Contact CU Independent Guest Writer Nick Burnaugh at justice.burnaugh@gmail.com
The Makers Collective of ATLAS Institute is a CU-Boulder student group that allows participants to experience technology in a hands-on, creative environment. Meeting once a week in the ATLAS BTU Lab, which stands for Blow Things Up, visitors have the chance to invent, collaborate with others, and experience technology in an environment that welcomes innovation.
Members of the Boulder community had the opportunity to witness some of the club’s latest gadgets and projects during the Makers Collective open house held on Sept. 24 at the BTU Lab.
Alicia Gibb is the faculty adviser for the Makers Collective. She’s helped start similar organizations in the past, such as the NYC Resistor in Brooklyn. Gibb refers to these places as hacker spaces. As she explained, a hacker space is where people can “learn, make and share things.”
In past years, Gibb said, shop classes have been removed from schools for safety reasons, and so a lot of students lost the chance to work with their hands. But hacker spaces have been popping up more frequently, she said, and they allow people to work together and collaborate.
A hacker, Gibb explained, is someone who designs something for an unintended use. Hacker spaces allow people to take technology apart and reinvent it for a new purpose. Zack Jacobson-Weaver, who has been with the Makers Collective for one year, specializes in digital fabrication and sculpture . Currently, he is working on a device that will teach people about 3D printers. His project began by taking an out-of-use 3D printer and stripping it to its bare parts. He then rebuilt it in a way that shows people the inner-workings of how a 3D printer operates. Essentially, as he explained, he took a complex machine meant as a consumer product and turned it into a teaching device.
As technology becomes cheaper, Jacobson-Weaver explained, it allows outsiders to experience it in places like the BTU Lab. University politics can be exclusive, he said, and can restrict people’s access to resources. Hacker spaces, he explained, help peel back the veil between consumers and the technology they use.
Slaton Spangler is the vice president and communicator for the Makers Collective, and since he can remember, he’s always enjoyed tinkering. But nowadays, Spangler said, a lot of technology is kept out of the public’s reach, and at times, tinkering is discouraged. By allowing people to manipulate and reinvent technology, he said, it gives them “ownership” of something they made with their own hands.
Like Spangler, Jacobson-Weaver also has an addiction to building things. He said that his love for inventing stems from a “self-sufficiency mentality,” which stresses the importance of making things for yourself.
Collaboration is an essential aspect of places like the BTU Lab, Jacobson-Weaver said. “As you’re learning in a space like this,” he said, “you’re always exchanging with people who don’t know what you know… [collaboration] is simply a byproduct of learning in an environment like this.”
