Made Realities: Makerspace

 Accolade East Concourse (across from CIBC Lobby)

Devon Elliott (University of Western Ontario), Kevin Kee (Brock University), Shaun Macpherson (University of Victoria), Jentery Sayers (University of Victoria) and William J. Turkel (University of Western Ontario) in collaboration with the Maker Lab in the Humanities, the Ontario Augmented Reality Network (OARN), and the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication.

Hello World

Exploring the intersections of and tensions between augmented reality and desktop fabrication, the space will be outfitted with various tools and equipment, including 3D printers, microcontrollers, Kinects, webcams, sensors, actuators, hand tools, and other resources for making. Participants will contribute their unique perspectives and expertise toward experimentation with desktop fabrication and augmented reality, broadly construed. The makerspace will provide the infrastructure and time for that creative collaboration, and it will bring together scholars, artists, and technologists who are already involved in maker communities. It will also be a place for others to experience maker culture and explore ways that they might apply maker-based approaches to their own work. Questions explored by the makerspace include: In what ways can augmented reality be materialized through fabrication techniques? What types of things do we want our realities to be augmented with? And how should our realities change, under what assumptions, and to what effects? In principle and design, the makerspace will be very similar to the hackathon format: provide a space with tools and resources to create toward a common theme, and the results are often productive and surprising.