Almost a decade ago, insightful members of the Swarthmore College campus community began thinking about ways to engage new technologies and resources to deepen the learning experience inherent in the Swarthmore education experience. This collaboration, initiated by Arts and Engineering faculty and wholeheartedly supported across campus, has culminated in the formation of the Swarthmore Innovation Collaborative; a dedicated group of faculty and staff whom seek to recognize Swarthmore College’s MarkerSpace Ecosystem and foster greater interconnectedness amongst faculty, students and community interested in inventing, fixing and making things.
Over last year in particular, there has been great progress with a new Social Innovation Lab in the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, new funding for the Center for Innovation and Leadership and both staffing and space for a dedicated MakerSpace and Wood Shop in Beardsley Hall. Working across Departments and Programs we have started to create an infrastructure to better support and engage the campus around a range of Maker programming. This coordination and cooperation will allow us to build on existing infrastructure, replicate resources only where necessary and begin to build a road map to a MakerEcosystem unique to Swarthmore.
We are very excited to see how the new Swarthmore Innovation Collaborative can envision Swarthmore’s MarkerSpace Ecosystem and utilize the Beardsley MakerSpace as the nexus of our groundswell of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship for many decades to come.
