Diamond Engineering to host the next International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces!

In early October, Dr Pete Mylon, Academic Lead for the iForge, was approached by the board of the Higher Education Makerspaces Initiative (HEMI) to host their annual conference, the International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces (ISAM), in 2024. This will be the first time ISAM, which has run since 2016 and this year attracted around 350 participants, will be hosted outside the US. 

The University of Sheffield was chosen because the iForge makerspace is “probably the leading student-led makerspace outside the US” and has championed student-led learning and making across the UK and Europe through its own conference, UNIMAKER. 

Having accepted the challenge of bringing these two conferences together for 2024, Pete flew out to Pittsburgh later in October to attend ISAM 2023 at Carnegie Mellon University. In the meantime, Pete had been elected by HEMI members as an At-Large Member of the HEMI Board to represent academic staff. This meant that, as well as being announced to the conference, Pete attended the HEMI board meeting, with many of the founders of the academic makerspace movement from Georgia Tech, MIT and UC Berkeley. 

Whilst at the conference, Pete also met with this year’s conference chairs to understand the challenges of organising speakers, venues, catering, paper submissions, websites and the myriad other things required for such an undertaking. Pete also met with a number of potential sponsors and exhibitors and with support staff who will help administer the conference. 

In the brief moments when Pete was able to participate in the conference, he met many enthusiastic makers from universities and colleges across the world, and was able to see the brilliant maker facilities at Carnegie Mellon, including TechSpark and IDeATe.

Since coming back, Pete has been speaking to lots of potential UK sponsors, creating the website, and working with the University’s conferencing team and Marketing Sheffield to plan the event. 

If you want to keep in touch with developments for ISAM, such as the Call for Papers and the opening of ticket sales, why not join this LinkedIn group?