Quantitative Survey and Analysis of Five Maker Spaces at Large, Research-Oriented Universities

Technical universities around the world are opening makerspaces on their campuses: facilities and cultures that afford unstructured student-centric environments for design, invention, and prototyping. Consequentially, there is a growing need to survey and understand emergent trends and best practices, to compare and contrast them. Towards this end, we have conducted interviews at five university maker spaces: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech, Technical University of Berlin, and at Arizona State University. The comparison of these spaces highlights similarities and differences in the areas’ foci, size, accessibility, intellectual property policies, funding and staffing of the surveyed spaces. We extracted quantitative relations between maker space size and number of current registered users, staff supervision composition and staff to user ratio. While the sample size is small, does not span the spectrum of university makerspaces, and does not address crucial cultural factors, this survey and analysis provides an initial dataset and statistics for large, research-oriented institutions and a benchmark for relevant metrics.