About the
Baum Family Maker Space
The Baum Family Maker Space is a multipurpose center for designing, innovation and hands-on fabrication by USC Viterbi undergraduate engineering students, including spaces dedicated to the design and build work of many of the school’s student design and competition teams which are currently dispersed throughout the campus.
Set on the ground floor of the Science and Engineering Library on USC’s University Park Campus, The Baum Family Maker Space includes an open design space, a fully staffed machine shop, a 3-D fabrication shop and an outdoor work area for welding and painting. The space is outfitted with tools such as 3-D printers, laser cutters, routers, lathes, mills, band saws, drill presses, reconfigurable workbenches, hand tools and software for design purposes.
The “reimagining” of the first floor of the Science and Engineering Library into The Baum Family Maker Space represents a commitment by USC Viterbi and USC Libraries to create a top-tier engineering maker space, increasingly a goal of the nation’s best engineering schools, USC Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos said.
“Brick-and-mortar universities will increasingly be differentiated by their ability to cultivate new mindsets, let’s call them mindsets of growth – one of which is through activities that require hands-on and physical interaction, and requires places for our students to innovate and flourish,” he said.
“The Baum Family Maker Space,” Yortsos added, “will be exactly that cauldron of innovation, the place where ideas are conceived and tested, where leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity and collaboration across the disciplines will be enduring and prevailing.”