The Tulsa Fab Lab will be fifteen years old in September, although it had many years of incubation prior to opening its doors. I interviewed Nathan Pritchett for Make:cast back in 2021 — “Making and Thinking Big in Tulsa”. While some makerspaces were really hurt by Covid, Fab Lab Tulsa came out stronger and was raising money to expand their space and membership. In May 2022, Fab Lab Tulsa opened its new facility: Hardesty Hub for Makers. Today it has 221 members.

I talked to Nathan this week to learn more about Fab Lab Tulsa. Next week, in part 2 of this interview, I’ll talk to Nathan about Maker Faire Tulsa, which is next Saturday, August 29th.

Dale: How is Fab Lab Tulsa doing now?

Nathan: We spent 2016 through about 2022, including the pandemic, on this kind of scale up. What kind of facility and what kind of equipment did our community need? We did very well and and it worked out. Since then, we’re on this scale out and it still remains to be seen whether we’re going to be successful at that.

Dale: What do you mean by “scale out?”

Nathan: When I think of the scale up, we were hemmed in in our 3,500-foot facility with sort of a pseudo-classroom that had only 12 seats. We had two laser cutters over in the corner and a ShopBot kind of crammed in the side. In 2016–2017, we couldn’t grow any larger if we wanted to. We were kind of stuck. We had to make the decision that if we had more space and capacity, could we grow more and could we serve more people and could we be more impactful to our community? So we made that decision to scale up. And when I say scale up, we meant more square footage, more machinery, more capacity, and different types of machinery.

Dale: More programs?

Nathan: Yeah. We’re still working on that. When I say scaling out, I mean can we serve a bigger population — more students, more businesses, bigger economic development and those types of things.

Dale: Has your conception of what a maker space is changed over the years? Is it something you’ve grown into or did you discover new things about its value or its purpose since you started?

Nathan: Some things have always been true and some things felt like they were opportunities and then they sort of disappeared. There has always been and will always be a place for makerspaces and hands-on learning and education — experiential learning. These are things that we’ve stripped out of education spaces and they continue to be removed from education. So I don’t see a time where makerspaces do not have a role in elementary, middle school, high school, and college education spaces.

I also see increasing demand in economic development. So small businesses, where people are wanting to work for themselves, especially as people get displaced from what was the corporate system. Those people are still here at Fab Lab Tulsa. We always had this idea that many of them would eventually grow up and kind of leave us, but most of them don’t. It’s a very small percentage that outgrow the makerspace and create bigger and larger companies.

Dale: So, you do have people doing commercial work at Fab Lab Tulsa?

Nathan: Yes. In fact, when we just did our annual survey of members, it was actually 51% of our members use us for commercial purposes. What’s interesting is another 8% said they plan to in the future.

We still see lots of tinkerers and hobbyists that are here just for self-exploration. There was some hope that didn't really work out for us in workforce training and more professional skills development. But there's there's really just no way for our space to give credentials that employers and to break into that space or to compete against the more traditional education players is hard.

We had this idea of a jump-start program, where we bring people in and we do a very, very condensed program that didn’t cost a lot of money, and didn’t take a lot of time. We teach them a lot in a very short window. There wasn’t a lot to lose, but there’s no funding for it. Basically, it kind of failed.

Dale: Too bad.

Nathan: Now I’m actually kind of taking the opposite approach, which is falling back on an internship program where people can come in as an intern and I teach them all the same things but I do it over a very long period of six months. They’re here longer and they learn more. They learn at a slower pace, but they get to put internship on their resume. An internship at a Fab Lab might be more valuable than that pretend certificate. So I’m trying that with high school.

Dale: I think that’s a good model — internship, apprenticeship models.

Nathan: What I think is interesting is our education system rewards something different than what our industry rewards. Our industry rewards people who like to do things and so maybe we have a role to play there.

Did you miss the action-packed Make: Live featuring contributors from Make: magazine? You can catch up on YouTube. I wonder which of these projects is your favorite:

Congratulations to the Heise team that produced Maker Faire Hannover and publish Make: magazin.

Maker Faire Hannover is held at the Hannover Congress Centrum, and while it looks like a convention center in the photo below, it’s much cooler than that. There’s a nice outdoor space that is park-like.

A lot of convention centers would not like you to have fire or Tesla coils.

A friend of mine, Casey Shea, has the thankless job of cleaning out a rural home and shed that belonged to his parents. He sent me these photos and I told him that I couldn’t quite explain why they are so pleasing to look at.

“I’m digging out old hand tools stamped with PA and NY factory markings,” he said. “I like to think about both the people who made them and the work done with them over the decades. There are definitely some unique ones!”

By Kevin Toyama
Make: Books Editor

When we came up with the idea for the Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival in 2025, our intent was to provide a free showcase for people to apply their maker skills in the fun context of a movie. We wanted to encourage people who had never made a movie before to just try — and the results were fantastic! More importantly, we heard from first-time filmmakers that they had a blast, and their heads were spinning with new ideas!

That’s why I’m excited to announce this year’s panel of judges for the 2026 Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival. We have another great mix of experts from across the industry, each bringing their unique perspective and personal love of movies: Industrial Light and Magic Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Leven, whose credits include Severance, F1: The Movie, and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier; Nil Unerdem, whose short film Pearl in the Window was an official selection of the San Francisco Short Film Festival; Jesse Velez, animatronics expert and founder of practical-effects studio Raptor House FX; and Kayla Lane, who served in visual effects and production roles for Andor, The Mandalorian, and The Irishman.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing what creative and moving short stories that the filmmakers come up with in just two minutes, no matter how simple or complex,” said Nil Unerdem, who worked for Dolby Labs after earning degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford and Columbia before shifting her focus to filmmaking. “Sometimes it’s harder to make an emotional impact in a short, rather than a longer story, so kudos to everyone who enters and puts their film out into the world.”

We love movies! You love movies! Just look at Josh Fapp’s amazing “If Star Wars Had a $10 Budget” parody Cardboard Wars — it’s not awesome because of expensive sets or fancy props, it’s awesome because it’s filled with creativity and cleverness!

You’ve still got three whole weekends to make 120 seconds of movie magic, so what are you waiting for? Gather your pals, come up with ideas, and show us what you can do!

Make Things is published weekly on Saturday for premium subscribers of Make: magazine and the Maker community. This newsletter lives on the web at makethings.make.co

I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects, or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].