Adam Savage marveled at Cleveland's maker communities Wednesday to drum up enthusiasm for the 2016 National Week of Making this June 17-23.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- To everyone else, it was just a discarded refrigerator box. But to the boy Adam Savage, former co-host of the hit Discovery Channel television series "MythBusters," that corrugated cardboard box held all kinds of potential.
Adam dragged it home, shoved it into his parents' bedroom closet, and turned that box into the spaceship of his dreams. He even painted the walls of that closet like deep space and strung galaxies of twinkling Christmas lights.
On Wednesday, Savage shared that story with hundreds of Clevelanders as the moment he discovered the joy of creating something entirely from his imagination. Savage, along with Andrew Coy, a senior advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, visited and marveled at Cleveland's maker communities to drum up enthusiasm for the 2016 National Week of Making this June 17-23.
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Adam Savage loves making things out of corrugated cardboard. "I think of 'making' as the gateway drug to critical thinking," Savage said, while deftly gluing together cardboard strips into a Frank Gehry-inspired house. "Kids are inspired by the fact that we've manipulated our world and made it a little better, and the faster a kid realizes that, the better." Kids are naturally gifted makers who thrive on the opportunity to create something with their hands, he said.
Cleveland, the first stop in what will be a national publicity tour for the National Week of Making, was chosen because of area schools' focus on STEM education and workforce efforts that emphasize creativity. Local advocates are hoping to create an ecosystem of innovation that expands the maker movement to all ages, backgrounds and experience levels.
Sonya Pryor-Jones, the Northeast Ohio-based "Chief Implementation Officer" for the FabFoundation, the nonprofit that grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Bits and Atoms Fab Lab Program's efforts to provide the tools and technology "to allow anyone to make (almost) anything."
Savage's whirlwind tour included stops at Case Western Reserve University's Sears Think[box], Cleveland's Design Lab High School, the Great Lakes Science Center, MC2STEM High School, The City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland's Slavic Village and Central neighborhoods, and the Cleveland Public Library Main Branch downtown.
Savage, an industrial designer and creator of special effects for the film industry, also checked in on reddit.com and 90.3 WCPN's The Sound of Ideas. Everywhere he went, students and fans asked to take selfies with him or for his autograph, which he always signed with the tagline, "Stay curious!"
At the Great Lakes Science Center, Savage got to see projects created by 60 students from 12 area high schools, and then lead them in creating a city from found materials: cardboard boxes, duct tape, LED lights, batteries, copper wires, soldered together with glue guns and imagination.
Kirsten Ellenbogen, president and chief executive of the Great Lakes Science Center, said both visitors and residents should know more about Cleveland's extensive manufacturing roots and the smart things that are being created here every day. "This is Cleveland. We make things here."
She said Northeast Ohio should be recognized as much for its its innovation as it is for being the birthplace of rock 'n roll, and that the maker movement here is much larger than people realize: "more than the sum of our parts coming together."
"Today, we're going to build our future city here at the Great Lakes Science Center," she said. "You can build any sort of structure: a building, a park, a wind turbine," she said, inviting students to sign their creations before putting them on display.
Five students from the all-girls Beaumont School in Cleveland Heights built a movie theater, with stadium-style egg crate bucket seats, a flashlight-powered big-screen projector, and a screen made of plastic wrap. Their 3D-laser printed name tags identified them as Holly Sirk, Alexi Kerr, Mary Bova, Nora Duncan, and Kimberly Browske.
At the next table, under the Head of School Feowyn MacKinnon, seven students from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District's MC2STEM High School glued laser-cut windows onto an oversized skyscraper with a windmill on top.
Coy, a former teacher in Baltimore public schools, said he loves watching how making things cultivates a sense of curiosity among students. "Passion and ideas, those things are evenly distributed," he said. "But opportunity is not."
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Adam Savage, left, chats with student inventors Changyeob "C.Y." Ok and Brandyn Armstrong at The City Club of Cleveland. Later, at The City Club, Savage met Brandyn Armstrong from Cleveland State University, CEO and founder of the Studio Stick, a portable recording studio for smartphones that folds inside a 3D-printed case.
He also introduced Changyeob "C.Y." Ok, a Cleveland Institute of Art student who created a miniature Trinity Tree that picks up and blinks along with your heartbeat; Case Western student Alexis Schilf, who invented a shoulder sling that patients can put on and fully adjust with one hand; and Ilona Jurewicz of Cleveland State, who created a 3D hydroponic gardening system that lets students grow plants with found materials and open-source software.
"Making is a new word for the most ancient human activity" of modifying our world to suit our needs, Savage told the college students. With the availability of computing platforms and 3D printing, "it's never been a better time to be a maker."
But by high school, "a lot of the tech people have already sorted themselves, so the time when we need to change people's minds is in middle and elementary school."
Children don't need NASA-caliber labs to tinker with prototypes. Some of his best ideas were made from corrugated cardboard and brass rivets, he said. "Don't 3D-print it if you can make it out of cardboard; have a cutting mat. And don't make it out of cardboard if you can make it out of paper; so have scissors. Nothing is going to go exactly the way you want it to, and that's part of the plan."
"My passion for making things is the engine of everything I've achieved," Savage said. "Coming here to Cleveland today makes me feel that Cleveland is absolutely part of the solution for the future," he said, vowing to come back.