Sometimes the ideas come so quickly, you have to jot them down on a napkin before you forget. Maybe you share that napkin with a couple of friends and brainstorm it a bit more before realizing—hey!—you’re on to something kind of cool here. If only you had the tools to build it.
Look no further than UMBC’s own campus, pocketed with hubs of creative innovation. Whether you want to 3D print a robot arm, edit your personal podcast, or design costuming for a UMBC theatre production, Retriever makerspaces and research labs provide tools and training so students can bring their ideas to life.
By Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque and Catherine Meyers
Building a community of builders
On the ground floor of the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, just past the checkout desk, what was once a quiet reading room has been transformed. Tools, including laser cutters, 3D scanners and printers, computer workstations, soldering irons, and pliers, line the walls. A large table in the center offers visitors space to plan and work on projects.
Retrievers from all around campus come to the newly opened Alan and Wendy Wilson Innovation Lab to create—making fidget toys, figurines, model planes, hydroponics equipment, custom vacuum-cleaner parts, and more. They also come to collaborate. On a recent Friday afternoon, the lab buzzes with students chatting and troubleshooting manufacturing challenges.
“It’s definitely the community that attracts me,” says Jack Spence, a senior information systems major who has come to the lab nearly every weekday since it opened in the fall of 2024. “Everyone really helps each other, and it’s nice to hear different perspectives.”
Spence has made geared clock replicas and large mechanical gauntlets inspired by the anime series Arcane. He’s currently working on a giant hammer and an artificial-intelligence-powered robot that can converse with a human. Before the lab opened, he was making things in his dorm room, he says, but it’s much better to have a communal space. “It’s so empowering—you can come in and build whatever you want and follow your passions.”
Lukas Anderson, a first-year computer science major, learned about the lab from a Google search for makerspaces and drops by about once a week. He has come to the lab to fix electronics and to make custom enclosures and adapters for a variety of projects. “The most exciting part is learning and then having that knowledge immediately applied to something tangible,” he says. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper to make things than to buy them, he adds. “You can make a custom phone case in about two hours for about 60 cents,” he says.
Left: Jack Spence demos the large 3D-printed gauntlet he made in the Innovation Lab. Right: Spence works on the wiring for an AI-enabled robot in the Innovation Lab.
Jake Vann, the library IT specialist who co-manages the lab with fellow staff member Jason Conti, says the space has a vibrant DIY vibe. A core group of students regularly use the lab while others come for particular projects or drop by out of curiosity. Staff and faculty are also welcome, and Vann encourages everyone to check it out: “Even if you are feeling intimidated, there are people who will help you.”
Now that the lab is smoothly up and running, Vann and Conti are investigating ways to expand the community and offer new learning opportunities. They are looking into acquiring new equipment, such as sewing machines or vinyl cutters, hosting workshops and seminars, and hiring student workers to help manage the lab.
“Seeing such amazing and talented people in the lab each day is an inspiration,” Vann says. “We like to tell students: This is your space.”
— Catherine Meyers
Custom costumes
It is three weeks until opening night for spring UMBC’s production of John Proctor is the Villain by American playwright, Kimberly Belflower. At the costume shop, Lilli Malone, student costume director, weaves through the six cutting tables and greets two of their mentors: Margaret Caster, assistant costume shop manager, and Becca Janney, visiting lecturer of costume technology and design. Malone pulls a loosely stitched dark brown and white muslin dress from a clothing rack packed with costumes, each labeled by students with a manila tag noting its stage of production. They lay the mock-up on a cutting table next to a full-color digital rendering Malone designed of the costume for the character Ivy Watkins—one of nine high school English students reading The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials, while grappling with their identity, relationships, rumors, and secrets in 2018.
“I use the app Procreate to draw the costumes on an iPad. The designs are printed out and posted in the shop for me to use as a reference,” says Malone, a theatre production and history major. “We choose plays a year in advance. While I wait for the play to be cast, I sketch costumes based on the script, costumes we own, and research of the period. Once the play is cast, my renderings are adapted for the actors’ bodies.”
Students from any major can participate in the process or work on their own projects after completing the introductory costume construction course and annual boundary training, which teaches designers how to create and respect boundaries. To develop costume-making skills, students cut mini patterns of current costume renderings for small portable mannequins. It’s a space where they’re encouraged to make big mistakes on a small scale. Students experiment with various fabrics, draping techniques, color schemes, and other materials while receiving feedback as they develop complex costumes that reflect both the designer’s vision and the character’s personality.
Across the room, Taylor Holmes is sewing a pair of pants with Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s help—one of 10 sewing machines the students nicknamed. The geography and environmental science junior is at home in the costume shop. She steps away from Endora—another machine—to fix a type of rope scarf on her mini-mannequin costume of one of the three witches in the play based on a sketch by Megan Hromek ’20, theatre. Holmes began developing her needle and thread skills in high school. She plans on making it a proper business after she graduates.
In addition, she plans to map weather for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “I like to make my own things,” says Holmes, “and the feeling I get from doing something with my hands and mind.”
Malone enjoys the stark contrast between the students’ and the witches’ costumes. Malone’s vision for Watkins’s costume included a dress with a heart-shaped neckline and a button in the front, which was difficult to find online, in thrift stores, or in storage like the other costumes. When this happens, the team builds the costume instead. This requires an assembly line of sorts as students and faculty work together over the year to take measurements of the actors, purchase patterns if needed, cut the patterns on muslin, loosely sew the edges, and complete the final costumes. Today Katie Hetzer, who plays Watkins, is trying on the mock-up in a small private room where Malone and Caster use safety pins and heat-erase markers to draw where the garment needs to be taken in or cut.
“This is a unique experience because some of my closest friends, like Lilli, are in the cast, it is my fourth and last UMBC play, and the first time a costume has been designed for me,” says Hetzer, an early childhood psychology senior. After the fitting, they look over a Pinterest board to review lipstick shades and hairstyles. “I’ve never doubted that Lilli was going to do it right,” says Hetzer. “Throughout the process, if I said I don’t like how something works, they fix it, and I appreciate that. It is a lot about trust.”
– Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque
Tools to put a wider world at hand
A 3D printer sitting in the Designing Participatory Futures (DARE) Lab at UMBC has made all sorts of objects, including figurines, toothpaste squeezers, 3D maps of campus, and more. It’s that versatility that makes the equipment attractive to the research efforts of Mei-Lian Vader ’22, mechanical engineering, who is now a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing.
Vader is working with Blind Industries and Services of Maryland (BISM), a local nonprofit, to develop a curriculum to teach blind and low-vision individuals how to use 3D printers.
The project grew out of research Vader conducted with Associate Professor Ravi Kuber, information systems, showing that blind small business owners, as well as blind workers in garment manufacturing, prefer simple tactile tools to help them do their work over more complicated electronic assistive devices.
“For example, if a worker is looking for an item on a shelf, they have electronic devices that can scan a barcode and read out the label. But the technology can break, gets out of date, or it sometimes just doesn’t work. And we found people preferred a simpler solution, like a 3D sticker to label items,” Vader says.
The DARE lab supports a program run by the Maryland Department of Disabilities to 3D print such tactile tools—such as tools that can add braille labels to paper currency—for individuals who request them. But Vader says offering blind individuals training to design and print their own items should ultimately be more effective and empowering.
Anica Zlotescu, the manager of training and accessibility at BISM, says having a 3D printer will speed up how quickly the organization can design, make, and improve tactile tools to serve the blind community. She says working with Vader has been a joy: “She brings passion and enthusiasm, asks great questions, and wants to be a part of finding solutions.”
Reaching toward ambitious goals
Meanwhile, a floor down from the DARE lab in the Information Technology and Engineering Building, Caly Ferguson, a junior mechanical engineering major, is working in the Vinjamuri Lab of the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, headed by Associate Professor Ramana Vinjamuri, on a different type of assistive technology: a prosthetic arm and hand.
Ferguson says, like many kids, he was impressed with the futuristic tech in movies like Batman and Ironman and also loved building with LEGOs and other toys. In high school, as he thought more seriously about his plans for the future, he was inspired by his own birth defect, in which he lost four fingers from his hands, to work toward a career developing biomedical devices such as prosthetics.
With guidance from his advisors in the Meyerhoff Scholars Program and Vinjamuri Lab, he fleshed out an ambitious goal of developing and building a full prosthetic forearm and hand by the end of his undergraduate study.
Starting in the spring of his first year, he began work on machine-learning software that could interpret electrical signals from the nerves in the arm and translate them into desired movements of a prosthetic hand.
“I’m not a computer scientist, so it was a steep learning curve understanding how to code and understanding the foundations of AI,” he says.
Ferguson is currently testing and improving the code and hopes soon to start designing and building the mechanical parts of the prosthetic from scratch, using a 3D printer.
The project, which Ferguson has mainly self-directed, has been a great learning experience, he says. When he has questions or gets stuck, his lab mates and faculty mentors offer ready advice. Ultimately, Ferguson wants to work on developing cost-effective biomedical devices.
“A lot of the technology that’s really advanced, maybe there’s only one, and it’s sitting in a lab somewhere,” he says. “I’d like to find ways to bring down costs and take devices to market so more people can benefit from them.”
— Catherine Meyers
A Digital Creative Sandbox
Inspiration has an all-access pass at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery Digital Media Lab (DML). Whether you need a hyper-quiet room to record, film a magical setting, or transcribe your novel, the DML’s whisper room, green screen wall, and transcription foot pedal will get the job done. Need to do some tweaking? Level up with the lab’s audio, image, and video editing software. “The lab supports all types of audio/video projects and anyone on campus, no matter their major, can borrow equipment and use it for anything—coursework, vacations, or a podcast with friends,” says lab supervisor Nett Smith ’10, modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication. “Our biggest value is that there’s no gatekeeping of our services; if you have a campus card, you can borrow our equipment.”
Tags: CAHSS, COEIT, CSEE, Feature, GES, innovation lab, IS, Psychology, Research, Spring 2025, Theatre