Become a Certified Maker

We are excited to launch a set of workshops on 3d printing, modeling and scanning. Take all four and become a certified maker, along with a Digital Badge that you can show on your profile on social media or LinkedIn!! 1. 3D printing 2. Basic 3D Design 3. Advanced 3D Design 4. 3D Scanning

These workshops have been designed to help you understand the fundamentals and get you hands-on practice in each session. The workshops start with the basics of 3D printing and go on to more advanced methods of 3D modeling and end with a workshop on 3D scanning. All courses must be completed in order to be certified by the MakerLab. We guarantee you an evening of fun and learning. Hurry! Each workshop is limited to 10 students!

Find out more and sign up for the Workshops now.

Stay tuned for updates on new workshops by subscribing to our blog feed, or just get our posts via email. You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on twitter to stay updated. You can contact us at UIMakerLab@illinois.edu

MakerLab + Weddings = Happiness

One of our departmental office administrators (Sarah) is getting married next month. To celebration this wonderful event, we recently held a wedding shower for her and her fiancee (Jared). Their primary wedding color is lilac and are trying to use this color in all of their wedding-related materials. Unfortunately, they had difficulty finding a lilac colored cake topper. So the MakerLab came to their rescue. Our intrepid Gurus simply downloaded a wedding cake topper (designed by cerberus333) from Thingiverse, loaded some lilac filament in one of our 3D printers and, viola, a lilac cake topper appeared in less than two hours. A little bit of custom design work by our Guru, Winnie, helped round out the offering, with a 3d rendering of a note card. Sarah was delighted. Makerlab + Wedding = Happiness!

If you are celebrating a wedding, anniversary, birthday or other special occasion, please stop by our Lab to learn how we can help make this event even more special or just drop us a line at UIMakerLab AT Illinois DOT edu.

Making Things Class Conducts Concept Testing

Last week's class was kicked off with a visit from Dr. Vishal Sachdev, the Director of the MakerLab. Dr. Sachdev gave our class some tips for making and provided an overview of his Digital Makings class, which is taught in our Lab on Tuesdays.

After Dr. Sachdev's visit, we got down to work. The goal of the class was to conduct concept testing and begin to do some market research by asking people their opinions about our product concepts. Our group, DigiCraft, began printing our first prototype. After two failed attempts we were able to print a very nicely finished version. We will then use this prototype to help demonstrate our product idea and collect some heplful feedback from potential customers. We will then use this feedback to further refine our prototype. This is when the real fun begins!

By: Digicraft

Find out more about whats happening at the Making Things Class 2015. Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our blog feed, or just get our posts via email(subscribe on the right navigation). You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on twitter to stay updated.

National Medal of Science : Designed and Printed at the Lab

Carl Richard Woese was a great microbiologist and a biophysicist. He held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. This great man passed away on December 30, 2012. Today we commemorate this great man and his accomplishments. Nicholas Vasi, Director of Communications, Institute for Genomic Biology came to us at the MakerLab with the idea of 3D printing two medals that held significance in the life of Carl R Woese. Woese received the National medal of Science in 2000 and the Trustees’ Distinguished Service Medallion 2009. Mr. Vasi thought it would be great to recreate these medals and place them in the memorial exhibit within the Institute for Genomic Biology.

Printing these medals was never going to be an easy task. However we deal with such challenges on a daily basis at the MakerLab. Our Gurus took this challenge head on and began the design of the two medals.

Every interesting project comes with numerous unforeseen difficulties. Our Guru, Ryan Hurley who was initially assigned to this project injured his foot so Kevin Lohan and Brian Busch two of our other guru's had to step in midway and take charge of the order and they did an amazing job.

Kevin Lohan(Left) and Brian Busch(right)

“I learned a lot of time management during the course of this project. It was dropped on me at the last second and I had to pick up where somebody else had left off.” said Brian.

There were some design issues faced during this project as well. The lettering of the book in the Trustees’ Distinguished Service Medallion was too small and had to be redone. Kevin Lohan was the guru in charge of the National Medal of Science. He faced some trouble during this project also.

“The free form modeling was a little bit challenging since the person in the medal is an organic shape and doing that is much more difficult with a 3D modeler as compared to doing geometric patterns”, said Kevin.

However, Kevin has had some experience in dealing with such situations and was able to handle this difficulty with ease. The project was a success and was completed in time. Mr. Nicholas Vasi was impressed with the results and is looking forward to working with us again.You can hear Mr. Nicholas Vasi talk about his experience below.

http://youtu.be/YHvj2FSykPU

Join the Maker movement at Illinois. Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our blog feed, or just get our posts via email (subscribe by entering your email on the right). You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on twitter to stay updated. Interested in our services? Just drop us a note at UIMakerLab@illinois.edu.

Digital Making Class Learns Design Thinking

Guest Post by : Olzhas Ayazbayev, a student in the #DigitalMaking Course On the February 3rd.we had two guest speakers from the Design for America team. They showed us an interesting way of solving problems through the human-centered design process. We hope to use this approach in several other projects during this class. The specific topic of our discussion that week was distracted driving.  The framework that we used in class helped us understand the problem first and then create a suitable solution for that problem.

Understand

Identify

In this stage we tried to identify the problem by brainstorming different ideas why people get destructed while driving. The several reasons for destructive driving were texting to friends, talking on the phone, switching the radio and etc.

Immerse

Here we surveyed each member of our group to better understand why each of us gets destructed while driving. This helped each student to put himself in the position of the destructive driver and think about the reasons why he or she does that. This was also useful for the interviewers to collect some data and feedback from others before framing the problem.

Reframe

This was a very important stage of the whole process, because here we had to reframe all our thoughts and ideas to one single problem. We used the  “How can we?” prompt to help us phrase the problem so it would be specific and clear.

Create

Ideate

Before building a prototype we ideated how the reframed problem could be solved. We then shared our thoughts with team members and combined our ideas to come up with one single solution.

Build

This was the most exciting stage. Here we actually got to use given resources to build a prototype. Every team had different prototypes depending on the problem they identified and corresponding solution that they created.

Test

Due to time and other constraints, the testing stage was not executed. But someone tried.....

Overall the process was very interesting and fun, especially because it involved several icebreaker games that helped us think more creatively and outside of our comfort zone.

Huge thanks to the DFA team that made this class so exciting!!!

Stay up to date with the reflections from students on our class blog at http://publish.illinois.edu/digitalmaking/ or follow our hasgtag #DigitalMaking on twitter.

Making Mr. Jaws at the MakerLab

This video introduces the Illinois MakerLab and demonstrates the workflow for getting something printed at the lab. The example used in the demo is called Mr. Jaws, which is a test print that is used to test a new Replicator 2 printer.This video was made by Ms. Hyewon Cho , a Phd Student in Marketing, who is also doing research in the MakerLab, to study the impact of 3D printing on consumer behavior.