How Cornell Tech Built an Inclusive Maker Space in New York City

Over the last 10 years, colleges and universities across the country have begun adding maker spaces to their physical offerings. These high-tech shops give students, faculty, and sometimes community members access to the tools, cutting-edge equipment, and advice they need to turn new visions of products and other objects into reality. Building such a space might sound like a straightforward task, but as Niti Parikh, founding director of Cornell Tech’s MakerLAB can tell you, installing the machines is only the beginning.

Located on a 12-acre campus on Roosevelt Island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, Cornell Tech was founded 11 years ago as part of an effort by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City of New York to bring more engineering expertise to New York.

A joint project between Cornell University and Technion, an institution often described as the MIT of Israel, Cornell Tech was intended to be a new graduate campus for Cornell, with a special focus on fostering innovation and encouraging what campus marketers call “creative collisions.” 

That’s where Parikh came in. An architect with prior experience in maker spaces in San Francisco, she was tapped to build MakerLAB, a 1,200-sf space for sophisticated equipment that would be open to anyone at Cornell Tech who wants to design and fabricate physical objects.

When Parikh joined Cornell Tech in 2016, the MakerLAB was just getting underway. “I had two machines when I walked into this lab—a laser-cutting machine and an FDM 3D printer—then we slowly grew,” she says. 

Phase 0

In the beginning, Parikh’s agenda was simple. “I said, Phase 0 is going to be about facilities, access, and visibility.” Not only access for Cornell Tech, but New York City. “New York City is amazingly embedded with entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, and innovators. I felt like our students, who are coming for a one-year, very rigorous master’s program, should actually have this space be a pool for them to meet people,” recalls Parikh.

She also reached out internally to introduce Cornell Tech to the philosophy and culture behind the maker movement. “I started partnering, and we did a make-a-thon for three days, which allowed me to meet with lots of people who were doing cool stuff. I also started inviting speakers who have been in this world. I wanted to expose our leadership to the idea that making is not just about the tools, it’s also about the culture.”

As for the tools, Parikh took her time in deciding what equipment to buy and how to organize the space. “You cannot predict right away what research groups are going to join or what faculty they are going to hire,” she explains. 

First came a laser-cutting machine, which was useful for printmaking, then later electronics, a CNC (computer numerical control) mill for precision cutting of various materials, and additional 3D printers, mostly in response to student demand, says Parikh.

The printers included an industrial sewing machine and a machine that could create extremely thin, flexible 3D print pads, a combination that enabled one student team to design a smart exercise mat that uses computer-vision algorithms to recognize how your body is moving in three-dimensional space, which was later acquired by Peloton, the exercise company. 

As the lab grew, Parikh found that there was a lot of interest in robotics and digital fabrication, and she designed part of the facility to accommodate the needs of faculty and students working in those areas. “They need this kind of facility to allow their students to build prototypes quickly and share their knowledge to advance them,” she says. 

The emerging focus on robotics notwithstanding, Parikh kept interdisciplinary uses in mind, which she says is common for university-affiliated maker spaces. “Every university is investing in a space where the tools are not just for mechanical engineering or architecture or industrial design. They are for humanities and the arts and sciences and engineering together, and that has changed the whole landscape of how we design these spaces,” she says. 

This is definitely true at Cornell Tech’s MakerLAB. Of the 500 students on campus, 120 or so have access to the MakerLAB in any given semester, including students from seven masters programs and doctoral students.

Phase 1

After two years, the lab moved out of temporary space in a Google building in Manhattan to one floor of the Tata Innovation Center on the Roosevelt Island campus.

Students are encouraged to treat the MakerLAB as their own space. “We tell them, here, this semester, we are all going to use this lab for a lot of creative stuff. Let’s learn from each other. Ask questions,” says Parikh. 

This also means taking responsibility for the facility. “This is not an undergraduate campus, so we don’t have lab monitors. I onboard students by having them go through a safety orientation on the very first day. Once they’ve swiped their key card, they are in charge of taking care of this space,” says Parikh.

Over time, the students have created “a very good peer-to-peer learning culture where they are coming in, they know where things are, they are putting things back, and they are only using the tools on which they have prior training or have knowledge of,” according to Parikh. 

“Once they have safety training, the students are given key card access, so they can come in any time of day, seven days a week. If they are certified to use a laser machine, they can do so. And then my lab managers and I are there—we have our office hours—if they need some project help,” says Parikh.

To accelerate training, the walls above different workstations include signage with oversized laser-cut QR codes linking to online resources on how to use the tools, including student-filmed training videos posted on YouTube. 

So far, the approach has worked well. “We haven’t had any critical situations where we had to stop the lab or take away the students’ access,” says Parikh.

As an added benefit, self-management has kept lab overhead low: Parikh only recently added an administrative assistant and a lab manager to the staff.

On campus, participation in the MakerLAB is encouraged by a mandatory interdisciplinary class that all master’s students must take in both their first and last semesters of the two-year program. “You will see companies come out of the class in which one of the co-founders will be an MBA and one will be an engineer,” she says.

To make the lab even more diverse, Parikh reached out beyond Cornell Tech, as well. “From the beginning, I also emphasized New York City as a large community outside campus, because there are so many amazing talents and artists in the city itself,” she says. “I started a collective, which I call Craft@Large, which allows any organization in New York City to propose a project which requires access to digital fabrication tools.” 

Phase 2

The first five years on Roosevelt Island have gone well enough that the lab will soon be relocated to a 2,700-sf facility, more than twice the size of its current home. For Parikh, the start of Phase 2 is an indication that the university is coming to see the space as an essential educational resource. 

At the top of her wish list are more tools. “We still have a pretty basic line of equipment. In the new lab, which we are creating, we will have a robotic arm, we will have a waterjet machine which can cut metal—and that’s going to require a certain budget for a lot of safety and health issues and also for regular maintenance—and we will have to add to the staff.” 

There will also be a separate woodshop, which will make it easier to keep sawdust out of the rest of the lab. Parikh is also planning on adding gallery and exhibition space. 

Three Takeaways

Parikh offers the following advice for institutions considering their own maker spaces:

• Know your customers. “You have to do your stakeholder mapping. You have to know the community you are going to serve, because its needs will be distinct.”
   
• Be choosy about tools. “Think about the outcome that you are looking for and then think about the tools. I can buy the fanciest 3D printer available and put an array on it because I just had the funding, but how am I going to use it and who is going to run the programming around it?”
   
• Remember to hire a lab manager. Don’t forget to budget for someone who knows how to use the machine. “I’ve seen many programs which got the funding and bought the machine, but then didn’t use the machine in 10 years, and now it’s old and one teacher used it. You almost need the same amount of money to manage the machine as to buy the machine.”

By Bennett Voyles