The Maker Lab
Devoted to Making. Thinking. Experimenting.
The Maker Lab seeks collaboration across disciplines in creative ways to recreate, advance, and re-make the history and making of print.
The founding director of the Maker Lab is Patricia Fumerton.
The Maker Lab is a collaboration of faculty, graduate students, and undergrads across disciplines devoted to the history and making of print. In the act of creative thinking, it tracks a circular history of print from the common hand-operated pull press, through digital technology, to 3D reproduction—the artifacts of which we integrate back into early printing practices. 3D plastic images and letters sit alongside metal movable type from all historical periods, together with wooden hand-carved illustrations in the “forme” of the press bed, ready for the “kiss” of the heavy tympan onto the paper laid upon the forme which produces the printed sheet.
The pride of the Maker Lab is Mad Madge, a reconstruction of an early 19th-century Albion pull press, named after the eccentric Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, poet, fiction-writer, and inquiring mind, most active in the 1650s. See the 2017 Current video documenting Madge’s celebrated arrival:
Video of Mad Madge from UC Santa Barbara on Vimeo. A replica 19th-century printing press from England takes center stage in UCSB’s new Maker Lab.
Collaborators in all facets of the Maker Lab grow daily and are welcome—from faculty, to students, to staff, to community.
The ML’s founding parents are: Jeremy Douglass, Andrew Griffin, Patricia Fumerton, Melody Jue, and James Kearney.
backSpecial thanks also go to donors Harry Reese, Ian Rhodes and Pam Maines, Tony McCants, and Alan Liu and Patricia Fumerton, as well as to the hard working and inspired graduate students — Katie Adkison, Kristy McCants, Tyler Shoemaker, Erik Bell — and SASC staff — especially Mayra Magana and Meg Wilson — contributed so much to making an empty room into an experimental Maker Lab.