Innovation is our future, and it becomes easier when the latest tools are at your fingertips. Kent State University’s new Design Innovation Hub, which opened late last year, gathers trailblazing technology in one spot to help students create prototypes and spark innovation.
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Bob Christy
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Bob Christy
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Bob Christy
The idea for the hub came about after faculty, including J.R. Campbell, then director of the School of Fashion, came together to discuss makerspaces on campus about 10 years ago. They recognized that the campus was full of makerspaces that students knew nothing about. So they wanted to create a place that could serve as a community space for makers. Campbell became executive director of the Design Innovation Initiative to accomplish that goal. Today, the Design Innovation Hub resides in the former art building that’s been renovated into a spot with a variety of makerspace environments focused on collaboration to instill innovative thinking and creating.
“It’s really more about the process of applying human-centric design and design thinking to solve problems that are big on collaborative teams,” Campbell says.
The three-story building is built into a hilly grade that allows all floors access to the ground level. Inside, the floors are divided by labs holding state-of-the-art devices that target different areas of creating by allowing students from all majors, along with faculty and staff, to make prototypes, brainstorm and work on projects. The hub also has studio and auditorium classrooms, as well as a dining hall.
Here are six spaces in the hub that help students innovate through technology and techniques.
Design Innovation Reactor
Collaboration is the heart of innovation, and the reactor serves as the main space for it within the building. It’s composed of a main studio, which is equipped with technology like 3D printers and is surrounded by several rooms known as shops. Those hold more specific equipment, such as laser cutters and a PolyJet Printer, which is a UV curable 3D printer that can print in full color and on clear materials.
Campbell explains the reactor is a spot to bring in new forms of technology that weren’t already on campus, like the water jet cutter, which can cut through human-made materials and has been used to form foam cutouts for tools.
“The pump creates 60,000 pounds per square inch of pressure,” Campbell says. “It is able to cut through 4 inches thick of steel.”
Blank Lab
Immersive technology is on the rise, and the Blank Lab is a space where students can create immersive experiences. The lab is surrounded by white walls and 10 projectors that can be calibrated to project a continuous immersive image in 360 degrees. The lab features projectors, a blackout screen, a green screen, and virtual reality and augmented reality technology.
“It’s pretty rare to have both projection-based, cave kind of environment and also be able to do AR and VR stuff with headsets,” Campbell says. “We want people to come in … and maybe reconfigure it to both develop something new and show something new.”
The hub is adding a sound system to the lab so that students can experiment with equipment like 3D ambisonic microphones that capture 360-degree audio.
Designer Residence and Shared Faculty Studio
Despite being mostly for students, the hub can also be used to expand the horizons of others within the university. “That also involves changing the minds of faculty, administration and everyone else,” Campbell says.
Faculty or researchers can apply to use the Designer Residence and Shared Faculty Studio for cross-disciplinary collaborative projects that investigate different methods of learning and creating. The studio was most recently used for the Trauma Room Redesign Project led by health care, design and architecture faculty members, in which they built a full-scale cardboard mockup of a redesigned trauma room.
LaunchNet
Since 2012, LaunchNet has helped students start businesses at Kent State as a part of a network that’s located at four other Ohio universities, and now its office is in the hub. Its team is available for drop-in support and advice on starting a business, marketing a product and legal services. It holds workshops for students that focus on having an entrepreneurial mindset. Success stories include Kent State alumna Yayra Tamakloe, who earned a Venture Fund award for her herbal tea infusions idea.
“They provide all of the business-level support and thinking,” Campbell says. “We provide the conceptual and design and engineering-level support.”
Marty Erbaugh I(3) Lab
This spring, look for the opening of the Marty Erbaugh I(3) Lab, which is a combined project of the teams behind the hub and LaunchNet. I(3) Lab provides an accelerator space that will host student applicants for a maximum of nine weeks to access mini-grant funding and assistance from LaunchNet in helping them market products and start businesses. The space is set to feature coworking and private offices.
“It’s the first time ever that students have been able to have a space on campus where they could work on their business ideas or prototyping ideas to bring them closer to market,” Campbell says.
Design Innovation Teaching Kitchen
The hub’s team wanted to include a teaching kitchen to remind students that making is more than creation by technology.
“Kitchens were the first makerspace,” Campbell says.
The space is a fully equipped kitchen with commercial stoves that serves as a classroom for culinary classes, such as food and wine pairings, and a spot for students working on new recipes or products, team building and culinary business concepts.
The kitchen and these other spaces create a welcoming hub for new ideas.
“Makerspaces are places where we hang out, where we communicate, where we tinker and play and there’s not a whole lot of direction or consequence,” Campbell says. “But in that process, it creates community, it creates awareness and it also sparks innovation in a pretty major way.”
