Makerspaces

Yesterday afternoon, I listened to a presentation on makerspaces, dedicated rooms or facilities where students can gather to generate and share ideas, plan, and create products or services that both empower the students and improve their communities. Clearly there would be a wide range of possible creations, abstract or concrete, that might emerge from these spaces. The thought experiment we were asked to consider during this session was organized around Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which, if one recalls, is a staged progression of an individual’s met needs starting with the physiological requirements for survival and eventually achieving the self-actualization that may come when one feels that one has fulfilled a significant purpose in life. The last stage is usually reached after having passed through needs for security, belonging, and respect.

The thrust of our thought experiment was to design a makerspace engineered on Maslow’s model, with the proviso that we begin with the level of self-actualization and work our way backwards through these stages. What occurred to me first was the sustainability-centered research projects I assign my students to complete in my Composition II classes, which are both based on the students’ own needs and concerns and the idea of improving conditions for the community. And though the likelihood of my instigating the creation of a makerspace is remote, nevertheless, the idea excited me.

At the base of my Maslow-modeled makerspace pyramid, where the students’ survival needs get met, I would want collaborative spaces with large tables and ample whiteboards with a bountiful supply of markers and erasers. And because this makerspace would be used for students operating independently and those operating to fulfill specific course requirements, this latter group would also need the course’s parameters and their instructors’ expectation well established. At the next highest level, I believe the students’ security needs would be met in large part simply by being allowed, and encouraged, to investigate and pursue sustainability research and design based on their own passions and possibly even targeting their home communities.

Defining their communities and working for them, of course, would help elevate them to the next level, the need to belong, and additionally, they would be working with other students to conceive and develop their ideas. They would also likely be working within the larger university community that would include librarians and faculty with specific backgrounds in the students’ research. Having successfully completed their research and any ensuing practical results to follow from that, the students, both those working independently and those working for class grades, would feel personally fulfilled and would have reached Maslow’s level of self-actualization.

And then, finally, in the extended pyramid we were asked to consider yesterday, a level of transcendence defined by giving back to the community, those communities targeted by the students’ efforts would apply their results and create more reliably sustainable models for their abstract and concrete resources.