Checking out Chattanooga’s growing maker community
Everybody loves a good maker story. From Jobs and Wozniak piecing together the first Apple computer in a garage, to the friend with a side hustle or startup making soap or roasting coffee or printing t-shirts, to Doc Brown turning a DeLorean into the world’s first functioning time machine—inventors, tinkerers, and do-it-yourselfers (both fact and fiction) never seem to lose their fascination.
In the last 15 years or so, people who like to make things that never existed before started pooling their resources and setting up maker spaces. In the last few years, the number of places like this and people using them have exploded. According to one estimate, the number of maker spaces increased from 100 to 1400 worldwide from 2006 to 2016.
These days, the maker scene is a wild spaghetti bowl of places, programs, and people loosely gathered under the umbrella of “making.” Boundaries between types of spaces and what people do in them are fuzzy. Is this place a maker space or a FabLab or a hacker space? Is that maker over there creating art or learning to weld? That thing coming out of the 3-D printer…is that somebody playing or is it a product for sale?
What’s in a Maker Space?
Two of Chattanooga’s best-known maker spaces are the Public Library’s 4th Floor and Chatt*Lab.
The Public Library converted its fourth floor from storage to a maker space in 2013, adding a variety of tools available to anyone with a library card and creating a heavily used community space. The current lineup of tools includes 3-D printers, a laser cutter, CNC router, virtual reality booth, sewing lab, power tools, a soldering bench, photography studio, and more. The latest maker-type addition, completed in 2018, is a 1,000-square-foot state-of-the-art recording studio with industry-standard equipment, located on the second floor.
Chatt*Lab is a private, non-profit maker space located on the North Shore that feels like a garage workshop grown to massive proportions. Occupying 3,000 square feet in the Hamilton County Business Development Center, it’s packed floor to ceiling with tools, storage for member projects, and leftover or donated materials waiting for someone to find a use for them. Members pay $60 a month for 24/7 access, and the organization is a 501(c)3 run by a volunteer board who are all heavy users of the space.
“The tools we have vary from week to week,” said board member Jeff Johnson. “Our most popular tools currently are the laser cutter, 3-D printers, and vinyl cutter. After that, the wood shop. We’re always trying to expand our tool kit to increase the diversity of capabilities.”
Chatt*Lab received a $10,000 grant from the Lyndhurst Foundation, and has just completed raising a 50 percent match. Possible tool purchases include a computer-guided plasma cutter, which uses a jet of hot plasma to cut steel, and a computer-guided embroidery machine.
According to Lee Walker, a founding member and current board member, if a member is interested in a machine the space does not currently own, “We’ll put it to a vote, and if we have the money, we’ll buy it. If the person who is interested in something wants to teach people how to use the machine, it’s even more likely to happen. A maker space isn’t just a place with tools. Mostly, it’s a community of people and their skills, who can teach other people.”
“We attract all types—inventors, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, dreamers, makers, and those that like to be around other makers,” said Johnson. According to Walker, several members use Chatt*Lab resources to support businesses, including an “escape room” whose props were all made there and a couple who build furniture they sell on an Etsy store.
Walker is a perfect example of fuzzy boundaries in maker-land. He’s a software engineer who owns his own business, a 3-D printing enthusiast, and a passionate board game player. He’s made 3-D printed upgrades for his own board game pieces for years. Since so many people ask him to print game pieces for them, he’s thinking about creating a business to do that.
Chattanooga Does 3-D Printing
And speaking of 3D printing…nothing shows how one thing leads to another in the maker-verse more than the story of how 3-D printing was seeded in Chattanooga.
Starting in 2012, Mike Bradshaw, former executive director of CO.LAB, pulled together people, places, and resources to explore his hunch that 3-D printing could become a significant source of new companies and jobs. It was a moment when the maker movement, the cultivation of high-growth potential startups, and 3-D printing were three waves crashing onto the beach of public awareness at the same time.
Bradshaw connected with Tim Youngblood and Jason Brown, two founders of Chatt*Lab, which was smaller at the time, and Andrew Rogers, a programmer and jack-of-all-tech, to create a Maker Day in 2013 showcasing 3-D printing in the Library’s 4th Floor.
“Forty-plus makers came from around the country to demonstrate different types of 3-D printers and other forms of making,” said Bradshaw. “That was more makers than I thought we were going to have people in attendance.”
He estimates 2,000 people got very hands-on exposure 3-D printing in various forms, including a printer from UTC that uses a laser to fuse metal, rather than the more familiar process of melting plastic. Oak Ridge National Lab sent finished metal engine parts for the F-18 fighter jet that were 3-D printed by a similar process.
That Maker Day served as a proof of concept that helped Bradshaw convince CO.LAB’s board to dedicate the next Gig Tank startup accelerator to 3-D printing companies, the first accelerator in the world to do so, according to 3-D printing consultant Terry Wohlers. With modest funding from the Benwood Foundation, Bradshaw brought 3-D printing wunderkind Graham Bredemeyer to Chattanooga to advise companies in that Gig Tank and lead two more maker events.
All that led to four innovative 3-D printing startups in Chattanooga. Shoe maker Feetz has since moved to California. Still going strong here are Branch Technologies, using 3-D printers on robotic arms to print houses and architectural components; 3D OPS, which uses medical scans to create 3-D models of organs for surgical planning; and Collider, Graham Bredemeyer’s company that integrates 3-D printing and traditional manufacturing materials that can’t be 3-D printed.
More FabLabs Than…Anywhere?
FabLab is a trademarked name for a maker space that includes a core set of tools and supporting software. MIT’s Media Lab coined the term around 2005 and now the Fab Foundation certifies whether a particular maker space meets the requirements. Courtesy of a certain German automotive company you might have heard of, Chattanooga has more certified FabLabs than any other city in the galaxy. Boston, where MIT is located, has two.
Michael Stone, with the Public Education Foundation, directs a network of 16 Volkswagen eLabs located in Hamilton County middle and high schools. Every eLab offers students access to the same suite of digital and hands-on fabrication tools that are found in about 1,200 community FabLabs around the world, including automated manufacturing equipment, 3-D printers, robotics, microcomputers, and digital design tools. Students are guided by a curriculum developed in Chattanooga and teachers trained to make the best use of the tools.
The origins of the eLab program go back to Chattanooga’s STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) School, which was founded in 2012 and added a digital fabrication lab in 2014. MIT and the Fab Foundation visited in 2017 and identified the STEM school as a model for how digital fabrication could and should be integrated into education. The same year, Volkswagen announced a $1 million grant to expand the STEM school’s digital fabrication curriculum into 16 schools. Eight opened in August 2017, and another eight in 2018.
“What’s unique about the VW eLabs program is that it makes digital fabrication human centric. Technology is actually incidental to learning, which is different from the stated goal of most maker organizations,” said Stone. “Access to technology empowers students to discover their interests and strengths in way not otherwise possible. We shift the model from designing products to developing people capable of solving problems.”
But Wait, There’s More
Some of the Chattanooga maker stories that couldn’t make it into this brief overview include cosplay—the best of those comics and sci fi get-ups are hand-made, sometimes including 3-D printed props—and art bikes, which demand artisan metal working. There’s more education-oriented making at TechTown, with summer and after-school programs in making everything from robots to films, and the Baylor School, offering students what seems to be the only biology-based making in Chattanooga. Engineering programs at Chatt State and UTC include digital fabrication. Down the road, Berry College in Rome, Georgia offers a maker-based degree in creative technologies, and Shaw Carpets in Dalton has an internal maker space for employees.
To explore making in Chattanooga, the best place to start would be one of Chatt*Lab’s open build sessions, every Tuesday at 7 p.m.