November 1, 2022
By Ian Sargent

When Craig Forest, Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, explains the beginning of what is now the Flowers Invention Studio, he may tell you that it started in 2009 with the purchase of a $70 thousand water jet cutter. While this was the first of many large industrial tools to find its home in the space, another story of Forest’s is braided into the studio’s origin and begins during his time as an undergraduate at the Woodruff School.

“I used to live in an apartment with a bunch of guys and I had a mattress on the floor of the dining room,” Forest recalls. “A bicycle was hanging right overhead, and every day I would have to climb on my mattress and bring the bike down from a hook; It was frustrating.”

Seeking a neater solution to a precarious and inconvenient storage problem, Forest prototyped a working model of a claw-shaped device with a quick-release mechanism. Capable of securely holding a bike’s front wheel, Forest’s design made hanging and removing the bike much easier. The original prototype was built as a part of his senior project at Georgia Tech and is mounted on his office wall along with three later versions.  

“I was very, very lucky that in my capstone design project we were given freedom to come up with whatever we wanted.” Forest said. The autonomy allowed Forest to take a hands-on approach to solving a real-world problem. Forest refined his invention while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ultimately commercialized it.  

When Forest returned to Georgia Tech in 2008, he began teaching some of the courses he had taken as a student, including the senior capstone course. Eager to emphasize an authentic, collaborative, and tactile approach to design, Forest gathered the support and resources needed to convert an unused mailroom on the second floor of the Manufacturing Related Disciplines Complex into the first iteration of The Flowers Invention Studio, which opened in March 2009.

The studio is a premier example of an academic ‘makerspace’—a workshop dedicated to a collaborative and accessible approach to design and fabrication of all kinds. Currently, the studio occupies almost seven thousand square feet of shop space and includes over 500 unique tools that span the gamut of manufacturing and design. There are sewing machines, laser cutters, and an 8-foot-high wall of 3D printers; there are tools for welding, milling, sanding, and sawing; there are couches for lounging, small tables for building and large tables for scrutineering things built; There’s a bike repair station, and a store for purchasing raw materials on site.

What is most remarkable about the Invention Studio is that the day-to-day management and maintenance is handled by a dedicated team of student volunteers. In the early days, students were supervised by faculty who volunteered their time to keep the studio open. In 2010, students took over the running of the studio and it has remained so ever since. This makes the Invention Studio the largest student-run makerspace in the nation. The student-run model for an academic makerspace is rare, but for Forest and others, it’s what makes the Invention Studio so successful.

“If you trust students, if you empower them, they’ll blow you away.” Forest said. “That’s what we did that was really special. We trusted them, we empowered them, and we made it safe.”

Any student or faculty member of Georgia Tech can utilize the makerspace without charge, and that includes access to all the tools and a select amount of materials. For newcomers, getting acquainted with the space is made easy in part to the assistance provided from Prototyping Instructors – or PIs. The PIs, identified by colored armbands, are student volunteers who are highly trained and eager to lend their support to any project someone might be working on.

Before becoming fully-fledged PIs, students must go through a rigorous curriculum, having to first complete a series of training tests to become ‘Provisional PIs (PPI). Full PIs enjoy unlimited access to the studio and are eligible for sponsored projects called Maker Grants, which allow the creation of any project or idea to be fully backed by Studio funds.

Teddy Koutsoftas is a junior industrial design major and a current PPI. He sees only benefits to having students staff the space.

“It’s not a liability,” he said. “You have to do a lot of training, and there’s a lot of tests.” Koutsoftas also believes that new students are more at ease venturing into a new space and seeing their peers ready to help them. “It’s not as intimidating,” Koutsoftas said. “If you came in and saw professors, you might not want to use all the tools available.”

Forest agrees and says that students need to see someone who looks like them when they enter the studio to feel completely at ease. “To be creative and to have invention ideas you need to be vulnerable, you have to have courage and trust,” he said.

Additionally, there are intangible benefits to working as a PI. Amit Jariwala, Director of Design and Innovation at the Woodruff School, believes the experience that student leaders gain will help them post-graduation. “They develop pro-social, teaching and communication skills that will help them become effective engineers in the future,” Jariwala said. “The studio is an incredible collaboration platform and I have witnessed numerous students forms groups and find their co-founders for their startups within the space.”

Jariwala is also the faculty advisor for the student organization responsible for running the Invention Studio. He provides stable leadership for an organization that graduates its entire staff every four to five years. He’s also responsible for developing key partnerships with outside companies, who provide support through sponsorship programs, workshops, and industry tours.

Collectively, almost 150,000 hours were spent in the Invention Studio last year, the equivalent of each of Tech’s 17,000 undergraduates at Tech spending a full day in the shop. As we move further into the post-pandemic timeline, that number is expected to rise.

Many use the studio as a physical extension of the classroom, but students will also find compelling secular reasons to make use of the hi-tech tools.

Luis Lascano is a third-year computer science major at Georgia Tech. Rather than spend $300 on a large art print for his living room, Lascano was helped by PIs to learn a new software program, allowing him to use a laser cutter to finely trace an image found on the internet onto a three-foot square wooden panel.

“I like minimalist art and I have a black and white color scheme in the room.” Lascano said. “I realized it would be easier to learn how to do this myself than find something online.” Lascano has also made use of the 3D printers, teaching himself how to design and 3D print his own vases.

Jariwala is hoping more faculty and staff will begin making use of the studio’s resources and contributing to its collaborative ethos. “We welcome anyone from the community who is humble and curious to learn and share,” Jariwala said. “I have met many staff members who use the studio for building their personal projects.”

Ultimately, however, students are the beating heart of the Invention Studio’s creative fervor. Their projects are as diverse as they are impressive, ranging from handmade guitars to commercial injection molders, from Halloween costumes to an award-winning sleep-monitoring mask that wakes you up after your REM cycle finishes.

“The students provide an urgency and agility to the work we do at the studio,” said Mason Hinckley. Hinckley is a third-year business major and the Director of Finance for The Invention Studio. He’s proud of the work he and his peers are able to accomplish given the limited amount of time and the scale of the operation. “We volunteer to run a commercial level machine shop, maintaining millions of dollars of equipment as a team because we each share a passion for ideation and creation, which is central to our culture,” he said.

The passion for learning and crafting embodies the principal ethic of the ‘maker’ movement, which was a natural progression of the DIY wave that first gathered momentum in the 50s. As America recovered from postwar labor and material shortages, more households found it necessary to tackle home projects themselves. The growing reach of television programs and print media fostered a family-focused and productive hobby that echoed the larger national push towards industrialization and technical mastery.

The internet further democratized access to knowledge previously only accessible through apprenticeships or a specialized education. Rapidly, Do It Yourself became Do It With Others; the immediacy of 21^st century communications allowed for instant peer feedback, encouraging more experimentation and repackaging failures as waypoints toward success.

Places like the Flowers Invention Studio have a rich history and numerous analogues across disciplines. Consider the renaissance workshop, which in their day were places of public interest, included on city tours and entertained common and noble visitors. Recent scholarship suggests that these workshops relied less on the individual originality of a master than they did on the collaboration of pupils and peers.

Modern examples of makerspaces include innovation programs like Google’s X Development, the Department of Defense’s DARPA program, or Bell Labs—out of which came the transistor, arguably the single most important development in consumer electronics history.

Each evolution of the makerspace carried within its genes the spirit of what scholars call the ‘serendipitous collision of ideas’, where makers are given a degree of autonomy in their research and practice in exchange for open collaboration.

While corporate and government makerspaces place a high value on innovation, production is still the primary indicator of success. In the educational environment, however, learning and experimentation take precedence, and the ‘product’ is the knowledge and skills gained by the makers.

“The peer-to-peer learning model in makerspaces instills a sense of community,” Jariwala says. “It leads to personality growth for both the volunteer instructor and the learner.”

There is also increasing hope that more academic makerspaces will eliminate barriers to fields of study and career prospects for underrepresented populations. In theory, an academic makerspace is highly equitable, as it implicitly accepts that no two students bring the same level of knowledge about fabrication or design, or that they will learn core manufacturing principles at the same rate. It expects different competencies and encourages a learner-driven strategy to problem solving.

Many universities are channeling resources into places like the Invention Studio, hoping this more tactile approach to pedagogy will lead to a paradigm shift in classroom learning and design curricula.

In early November, The Invention Studio will take the spotlight as it hosts the International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM) 2022 Conference. The symposium will see hundreds of industry professionals and higher education stakeholders gather to share makerspace knowledge and discuss best practices for running and improving maker facilities.

The Flowers Invention Studio will look to continue its growth and community impact in the immediate future, with plans to increase computer-aided engineering support and further incorporating innovative tools into its repertoire. Later in November, the studio will host an XR (Extended Reality) Night to demo virtual and augmented reality technologies. The event will be hosted by George W. Woodruff Chair Fellow Chris Saldana and will feature industry experts in extended and mixed reality.