IN HOUSE: A Remote Making Studio

The circumstances of the pandemic resulted in the closure of collective maker spaces and university fab labs. This disruption to machine access had consequences for design studio curricula which shifted to online and digital formats. In response, an experimental studio centered on digital fabrication was offered in the Spring of 2021 at MIT. The prompt of the studio was simple, to design and build an installation with spatial implications, wherever and with whatever material was at hand. To support students to re-engage physical making, a desktop milling machine was developed called the TinyZ. Due to its small scale and low cost, the TinyZ could be distributed as a kit to each participant in the studio. The TinyZ Kit was largely composed of standard parts and repetitive assemblies, making the machine itself extremely modular and easily reconfi gurable to adapt to different material processes and projects throughout the semester.