Victoria Rind and her amazing wearables

It is exam period, and impending finals have packed every nook and cranny of the D. H. Hill Jr. Library with stressed-out students—except in the Makerspace. Amid the low din of a laser cutter and 3D printers, Wilson Wooten smiles down upon a three-inch, white Quidditch tower. It’s part of a present that the Applied Mathematics sophomore is printing for a Harry Potter-obsessed friend, and it looks impossibly perfect.

Wooten is one of over 10,000 students, faculty, and staff who have visited the hands-on Makerspace in the D. H. Hill Jr. Library since it opened on June 16 last year. Building on the success of the Hunt Library’s maker program, the D. H. Hill Jr. Makerspace offers an open, do-it-yourself learning environment where all NC State students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to experiment and learn new hardware and software skills.

An Open-Access Model

In just one semester, the D. H. Hill Jr. Makerspace has become a springboard for student entrepreneurship and innovative faculty curriculum development. Its easy-access model has sparked creative experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration from the moment its glass doors were opened, adjacent to the library’s first-floor lobby.

“At the Hill Makerspace, we’ve tried to lower the barriers to access as much as possible in terms of cost, software availability, and ease of use and learning,” says Adam Rogers, Emerging Technology Services Librarian. “We really let students get their hands on the tools and machines. There’s sort of a do-it-yourself route here at Hill, and a more mediated, high-tech service over at the Hunt Library Makerspace.”

While the Hunt Makerspace, located on the library’s fourth floor, offers 3D printing and technology lending services, the Hill Makerspace turns the operation of an expanded set of equipment, tools, and resources over to users. This direct access is expressed architecturally through the Hill space’s two glass walls and its prominent location near the Ask Us center and Learning Commons on Hill’s bustling first floor.

Featuring MakerBot and LulzBot 3D printers; Arduino, Galileo, and Raspberry Pi electronics prototyping platforms; Bernina sewing machines; an Epilog laser cutter; and an electronics workstation with a Hakko soldering iron, students aren’t just printing out files. They’re refining models for product pitches, mashing up different technologies, seeding startup companies, and launching careers in emergent fields.

The space also offers a “tinkering table” for drop-in users, including hands-on making tools like LittleBits, 3Doodlers, LEGOS, and MaKey MaKeys. These interactive experiences help stir users’ creative thinking and get them making on their first visit.

"It's exactly why I came to NC State"

Victoria Rind exemplifies the potent knack that Makers have for crossing the humanities and sciences. A junior studying Textile Engineering, Rind has gone from messing around with wearable technology to an accelerated career path in a matter of months. But she’s matter-of-fact about it—e-textiles are precisely what she came to NC State to do.

 Seeking to incorporate her interest in fashion into her electrical engineering studies, Rind transferred from SUNY New Paltz to NC State’s College of Textiles. When she tried to get a job running the 3D printer at the Hunt Makerspace, she found they were already fully staffed. But the Libraries wondered if she would be interested in helping set up a new, hands-on makerspace at Hill? Rind jumped at that chance.

 “When I started working at the Hill Library Makerspace, SPARKcon sent in a bunch of wearable microcontrollers,” she recalls. “I was told to play around with them, figure out how they worked, maybe write a manual for them. So I started working on a light-up dress. It was the first piece that got me into e-textiles.”

 The light-up necklace dress that Rind made in the Hill Makerspace was featured on the Adafruit Industries website, and led her to the Nano-EXtended Textiles (NEXT) Research Group in the College of Textiles, where she’s conducting undergraduate research in biometric clothing. Another NEXT e-textiles team was one of only five research teams from across the university to receive support from the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund this fiscal year.

 “The Hill Library Makerspace gave me that opportunity to put in the time to learn how to do basic e-textiles, and from there I’ve moved on to bigger things,” she says, such as pitching prototypes to the Victoria’s Secret Sport innovations group and blogging for IBM’s Big Data and Analytics Hub. Rind is also currently collaborating with fashion designer and NCSU alum Jazsalyn McNeil on a bioluminescent clothing line that visibly responds to a wearer’s heart rate. Their e-textile fashions have been nominated to be featured in the Hall of Fame at Charleston Fashion Week in March 2016.

 “It’s really cool,” she notes, “and it’s exactly why I came to NC State. It all goes back to learning the basics in the Makerspace. From there, I gained confidence and taught myself how to use lots of other things like a Bluetooth chip and so on.

 “I think everyone should get into e-textiles because no one’s in it right now. Literally anything you do, people are interested in it.”