Abstract:

The academic affairs unit of a large state university system in the United States with 16 constituent institutions competitively recruits three faculty fellows annually to support the unit with research activities in announced topical areas. In this presentation, three faculty fellows selected to provide research support in the topical area of technology-enhanced teaching and learning report a selection of results from their study into learning spaces across the system thought to promote innovation. Innovation has rapidly emerged in higher education as a driving force that enables the academy to adapt by re-imagining pedagogy, structure, and outcomes to forge meaningful connections to industry, government, and society. Fellows consulted with academic affairs staff on emerging learning spaces across the system that they believed would support innovation and opted to focus on three types of spaces in the study: makerspaces and design studios, unique technology-enhanced classrooms, and campus entrepreneurship centers. The fellows conducted a detailed inventory of these spaces of interest across constituent institutions to build a contact list of 124 space leaders or managers in the prospective data pool. Before gathering data, the fellows conducted a literature review on innovation and identified a useful conceptual framework for broadly characterizing innovation in terms of six facets: aims, types, nature, stages, social context, and means. The fellows developed a survey and focus group protocol based in part on this framework to comprehensively document and characterize innovation emerging from analogous spaces. Space leads were contacted to participate in a survey and follow-up focus groups to document innovations emerging from their spaces (e.g., products, processes, startups) as well as to characterize the spaces themselves as a form of innovation in higher education. In this presentation, we focus on a sub-set of our results specific to makerspaces and design studios. Among completed surveys (n = 41 from 12 different institutions) were 15 makerspace and design studio leaders, and 7 of these leaders also participated in follow-up focus groups. Survey results were summarized descriptively, while focus group transcripts were open coded by the three faculty fellows with cross-case analysis employed to identify similar or unique characteristics of different campus spaces. Results from the study indicate makerspaces and design studios support divergent aims of innovation from the design of products to support for new processes and positions. Innovation in these spaces is mixed in nature from intentional to incidental, suggesting they afford considerable flexibility and may drive new models of instruction and learning for not only formalized classes but also for student desiring to take projects farther than limited class timelines and project deadlines may allow. The potentially transformative effects on the individual to develop a creative and entrepreneurial mindset was another commonly touted benefit. A better understanding of the varied aims and types of innovation supported by campus makerspaces and design studios will likely be of interest to any institutions still considering adopting one, while providing new ideas to existing leads for how they might more flexibly use their space. Attendees will be invited to discuss and share similar or unique benefits noted in makerspaces and design studios on their campuses.

Keywords:

Makerspace, Design, Studio, Innovation, Entrepreneurship.