Since 2016, the Be A Maker (BeAM) initiative at UNC-Chapel Hill has been working with other universities and organizations across North Carolina to build a network of maker-minded innovators. And although they’re always thinking ahead about emerging tools and technologies, this group of makers never predicted the network they were building would be called upon during a pandemic.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, BeAM’s four on-campus makerspaces typically offer students and faculty a way to design and make physical objects for education, research, entrepreneurship and recreation. That focus shifted at the advent of the coronavirus crisis, when the BeAM group quickly moved into mass-production mode, immediately activating its own resources – and its relationships with other makerspaces across the state – to work faster and more effectively to create personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers.
To help fill the shortage gap on face shields, BeAM has already designed and produced 25,000 durable, face shields for medical caregivers at UNC Health, with the ultimate goal of producing 40,000 or more to help hospitals and smaller facilities, including nursing homes and medical facilities. Two of the people working together on this effort – and in tandem with colleagues across the North Carolina maker network – are Kenny Langley, director of BeAM, and Glenn Walters, applied physical sciences professor, director of the BeAM Design Center and senior technical advisor for BeAM makerspaces.
“I had not thought of makerspace operations in terms of emergency response or community resilience, so now that’s something that all university makerspace systems and programs across the state are more aware of and that will play into different roles in the future,” says Langley. “Everyone is sharing resources, which is the way it should be. It’s been fantastic.”
Walters, who led the design of UNC-Chapel Hill’s face shield product, has worked for years with colleagues at more than 20 other universities, colleges and other organizations in North Carolina to create a community of makerspaces that participate in virtual meetups on a monthly-to-quarterly basis. Those virtual meetups started when a group of panelists – including Walters and colleagues from NC State, Davidson College and other schools – worked together on a panel at an educational technology conference hosted by Elon University. Now, group members also meet during in-person summer summit events, which have been hosted by Elon and UNC-Chapel Hill so far. The connections made among community members have paid dividends during the COVID-19 crisis, said Walters.
“If it wasn’t for the makerspace development efforts that we’ve been going through over the last few years and the connections we’ve made across the state, a lot of these efforts wouldn’t have been pulled off at all,” he added.
When leaders from UNC Health and UNC-Chapel Hill turned to BeAM with the idea of making PPE, Walters and Langley were able to quickly reach out to makerspace colleagues across the state to see what PPE initiatives others might be working on and to jumpstart collaborations.
“It started out as, ‘Hey, this PPE thing looks like it might be an issue. Has anybody else heard this?’ And then we decided with Duke to take the lead and say that we were going to have an online emergency call,” said Walters. “And that has turned into a weekly call.”