5. Designing Activities & Programming

Choose activities that connect to interests and relevance and offer a range of options.

Connect to community interests and options that are relevant and connect to goals.

Even before you have a makerspace of your own, you can run activities and events to tease out community interest and have everyone get to know each other in the context of making. During these gatherings, you can invite partner makerspaces to showcase equipment and display posters for "dot-voting," allowing residents to mark their activity interests and preferred times for workshops. We found that weeknight afternoons, evenings, and early Saturday afternoons to be prime time slots for makerspace activities. You can also conduct surveys to gauge residents' interests and past experiences to help curate an initial set of activities.

Choose activities that provide a range of options and extend-ability.

Providing a range of options in activities has a number of advantages. Participants typically come in with a wide range of knowledge, experience, and skill sets. Less experienced makers can start with an easier version of an activity (example), and more skilled participants will find themselves challenged instead of bored with more advanced or ambitious activity options. What’s more, multiple generations at the same event or workshop will find they each have something to offer — the elders with vast wisdom and experience, and the youth with technical skills. 

Connect activities to community needs, education, and career pathways.

Getting to know the community means tuning in to their interests and values, and also their needs adjacent to broader societal issues. Engage in creative problem-solving around needs within your community. Design thinking and the engineering design process are great tools for this.

What industries are in your local area? These signal natural connections with the kinds of activities and programming you provide in the makerspace. For example, you could set up a recording studio complete with podcasting, sound, and video production if your area is a media production hub. In an area with a strong aviation industry, such as Houston, a robot and drone focus would be a natural choice. 

Co-locating makerspaces in affordable housing organically connects residents with education and career pathways, and builds industry-needed workforce skill development. Career possibilities for residents organically open up through participation, even for residents who seem to be just watching. Have industry come into the makerspace to share their work or teach a workshop, and connect residents with budding new skills and interests with local internships. 

Design and scaffold activities to build skills and accommodate a range of participant expertise.

When designing activities and workshops, allow time for basic skill building. Scaffold activities to accommodate a variety of different levels of skills and expertise, and honor the wisdom that’s in the room by encouraging the “lean over” maker mindset practice. This allows makers to tap into other’s experiences and solve problems together. 

Learn and teach creative problem-solving processes. 

Facilitating the design cycle is all about encouragement and curiosity. Making, and the process of making things better, leads to understanding. When you hear "I'm done," try these iteration prompts from Invent to Learn:

How can I make my/our ___ faster, slower, better, more accurate, prettier, greener, cooler, stronger, smarter, more flexible, taller, shorter, more efficient, less expensive, more reliable, lighter, more elegant, easier to use?

Better yet, empower your makers by posting the prompts on the wall! We have also found the Invent to Learn book to be incredibly helpful, as well as the book's online resources.

Leverage design thinking to support innovative solutions to real problems around the community. This approach is incredibly engaging and meaningful to the participants. Be sure to have participants document their work in progress to support reflection, solidify learning, and spark new insights. 

Design thinking and engineering design processes have a lot in common.

Model and support a maker mindset when leading activities.

While it’s important to be prepared as an activity facilitator, you are not expected to have all the answers or know everything! Model a maker mindset by wondering out loud about how a problem might be solved, and where you might go to get answers when stuck. Make your thinking visible by documenting processes as you go, note where you got stuck, and share how you solved it. Encourage the participants to do the same to create a culture of shared learning.

Support skill development around making, equipment, and tool use.

Developing skills in the makerspace is empowering and increasingly opens up possibilities for budding makers. Different modes of making require different skills. Your choice of programming will inform what skill training to provide, either at the start of workshops, or beforehand. Offer equipment and tools skill development workshops on a regular basis, and tie these to a membership tier system.