The Joy Agenda

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We’ve been working on (until recently mostly just thinking about) a project called The Joy Agenda, which conceptually is an alternate reality layer at the college – something like a combination of geocaching, faerie doors, escape rooms, and Meow Wolf – all motivated by providing opportunities for joy and wonder. We’re getting close to installing the first element of the project, a Free Little Art Gallery, housed in an old newspaper dispenser.

FLAG in a newspaper dispenser

The gallery will be housed in the Library, and folks from the Artist Guild (the college’s arts club), the Equity Center, and our own Innovation Center student community are making and sharing beautiful and tiny – 3″ x 3″ (x 3″ for sculptural works) pieces of art. The plan is to hang a show for a week, and then those works move to the top of the gallery to be taken home by interested art patrons, and another show hung. Rinse and repeat.

FLAG

We’ll launch v1.0 as soon as we get enough works for 2 or 3 shows, after which hopefully the project will chug along under its own momentum. Feel free to send some (3″x3″x3″) art, any media, to The Innovation Center, 10 College Parkway, Folsom CA 95630. Phase 2 will see the addition of cyphers and clues and puzzles, leading to fake books in the stacks containing hidden artifacts, tokens for a vending machine filled with arts supplies, and other things we have yet to think of!

DIY Vacuum Former

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DIY channels on YouTube are a source of inspiration, and lately I’ve been watching one in which the maker creates figures and environments inspired by Sylvanian Families.

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In one episode, the maker uses a DIY vacuum former (made from a plastic jar) to create little bottles. We have a commercial thermoformer in the lab – Sophie most recently used food safe plastic to create candy molds for our holiday party, and made this lovely Nova (our space bunny mascot) lollipop.

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I thought it would be fun to prototype a little DIY version, and so set out designing it, starting with a simple box (using Makercase, certainly in the top 10 of most useful makerspace software) to which I added holes for the vacuum hose and the top surface. A couple of iterations later, all glued and clamped up.

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Though I think it would have worked fine, I decided that the grid of vacuum holes needed to be smaller, so I altered the file in Illustrator and re-cut that piece with the laser cutter.

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I hooked up the vaccum and gave it a try, sandwiching plastic between various frames and heating it with a heat gun with promising but not perfect results. What ended up working best was just heating the plastic in place with a heat gun while the vacuum was running.

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Here’s a closeup shot of the resulting mold, which is a perfectly acceptable result for a quick protoype!

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Mobile Modular Peace Pole Prototyping

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The Innovation Center is collaborating with folks from the Equity Center, the PEAC²E (Peer Engagement for Achievement, Culture, Connection and Excellence) program, and Diane Carlson (Sociology) on a Peace Pole project. One of the many ideas that has emerged from the collaboration is to create a modular mobile “peace pole platform,” essentially a design specification and a set of affordances that will enable members of the college community – disciplines, student groups, classes, anybody – to create art and interactive content for display.

Peace Pole Platform Prototype Planning

Spent the day yesterday in the Innovation Center (I love having the lab to myself and locking in to the rapid prototyping flow), crafting a 1/4 scale prototype of the mobile modular peace pole platform prototype (M²P⁴?), and in particular exploring how the segments will connect. Nothing especially revolutionary about the basic design; each segment is a simple 12″ x 24″ rectangular box (our big laser has a cutting area of 18″ x 32″), and the pole itself will be three of these bolted together in a concealed way.

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The big circle in the middle of each end piece (Illustrator file above) is the access port, and so I think I’ll be able to reach in and connect them together with bolts. There are other ways of creating access panels from the outside – I’m thinking magnetic – that I might explore just to make the connection process simpler.

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Three of these stacked will be about 6′, and provide 12 possible faces for art and expressions of peace.

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Version 1.0 will be “static” – crawl, walk, run – but the long-term goal is to have the base of the unit equipped with power, sound, and a Raspberry Pi or similar, such that folks have a set of givens they can design for. Think lights and sensors and haptics and interactivity. Two peace poles communicating at a distance? A receipt printer that provides folks with a prayer for peace they can take with them? Lots of possibilities!

Physicalizing Poetry: Creative Writing in a College Makerspace

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A couple of weeks ago, the Innovation Center hosted Lisa Danner (English) and her Creative Writing class for two class sessions about physicalizing poetry.

We started by introducing students to these really fun Metaphor Dice…

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They rolled the dice, individually and in pairs, and then wrote and shared poems based on their dice rolls.

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Our overall goal was to get students to think about ways they might give physical form to their writing, so I asked Sophie and Sydney (two of our outstanding Makerspace Facilitators) to create some physical poem prototypes to help guide student thinking. They used the laser cutter and the embroidery machine and 3D printers and came up with these fantastic models.

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3D Fabric Printing

We talked about the many forms that poems (and words more generally) can take, from calligrams…

Shiite Calligraphy symbolising Ali as Tiger of GodIshvara7 at English Wikipedia [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

…to the inspiring Viewfinding poetry and sculpture installation by artist Sarah Cook.

Students returned a week later to start physicalizing their own poems, some using glue guns and materials from our low-resolution prototyping cart, and others working with the laser cutter.

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It might be less obvious (to some folks, anyhow) about how English classes might use makerspace resources, but we think we’ve come up with an engaging instructional sequence, and hope to tweak and adapt and scale it up, exposing lots of different kinds of students to maker-centered learning.

Our Very Own Hops

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Following our first successful public pour, we have committed to a quarterly brew, to be served at a series of “Art of Wine” events for Harris Center for the Arts members. The first of these will be in late August, so we gathered in the Innovation Center to brew another batch of our Kveik Pale Ale, and a Dry Irish Stout. As it happens, our hops were ready for harvest, so we started the day up in the bines, gathering flowers from our Cascade and Willamette plants.

Hops Harvester

We weighed and measured these, reserving some to be added “wet” to the pale ale, and the rest we put in the dehydrator to use in some future brew. 564 grams in total.

Cascade of Cascade

The water built – we start with DI water, and Max adds salts and things to create the ideal water for the particular recipe – we set about brewing. Brewing beer is a lot of waiting around, and a lot of cleaning and sanitizing. We got a chance to try out the new keg washer, which works a treat.

Keg Washer

We were joined this brew day by Nicole and John, both students and Innovation Center staff.

Also Sparging

Each of them had sparging duties.

Sparge!

Here are the hops in their natural habitat.

Hoppin'

Of all the gear we’ve been able to acquire, the counterflow chiller – the black coil below, just left of the Robobrew, which is used to bring the hot wort down to pitching temperature – has done the most to improve efficiency, and to reduce the amount of water required as part of the brewing process. An absolutely essential tool!

Counter Flow Chiller

With the beer into the fermenters, and safely housed in the Spider Shed, and with all the brewing gear clean and stowed, Max and Nicole took samples of our prior batch of lavender kombucha and beer…

Beer in Glass

after which Max entombed them in glass.

Sealed

We’ll do this for each of our brews, and put them in a yet-to-be-designed UV-resistant display case.

More photos from the day…

Off Flavors

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Another FermSci lab, this time about off flavors.

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As before, students started out in the lab…

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…and ended up in the Innovation Center for triangle test tasting, trying to identify off flavors…

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…in spiked brews.

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Alice In The Makerspace

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FLC’s Falcon’s Eye Theatre is staging a spring production of Alice in Wonderland, and the Innovation Center decided to host a party to support the show.

Alice in the Makerspace

Staff planned a variety of activities, including blackout poetry…

Blackout Poetry

flamingo croquet with 3D printed wickets…

Flamingo Croquet

teacup painting…

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VR…

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and figure drawing…

Figure Drawing

Toward the end of the party, we walked down to the Harris Center for a preview of some of the visual effects and technical theater magic that will be part of the show, which opens in a couple of weeks.

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The show promises to be a technical tour-de-force, with shadow puppets, real-time motion capture, facial recognition, live compositing, and other visually stunning techniques. The Falcon’s Eye Theatre always puts on a wonderfully creative production, and this one looks to be pushing the envelope. Can’t wait for the show!

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A few more photos from the event…

Mushroom Planting Pot v1.0

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Today we got a look at the first prototypes of our mycelium-based 4″ planting pot project. Here’s how they looked, still in the forms.

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The “good” one – the one where the 3D printed PLA positive didn’t deform during the vacuum forming process – is really solid and feels done.

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The second one didn’t want to release from the form, which was not surprising, given how much deformation occurred during thermoformer’s heating cycle, so I had to cut it free from the pot, and use few paper clips to keep the top section attached to the more substantial base.

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Into the dehydrator at 100 degrees Fahrenheit for about three hours, and we’ll see how they feel after that.

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For this iteration, we used oat hay as the substrate, into which we mixed rye berries inoculated with King Oyster mushroom spawn. Since we set up v1, we’ve received a food processor, in order that we might more finely chop up the substrate, and we also have some other substrates in the shop, including rice hulls and various wood chips. V2 next!

Pizza Box Pinball, Mycelium, Tourists, Palentine’s Day, and Beer

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Sometimes it seems like there are too many things happening in the Innovation Center to keep track of. This week felt like that. Here’s a recap:

Students in our new ECE course Making for Educators started working on their cardboard pinball machines, which they’ll finish up in our next class session.

Pizza Box Pinball Day 1

Max (student and amateur mycologist) harvested and cooked some pink oyster mushrooms, and pasteurized and inoculated some oat straw, packing it into our first two 4″ pot prototypes, which we made using a 3D printer and our vacuum former.

Mycelium Roundup

Some snazzy new stainless steel fermenting vessels arrived, and Max Mahoney (Chemistry professor and makerspace champion) assembled one in preparation for another brewing day as part of our fermentation science efforts.

Fermenter

Our staff hosted a Palentine’s Day Crafternoon event.

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Finally, visitors from both College of Alameda FabLab and Lichen K-8 came out to tour our space and talk about making…

Lichen School Visitors

A busy week, and the semester is just getting rolling.

Fermentation Science aka Beer Tasting in the Makerspace

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Toward the end of last semester – after lengthy and vigorous and unflinching hacking of red tape – we offered the first workshop – Beer Science: Measuring Beer Bitterness – as part of our ongoing Fermentation Science efforts. We started the day in the Chemistry lab, where Max Mahoney (Chemistry professor and makerspace faculty champion) described the chemistry of beer, and led students through a procedure for measuring beer bitterness.

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Here’s how Max describes it:

The goal of this workshop was to expose students to a quantitative and qualitative analysis of beer bitterness. The chemistry of hops and bittering compounds was presented along with a discussion of the chemical procedures involved in this analysis. The following procedure was used to quantitatively analyze beer bitterness. Three beers were selected containing different levels of the hop-derived bittering agents. Students sonicated the beer to expel carbon dioxide, performed a liquid-liquid extraction of the hop acids with iso-octane, and measured the UV and visible absorption spectrum for their sample. We used the visible absorption spectra to help classify the style of beer. The UV absorption was used to quantify the concentration of hop acids and thus the bitterness of the beer (measured in IBUs).

Chemistry students of all levels were able to learn advanced analytical methods used in the beverage industry to analyze beer bitterness. General and organic chemistry lab techniques were utilized including UV-Vis spectroscopy, usage of micropipettes, and liquid-liquid extraction of organic compounds.

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The Chemistry lab portion completed, we went over to the Innovation Center for some blind taste tests. Students sampled various beers, and then used PollEverywhere to report the perceived bitterness of the sample, the results of which we compared to the lab-derived values.

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The event was a terrific success, and students were engaged and enthusiastic. We’ve got additional interdisciplinary FermSci workshops and projects planned for this semester, including more beer chemistry, sauerkraut making, curriculum development, and a partnership with a local employer for integrating IOT technology into kombucha fermentation.