The seven-story, 50,000 square feet facility is the culmination of a vision that began in 2008 with a small group of faculty to bust open the innovation door on campus. The vision of the Sears think[box] is to operate an open space that enables users of all disciplines, all ages, all organizations to come together as a community to ideate, create, make, tinker, and build.
YSU recognized the need to create an additive manufacturing lab that would complement the America Makes Innovation Factory. CIAM was launched by the College of STEM in January 2014.
The resulting ICE (Innovation, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurship) structure and Makerspace opened for business in April 2014. The future success of the project depends on continued support and collaboration of the three founding partners. Ongoing operations of the Makerspace area are funded by 4-VA.
The Maker Spaces in the Department of Engineering at James Madison University (JMU) are distributed throughout the four floors of the Health and Human Services building on JMU’s East Campus. Maker Spaces support engineering courses and project work, and consequently, the equipment and spaces are generally shared spaces that can be leveraged by engineering courses, labs, project work, and research activities.
FABWorks is a MakerSpace located at University of California Irvine in the Calit2 building, Room 2302. It was built in order to expand experiential learning opportunities for students and the local community for hands on rapid prototyping and advanced manufacturing tools and processes.