Duke Innovation Co-Lab

Due to Covid-19, Duke University students were asked not to return to campus after spring break. Soon after the Duke community (students, staff, and faculty) was informed of the decision to prioritize Duke community health, we began to plan an online version of Co-Lab’s programming. 

Typically, we offer a mixture of co-curricular technology-oriented classes on digital skills and hands-on fabrication training. We wanted to provide students and community members across the world with an opportunity to continue to explore technology and fabrication from afar. However, we wanted to provide students with classes that allowed them to explore new topics and participate in online-programming in a community-centered way. 

We were curious if we could provide students who were experiencing massive shifts in their expectations about their academic semester a way to engage with technology education that allowed them to explore new ideas and build a community at the same time. Simultaneously, we were seeing amazingly talented instructors from across the world, experiencing loss of income due to canceled teaching engagements. Altogether, we realized we could provide students with an opportunity to learn new skills and work with brilliant instructors they might not be able to access otherwise… and Co-Lab @ Home was born! 

For the last three weeks of the Spring 2020 semester, we offered classes on a broad range of creative technology skillsets. Here is a list of the classes we offered (many repeated each week): 

P5 Live with Ted Davis

DIY Solutions for Disrupting the Digital with The Center for Tech Pain’s Dasha Ilina 

Intro to Rhino 3D Modeling (make a fidget spinner!) with Kate McNamara

Getting Started with Electronics with Helen Leigh (*edited* Youtube Live)

E-Textiles @ Home with Becca Rose (Youtube Live)

Blender 3D Animations with Antonio Roberts

Livecoding Visual Graphics (Shaders) with Char Stiles

Quickstart Unity 3D with Everest Pipkin

Welcome to Bitsy - World's Cutest Game Engine with Everest Pipkin

P5.js Creative Coding for the Web with Libi Striegl

Introduction to Processing with Joselyn McDonald 

Processing: Making Geometric Art with Code with Brooks Frederickson

Sonic Pi: Live Coding Music with Brooks Frederickson

TinkerCAD 101 with Chip Bobbert 

TinkerCAD Circuits with Joselyn McDonald 

Website Development: Start to Finish with Sandra Bermond 

We also organized a live digital music performance by MSHR, who played a mind-bending set on their hand-built synthesizers for our community on IG Live. We were particularly delighted by their synthesizer housed inside a conch-shell.

If you were unable to attend these classes, we’ve posted many to our Youtube page. Some didn’t translate well to Youtube (e.g., lots of participant discussion), in case you’re looking for a class that isn't posted. Get in touch if there’s a class in particular that you’d like us to host again this summer or during the academic year. We’re excited about bringing more creative technology programming to the Co-Lab’s Roots offerings, which have tended to align with more traditional programming and fabrication programmatic offerings. We think it’s a great way to create access points for those interested in using STEM tools and techniques to enhance their work. 

Joselyn McDonald, who joined our team in October of 2019, will be leading creative technology programming at the Co-lab and wants to hear your thoughts on classes we should be offering moving forward. Send her an e-mail via Duke directory or DM the @innovationcolab​ IG account. Also, consider signing up for her Fall 2020 Physical Computing/Critical Making course if you want to explore circuit building and meaningful interaction design. 

We’re thankful that so many talented teachers quickly put together lessons for our students. The classes were limited to 1-hour or less (for the most part), and we set new attendance records for our courses through the Co-Lab @ Home program. It was rewarding for us to spend time with so many great students; many were new to the Co-Lab! In fact, 400 unique participants attended our program. We even got word that a newly admitted student chose Duke over Stanford because of the programming we offered! The Sonic Pi - Live Coding Music class, was particularly popular, and many of our students used the music they created in final projects for the semester! 

If you’re interested in exploring creative technology and want to continue to explore (or get started) on your own, here are some great resources: 

Processing: Getting started with Processing by Daniel Shiffman 

Sonic Pi: Live Coding Music: Tutorial 

Unity Quickstart by Everest Pipkin 

Massive Creative Tool List by Everest 

TinkerCAD and TinkerCAD Circuits -> tutorials under learn tab

We also highly recommend enrolling in Duke CMAC courses and attending a creative technology co-curricular program like School for Poetic Computation and No School. 

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen countless stories in the news and social media about how the design, engineering, and maker communities have been working together to help alleviate shortages in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).  In order to fight COVID-19 effectively, our health care practitioners need items like masks, face shields, and other equipment to keep them safe while treating patients.  

The Innovation Co-Lab has 3 Studios on campus, manages over 100 3d printers, including a larger printing capacity in our main space in the Technology Engagement Center.  As experts in the field of additive manufacturing, we were ready to produce whatever was necessary to help.  But we wanted to be sure that anything we did produce would be safe, effective, and approved to be used by the health system.  So, Duke convened a group of experts in fields of medicine, nursing, medical device engineering, and fabrication to coordinate a response, with the Innovation Co-Lab playing a key role in the process.  This group made quick work of evaluating the needs of the health system, prioritizing those needs, and beginning the prototyping process on a variety of potential ideas.  Having a bank of 3d printers and expertise in rapid prototyping allowed us to quickly print and evaluate existing designs, make quick improvements, and get these daily revisions into the hands of our partners who could provide the clinical feedback we needed.  

The first project we are taking on is a face shield.  This piece of PPE is worn by a provider over top of a mask and is a first line of defense against the primary vector of infection spread – airborne droplets.  The team chose this as an initial focus for 3d printing because of both its ease of fabrication as well as its key role and widespread use in fighting the virus.  The face shield consists of a 3d printed headband attached to a laser-cut sheet of polycarbonate that serves as the lens. After a few quick design revisions over a week (including testing and integrating design elements from many open source options available right now), we were able to get 25 of them into the hands of our partners at the School of Nursing, who put the design through a rigorous test process in the Simulation Lab. With their approval, we have now shifted into our first phase of production on these headbands, which will be used at both Duke and UNC Health Systems.  The Co-Lab team has pulled all of our printers from our Studio at the Rubenstein Arts Center and set up a production facility in the Technology Engagement Center, where we’re able to print around 120 face shield parts per day, with the goal of printing about 1000 in this first round.  

But to really ramp up production of this part, we’ve also leveraged our partnerships with professional fabrication companies in the area.  3d printing can take us from zero to a thousand units, but to get to thousands or tens of thousands of units, we will need to shift production onto injection molding and waterjet cutting equipment that can produce these items at a much faster rate.  3d printing has been key in developing these products, and acted as a stopgap for immediate needs, but as we get the injection molding parts going, they will quickly handle the scale of production required.  Knowing that we were heading towards this faster mode of production, much of our prototyping and design iterations involved making a part that could be produced effectively in both 3d printing and injection molding.  

Introducing TechGuru!

Every day, more than 10 million Americans need a caregiver’s assistance to get out of bed into a wheelchair. For people living with disabilities, this is usually the biggest obstacle to mobility within their home or health care setting. In homes, hospitals, and nursing facilities, performing this transfer for fully immobile patients is a complicated and labor-intensive task. There are devices to help with this transfer, but even the best current methods are inadequate for our society’s rapidly aging population.

Our startup, Zephyr Mobility, began in March 2016 with a grant from the Innovation Co-Lab. In the last year, we have developed a completely new method for performing the transfer that is significantly safer, faster, more comfortable, and easier to use compared with current methods.

We have partnered with the Duke I&E Initiative and are in the 2017 cohort of the Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs Program. We’re also in the running for Round 3 of the 2017 Duke Startup Challenge, and we’ve raised $5000 on Indiegogo! Check out our campaign and promotional video: 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zephyr-mobility/x/15890941

Our current stage is prototype construction and customer discovery. We’re visiting facilities to learn their experiences with this problem in great detail and figure out how our solution can be most valuable to them.

So far, we have a working physical prototype of the proprietary technology that is the basis for our new transfer approach. Once we expand this prototype to a full-scale version, we can bring it to the facilities to get their feedback. (The picture below shows the new equipment we purchased to build this full-scale prototype!)

Through the Melissa & Doug Program, we have committed to working on this project full-time in summer 2017. We’re excited for this chance to focus on Zephyr Mobility and make lots of progress. Thank you to all our advisors and supporters, both at Duke and in the broader Durham community!