Orange Coast College Makerspace Spurs Innovation on Campus by Reflecting Local Industry and Student Interest
“One of our biggest successes is embracing maker culture across campus and creating an innovative workspace where students can experiment freely without fear of pressure or failure. Seeing the excitement of students when they realize they get to use all this equipment is awesome.” — Garrett Hill, OCC MAKERSPXCE Coordinator
Orange County, California, is world renowned for being the epicenter of the action sports industry, with a long list of globally recognized companies, from Hobie surfboards to Vans shoes, calling the area home. What does that have to do with community college makerspaces? In the case of Costa Mesa’s Orange Coast College (OCC), everything. While hearing the hum of 3D printers may be expected in most academic makerspaces, having the opportunity to shape your own custom surfboard is virtually unheard of elsewhere.
The CCC Maker Initiative required that participating colleges go through a series of steps to help map their particular ecosystems to ensure that the makerspace they developed would be one their larger community actually needed and wanted. As a result, OCC’s MAKESPXCE is an apt reflection of he surrounding area’s ecosystem, with tie-ins to the action sports and aeronautic industries, custom built to serve the unique interests of the students and staff.
OCC, which has been serving the community for over 70 years, is one of the largest community colleges in the country, with a student body of over 25,000, roughly four times the national average. Previous to the CCC Maker grant, the school had digital fabrication offerings in the Technology Center, home to a variety of disciplines, including architecture, robotics, welding, manufacturing technology, and aviation. Like many institutions, though, access to these tools was restricted to students enrolled in relevant classes. The OCC MAKERSPXCE team, led by tenured architecture professor Steve Fuchs, wanted to expand that access to all students, along with a campus-wide infusion of maker culture and hands-on learning.
Fuchs, a lifelong maker, left a graduate teaching position in Chicago in large part because the institution didn’t want to create a makerspace and embrace maker culture, something he has long been passionate about. Raised in an entrepreneurial family where everyone created in the workshop together, the value of hands-on learning and working collaboratively had been ingrained in him. Along his career trajectory, he spent years attending community college, worked in fabrication shops and alongside prominent architects and designers, and earned his master’s from SCI-Arc, a progressive architecture school known for balancing making and meaning. Project-based learning repeatedly emerged as the north star. At OCC, Fuchs was originally hired as a studio professor and digital fabrication expert in the fields of architecture and design.
Fuchs shares, “There’s a vibrant community, enabled by maker culture, that gets to the heart of what I’ve been passionate about for years. My childhood experience as a military kid was all about our families sharing resources and making do with what we had, including making and fixing things together. Cultivating a diverse and empathetic network is half of the value of an education.”
In 2016, Lisa Knuppel was hired as OCC’s dean of Career Services and director of CTE grant development, and when the CCC Maker grant became available, she and Fuchs collaborated on the application. Fuchs and others at OCC had already been doing some interesting and related things — such as bringing robotics into design and not just into advanced manufacturing — with the impetus of celebrating design more on campus and creating a space for designers to make physical objects, in support of the curriculum. For the last seven years at OCC, Fuchs has challenged his students and the broader campus with a recurring question: Should design belong to any one department when it’s so prevalent across many disciplines? The grant helped the OCC team reinforce and expand upon the school’s existing offerings, including gaining traction in creating an open lab for design experimentation.
Cultural Mindset Shift
Along the journey, the makerspace team realized that bringing their vision to life wasn’t just a matter of creating a physical space with certain tools, accessible to all students — it was a matter of shifting the cultural mindset prevalent at OCC. Knuppel notes, “It’s been a lot of work, but I can tell you that there’s been so much gain.”
The OCC problem statement for the CCC Maker grant succinctly summarizes the issues they faced: “One of Orange Coast College’s (OCC) main institutional problems is that we are not currently capitalizing on bringing high technology to underserved populations in our region, especially in relation to increasing the adoption of design and maker culture on our campus. Overall, we’re focused on career technical education (CTE) and transferring to institutions of higher education, but we are not targeting opportunities to increase integration with our local economy and regional expertise. While we do have a job and internship center, OCC’s capacity to increase internships and account for skills-based learning needs to be supported by a larger ecosystem, so we can offer more opportunities for student success and meet the demands of California’s 21st century economy.”
The team laid a solid foundation by mapping their extended ecosystem (shown here) and through preliminary outreach to potential industry partners in the area, as well as to departmental partners within their institution. Initially, when Fuchs and Knuppel began trying to drum up support from within, they were met with resistance that was perhaps based on not seeing the makerspace’s potential for spurring innovation across the entire school. Knuppel notes, “Transformation, especially when you’re dealing with something as big as campus culture, is not easy, but you only do it by doing it, pushing forward in a positive and inclusive way. We spent a lot of time on strategy: Who am I going to talk to,what language are we going to use, how am I going to put this information out there to overcome that resistance?”
Though the space is physically housed in the Technology Center, they’ve strived to persistently break down disciplinary silos and emphasize campus-wide inclusivity, quickly correcting anyone who erroneously refers to the space as an Architecture department offering. There still remains some confusion about and resistance to the makerspace’s openness on campus, but mindset shifts require time and persistence.
Student and Staff Advocates
As the space developed, those who experienced it, students and staff alike, have become its biggest advocates. The shift in how making and the makerspace were viewed happened organically and authentically from within. Trang Ly, the makerspace administrative assistant, shares, “One of our greatest successes has been reaching not only the students but the staff as well. Some of our staff are innately makers, but they don’t have a space to be able to explore that. The makerspace encourages staff, students, and faculty to all interact with each other and learn from each other.” Ly also does outreach to potential incoming students, and she says that showing them what the makerspace has to offer is a big sell. Being able to access digital fabrication tools at an affordable school increases the value of the community college.
One of the ways the MAKERSPXCE has become so successful and supported is by being receptive and responsive to the requests of departments and student clubs, as well as individual students. For instance, OCC has a thriving Fashion department, and the makerspace team reached out to see if there were any tools they’d be interested in having access to. The exchange led to the makerspace adding a garment printer as well as an embroidery machine, both of which have ended up being a huge draw for many students. Once in the space, folks have the opportunity to see what else it has to offer, expanding the reach. As well, there is curricular tie-in beyond the Fashion department. Fuchs teaches a branding class and notes the value of students being able to bring their brands to life using a maker’s mindset and OCC’s makerspace equipment.
Campus clubs, in particular, have been drawn to the space for access to its tools and have been instrumental in spreading the word and encouraging adoption of the space. Many clubs who previously had to go off campus to have promotional items like T-shirts created now come to the makerspace. Club members have also noted that the makerspace has allowed them to interact with a wide variety of people, introducing new perspectives and skill sets, leading to collaborations with other clubs, faculty, and industry partners.
Hill, as the makerspace coordinator, elaborated on the importance of responsiveness to student needs. He said they have a lot of students come in and say they want to learn a specific technology. Then, a week later, the makerspace will have a whole workshop set up where they provide students with the resources to learn what they want to learn in the way they want to do it. He shares, “That’s really changing a lot of student’s lives and how they look at going to school. They may have been thinking about a project for a year or two, and now they can see it come to fruition and tangibly hold it. Students just light up when they can do that.”
Knuppel adds, “As the word spreads about the makerspace, who can use it, and what you can do in it, I hear students come into the career center or my office and ask what classes they have to take to be able to use it. When they learn that anyone can use it, they get so excited.”
Redefining “Maker” and “Well-Educated”
The makerspace team has strived to intentionally add tools that celebrate all forms of making, even ones not typically associated with the word “maker,” in an effort toward broad appeal. For example, they’ve added video and audio equipment, as well as DJ equipment. Fuchs notes, “To tie into the curriculum, I even found a way to use the same control surfaces to make geometry systems where we can use the DJ knobs to control a design’s dimensions and other parameters in a live 3D modeling environment.”
Another example is the surfboard-shaping machine Fuchs worked hard to bring to campus. Essentially a sort of CNC mill for surfboards, the machine offers a unique opportunity for students to apply digital fabrication to an art form with deep roots in the immediate geographic region. From fiber arts to music production, the MAKERSPXCE is spurring innovation on campus, actively expanding not only what it means to be a maker, but what it means to be well-educated in the 21st century.
As the Dean of Career Services, Knuppel knows that in the 21st century job market, “It’s not just the degree that’s going to be of value, but your experience. It’s not always your degree that gets you the success, whether that’s employment by someone else or clients, if you’re freelance. The makerspace helps legitimize and solidify what you can do.” The makerspace is home to vibrant internship programs and opportunities to build portfolios regardless of discipline. The team is also working to fine-tune a badging system as a way for students to be able to highlight skill sets to potential employers.
Ly adds, “Being well-educated is when students are able to think through process: Find out what the problem is and go through the process of getting to an end product or solution. The makerspace sets them up for exploration. It has changed student license. The innovation we bring to campus has allowed them to do much more than what they thought they could.”
Campus-Wide Support
The team’s hard work, persistence, and vision has paid off with signs of campus-wide support and adoption. While at first they were reaching out to the campus Marketing department to share the cool happenings in the space in hopes of garnering coverage, now the Marketing department is seeking them out. But perhaps most encouraging is when the makerspace was highlighted as one of the most important initiatives of the college. Recent developments over the past year point to a makerspace expansion to twice its size in the near future, and OCC’s 2030 development plans call for brand new makerspace facilities to support all programs on campus.
Final Thoughts from the Field
Reflecting on the systemic shift that has taken place over the past two years, Knuppel observes, “When we first started talking about the makerspace, people looked at us like, ‘What does that have to do with me? That’s an architecture thing.’ But now we have participation and openness, and the college has come to embrace innovation as part of what OCC is about. It’s really paved the way for us to do some other innovative things with technology. People are open to hearing about innovative ways to use the space and do programming and open up new related programs, like augmented reality, in other divisions. It’s been really transformational.”
This article first appeared in the CCC Maker publication titled “Makerspace Impact: Implementation Strategies & Stories of Transformation” (2019).
