Good Life | Just make it

There’s a quiet little room in Schlow Centre Region Library — well to be accurate, there are many quiet little rooms in Schlow Library — but the one on the second floor has the most panache.

Sure, on the surface it looks like just another study room, filled with tables, chairs and the aforementioned quiet, but it also has storage cabinets with retractable plastic drawers.

Hang on, it gets better.

Inside the the storage cabinets are construction paper, magic markers, pencils and more of the basic building blocks of creativity. This is a room of potential, four walls built around countless possibilities waiting to be given shape and form.

This is Schlow Studio, and it’s about to be majorly upstaged.

Monday will mark the beginning of Maker Week, a six-day celebration of people and their capacity to, you know, make stuff.

In collaboration with Discovery Space, Penn State, The Makery, The Make Space, New Leaf Initiative and more, the library will host a series of speakers and demonstrations ranging from a workshop with jewelry designer Staci Egan to a Coding with Your Kids Lab that is certainly making a bold push to bridge the generation gap.

It was a gap of an entirely different nature that caught the attention of Tim Sales, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Penn State, and David Celento, a consultant on digital tools and product design development.

Sales and Celento realized that there was a vast resource slipping out of State College cloaked in gowns and graduation caps, enthusiastic young minds that dream of innovation and small-business ownership — but no longer have access to the resources of a vast university.

“It’s like somebody turns off the fire hose,” Celento said.

Competing with the volume of opportunities offered in bigger cities is a tall order, especially if you’re trying to fit them all under one roof.

Celento and Sales are exploring the possibility of opening their own maker space, a environment with the tools and resources needed by entrepreneurs and others looking to collaborate on projects.

“Maker spaces are really about creating knowledge and power,” Celento said.

That same knowledge and power will be on full display this week — just on a slightly smaller scale.

The centerpiece is 3-D printing, technology that is to the idea as lighter fluid is to the spark.

Throughout the week, patrons will have the opportunity to not only gather around the fire, but also learn how to set one of their own.

On Tuesday, demos will walk novice printers through a step-by-step process that will eventually manifest a finished cookie cutter.

“Libraries nationwide are installing this technology and just letting people go,” Nathaniel Rasmussen, head of IT services at Schlow, said.

The technology has yet to find a permanent home within the walls of Schlow, but that doesn’t mean it can’t summer there.

Visitors to the second floor can observe a 3-D printer on loan from Celento — they may even get a freshly formed bracelet out of the deal.

“By the time this week is over I’m pretty sure that everyone on staff will have one of those,” said Maria Burchill, head of adult services at Schlow.

It took Burchill and the staff a few hours to learn ins and outs of the printer, a process that for their purposes involved three-dimensional models downloaded off of the Internet.

The models are the trap door, the secret compartment, the heart of a trick that might otherwise seem like magic. A 3-D printer may be able to render objects out of thin air, but not without a proper digital blueprint.

“The 3-D modeling is the skill,” Burchill said.

Still feeling a little lost? Just use your head.

On Thursday, library patrons will plunge face first into this stage of the process, using an Xbox Kinect to perform 3-D scans of their heads, which can be taken to the UPS Store and used to print a miniature likeness.

Those content with the head already sitting on their shoulders won’t be left out of the party. There is still a knitting and embroidery session, a painting technique workshop and Legos and crafts for the kids.

On Saturday, the library will host a Community Show and Tell in Sidney Friedman Park. Artisans, craftsmen and inventors alike can share something they’ve made and discuss their creative process.

“I would love to see a lot of community excitement. Maybe some ideas,” Rasmussen said.

This story was originally published August 22, 2015 at 9:21 PM with the headline "Good Life | Just make it."