X-Lab brings out students' creative side
At Ole Römer Road 1 there was once a MAX III. Now has LTH started the transformation of the old apparatus hall into X-Lab, an inspiring multidisciplinary innovation environment with various workshops and spaces for collaboration. In autumn 2020, the first 100 square meters were inaugurated with four modules with different machines and tools and with staff with the skills to help both with practical challenges and with the design of objects.
“Our basic idea is that many students are creative and have good ideas,” says Charlotta Johnsson, director of Makerspace X-Lab and Rector Campus Helsingborg (LU). We want to attract students from all sorts of fields to come here and work in an informal way. I believe that when many students from many different places and who have read many different things stay on the same surface, many new contacts and new ideas will be born. What starts out as a playful piece of work can eventually lead on to a prototype. If it is a good idea, perhaps more people will be interested and it may result in them eventually forming a company.
X-Lab has a high level of student involvement and wants to be a place for students both in teaching and in their free time.
− On LTH and LU we have courses in entrepreneurship and innovation and when there are practical moments, you can use the workshops — and feel free to work on the ideas after the course work. It is therefore important that we at X-Lab are open so that you can come so that it suits your schedule and not only when the courses are held, continues Charlotta Johnsson.
Yellow traverses are visible in the ceiling of the apparatus hall, thick pillars hold up the ceiling, and the floor is made of concrete. The four smaller rooms in one of the corners of the hall have transparent walls and parts of the walls are in transparent plexiglass in orange and green. There are tools for wood and metal in one room, 3D printers, a soldering station and laser cutter in another, and machines for textile and leather work in one. The interior architecture is thought out to create spaces where meetings can take place and where it should feel pleasurable, inviting, transparent and inspiring to work. The tools are carefully selected both to be easy to use but also to maintain a good quality and to cope with more complex tasks.
“We worked closely with an interior designer to get all the pieces in place and we were inspired by Building 20 at MIT, a temporary building that was built during World War II but remained standing for 50 years. It has housed much cutting-edge research and no less than 9 Nobel laureates. What made Building 20 such a creative place was its temporary structure, where you could rebuild and change how you wanted and according to your needs. This is what we are looking for with our rebuildable modules, they should be able to change as projects need it. They are also designed so that they can be easily built by staff and students at LU, which we believe gives an increased sense of participation in X-Lab,” says Claes Dorthé, project coordinator at X-Lab.
The students are supported during the opening hours of the workshop by people with different skills, for example Claes Dorthé is a cabinetmaker and has a lot of work on how the surfaces should be designed and Peter Schamaun is a designer and can both solve the practicality of the premises and advise how to create a stylish product.
The first test of creating a makerspace was done by LTH furnishing 50 square meters at IKDC 2019. Next, the hundred square meters were created, which are a test of an intermediate size surface. In the summer of 2023, an expansion towards 2000 m2 will be started, which will turn the entire appliance hall into a collaborative space.
“We will gradually make more and more rooms, but also use the room that now exists with special fans to carry out work that requires an extraction. There is also a space suitable for holding larger workshops and a “shelf” on the second floor where you could have a café, continues Charlotta Johnsson. We will launch it bit by bit so that we can continuously get confirmation that we are going in the right direction.
It will not only be students and staff at Lund University who will be present at the venue. Already there are discussions other units about having counselling in offices alongside the hall and various student associations could both have offices and other activities on the premises. Even companies can hire themselves in to work, have annual meeting or simply do fun things with their employees.
Already, some successful projects have been carried out in or in connection with X-Lab. In a part of the apparatus hall, about 65 students in the group Lund Formula student work on building a complete racing car with which they compete. X-Lab was used during the pandemic when LTH's students manufactured 12,000 visors using 3D printers following instructions from Lund University Hospital.
What do you hope for in the future?
“There is a lot of creative work going on at LTH, which I hope will be able to thrive further at X-Lab. For example, I would like to expand with a surface where you can work with large amounts of data and then we could have AI Lund and student associations within AI,” says Charlotta Johnsson. We also hope to have a connection with space and the exciting student initiatives being done in this field. We have 27 student societies at LTH and imagine what a force if we could show everyone in one place and create a picture of everything creative going on.