Labs at Makespace: report on Aug meetup and invite for 21 Sep

[Jenny Molloy]

Hi All

tl;dr: if you would like to be involved in further activities for planning labs at Makespace, review what we discussed at the last meetup for bio, electronics and outreach activities, join the Labs google group, RSVP for the next hybrid Meetup @ 18:30 on Wed 21 Sep and sign up for a team (bio, electronics, fabrication, outreach).

At the second meeting to build a plan for Labs at Makespace in August, we broke out into groups to discuss biology capabilities, advanced electronics fabrication and outreach activities.

You can see the full notes here.

People are excited about a clean space for bringing together lots of different types of technology and benefiting from the diverse community at Makespace in terms of everything from IoT, AI, biomaterials, art and more.

In summary,:

1. Electronics and fabrication group: set out some goals for the lab and considered the type of equipment and trade-offs in quantity and quality that could: facilitate Proof-of-Concept work of individuals and small business, in volumes 1-10 (maybe up to 100); support product regulations pre-checks; bridge the gap between electronics and biology; take steps towards microfabrication and make outreach events possible.

2. Biology and imaging group: considered the types of biology projects that would run, discussed the capabilities that might be useful to transfer from  Biomakespace and which wouldn't; listed the equipment and space requirements needed.

3. Outreach group: made plans for outreach boxes in the Makespace classroom with bio-  and imaging related activities that could be picked up by members and families. We brainstormed ideas for fun events for the Makespace community and the public and already have a draft calendar and commitment to run a monthly talk on engineering with biology from Oct 2022 and a workshop on how to measure muscle and brain activity with electrodes in early 2023.

We now need to put some detailed requirements and budgets together to take to the Makespace community and board, even though the availability of space is still a moving target. 

The next (hybrid) meeting for this is on Wed 21 Sep and you can RSVP now on Meetup. This will be followed by food from Aromi and the Biomaker Meetup so we hope some of you can stay!

You can also join the labs google group (sign up here) and we are still looking for people who are willing to coordinate activities one of these areas (sign up here) and someone willing to co-pilot the next few planning meetings. Get in touch if this could be you!

Thanks to Katia Smith-Litiere and Richard Hopper for facilitating this next meeting - we hope many of you can make it!

Jenny