businesses to non-profits, we’ve got school superintendents, colleges – everybody is here that you would want, who could make an impact to get this thing up off the ground. To me this is a total success today.
“It’s really where the world is going,” he added. “When you look at new ideas, new innovation concepts, they’re coming out of these kind of grassroots organizations … I think we need to do some of that here.”
Harris believed the community needed assets that could allow for someone to learn how to use a ShopBot CNC system or a 3-D printer. As an added benefit, these projects could grow entrepreneurship within the county, which could possibly lead to more jobs.
Knox Labs is currently working with Mount Vernon Nazarene University for a downtown space within the college’s Engineering building, which is scheduled to open this fall. In the meantime, the Knox Labs board will have to lay out plans for the makerspace, purchase equipment, and determine staffing or volunteers.
More information about Knox Labs can be found at knoxlabs.org. Information on the Columbus Idea Foundry and The Fab Foundation can be found at ideafoundry.com and fabfoundation.org.
