Just ran across this.
Pages 68-70 talk about Dale’s visits in 2011 and 2013, and mentions a few members by name.
Link? Abstract? PDF if please
Darn they arent shown in the preview
I wonder if this would be the third reference we need for a Wikipecia article
Click View all on the yellow band.
Rather meandering prose.
DALLAS MAKERSPACE
Located in an industrial park, Dallas Makerspace developed out of a
robotics hobbyist club that met monthly. My guide when I visited was
Doug Paradis. With his son, he had been involved in the original robotics
club. An engineer who had retired in 2009 from Texas Instruments, Doug
developed the Tiny Wanderer robotics kit for use in schools. I visited
the makerspace for the second time in 2013, and since my first visit in
2011, they had doubled the amount of space they had, and memberships
had grown from 80 to 240.I visited on a weekday night, and the place was busy. As I looked
down the main corridor, I saw multiple rooms on each side, one for
electronics, one for crafts, and another with couches for hanging out.
Another room was a lab for synthetic biology projects: Doug showed
me how they were growing a tissue culture to make a very thin fabric
that one of the makers would use to sew into a dress. At the end of the
hall we opened the door to a roughly finished space: part woodworking
room, part auto garage. The CNC machines on one side of the room
were silent, as were the welders on the other side. In the middle was a
black motorcycle with a whiteboard propped against it that named its
owner and his project: “Honda ST1100 Electric Conversion.” Taped to
the board was an electrical diagram.Doug introduced me to Michael Eber, one of the most active and
enthusiastic members. Eber suffers from medical conditions that cause
discoloration of his skin and swelling, yet his spirit is undiminished.
Some of his projects, like an interface for Arduino to your cell phone,
are commercial. Others are more whimsical, like the vending machine
he acquired and connected to the Internet so that members could order
components for projects online and get them immediately through the
vending machine. Instead of candy and chips, the Dallas Makerspace’s
vending machine serves breadboards, Arduinos, packs of small electronic
components, wire, and batteries.Michael wasn’t the only person tinkering with vending machines.
Another member had designed a game interface for a vending machine.
It had a video display and four colorful buttons. When I approached
the machine, it prompted me to take a quiz. IfI answered the question
right, it asked if I wanted to cash out or continue to play. The more
questions you get right, the better the prize you get–unless you get it
wrong, and then you lose whatever you gained.Doug Paradis also introduced me to a nineteen-year-old woman
named Kirsten who was there with her parents. After high school, Kirsten
turned pro as a tennis player but had lost her ranking after a car accident.
During her recovery, she checked out the makerspace, and now she was
learning to make robots, with Doug as her mentor. Someone remarked
that Kirsten was the best solderer in the place, and she smiled bashfully
I learned that she had been hired to work part-time building custom
circuit boards for another member’s commercial project.It is always great to see a makerspace with women members. I asked
several women I met there what makerspaces could do to welcome
women and increase their involvement in making. One was Stacy Devino,
an engineer who, with her husband, created a modular programmable
LED display system called LEDgoes, which successfully raised more
than $17,000 on Kickstarter. Stacy said what she wished for was not
that anybody do anything for women specifically, but that people would
just stop turning women away from engineering. She personally had the
experience of counselors, family friends, and professors offer advice that
she might prefer something other than engineering. They assumed that
they knew what was best for her because she was a woman, Stacy said
even though they hardly knew her.Three makerspaces opened their doors in 2013 and 2014 with the
mission to serve only women or those who identify as female: Seattle
Attic in Seattle; Flux in Portland, Oregon; and Double Union in San
Francisco.Georgia Guthrie, executive director of The Hickory in Philadelphia,
established a goal of inclusivity when she came on. The Hickory has
reached a fifty-fifty gender balance among volunteers and organizers.
Georgia wrote in an article on the Make: website that men might assume
that the lack of women in makerspaces is due to a lack of interest among
women in making things, but that’s not right. Many women have had
negative experiences around technology, with people underestimating
their ability or even being dismissive. “When a woman walks through
your door,” she asks, “is the general assumption that she must be a begin-
ner or that she’s tagging along with someone else? Such assumptions
may be based in real experiences, but to address this problem, lay these
experiences aside.Georgia believes that each space should evaluate the biases in the
organization and among its members, and then decide what it can do to
make everyone feel at ease and completely able to explore any activities
they like. It’s clear that we need to work on making makerspaces more
welcoming and inclusive, especially to women, people of color, and
people with disabilities.
Above excerpt from:
- Dougherty, D. (2016). Free to make: How the maker movement is changing our schools, our jobs, and our minds. North Atlantic Books.
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This is beyond rad. 0_0
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