Concept Representative quotation
Improvising “We started with the whisk design of face shield… That was something we could get started with quickly because none of the components or tools to produce those were sophisticated at all. It really is just an elastic staple to a piece of plastic… What we had to do going forward was scale up production from that… There’s a lot of improvisation there around both process and materials input. There was a run on plastic around this time. You couldn’t just go and buy the plastic. So, we were just getting whatever we could get ahold of… One of the universities donated a bunch of transparencies, like for overhead projectors, to us… It’s something to try and use just to get our hands on some plastic of roughly the right shape. And so, we tried all kinds of different plastic… These were all worthy things to try. But there were all these problems. Like those transparency covers, they were too foggy.” (Stilton producer)
Focusing “Conversations with [the hospital] were definitely eye opening in that there were people that were trying to make ventilators and these things that weren’t actually going to be… safe and therefore not helpful. So that was really helpful in guiding people to what maker space resources could actually do to be helpful.” (Midburg producer)
Satisficing “If we didn’t have the right brand of N-95 (mask) in our inventory, [the hospital] wouldn’t accept it. Until a couple weeks later, when they were like, ‘Give us whatever you have.’ That’s the way it worked for a lot of these hospitals. They started off saying, ‘Only [certain specifications]. Those are the only ones we want…’ And very quickly, that didn’t matter anymore.” (Triport producer)
Configuring “I was just running a 3D printing farm out of my apartment, and it turned out two printers really don’t have a big impact on the actual demand. So, [another person] provided all the Ultimaker (3D printers) from their university because they shut down and brought them over to [a maker space] so we could run a print farm. From there, it was a matter of coordinating who’s going to be watching the print farm, taking all the dirty prints, tearing them apart, cleaning them up, and then packaging them to be distributed for face shields.” (Stilton producer)
Brokering “A lot of the connections I made were through Facebook groups… where I was able to find people… like smaller nursing homes, preschools, clinics… that weren’t able to go through the large procurement channels that they would normally go through… I was finding them mostly in that… they would post… ‘We need this stuff. Is there anybody in the neighborhood who can donate?’ Or it was a maker space saying, ‘We have these capabilities. What can we do?’ On both sides. It was kind of just getting them integrated into the network.” (Stilton facilitator)
Seeking “We tried to come up with a separate name for the [maker space] for the effort that we were doing. So we came up with [new name], which was a name that we could attach, saying, ‘We’re a network of non-profits, designers and engineers who are putting a hold on everything to now produce this stuff. And here’s who we are.’ We made a cover letter. We had a whole setup that we were sending out as part of our cold call blast to make it seem more official.” (Midburg facilitator)
Circumventing “I retrieved a bunch of 3D printers from my [institution]. I was gonna do it, whether I had permission or not. So I kind of asked permission later, right? I took all the printers to my house, took all the material and started cranking out the visor shields.” (Edgeville producer)
Leveraging “They told me that [hospital name] or [company name] or other places were their customers, and they used their products, and they were fine. And, of course, [hospital name] obviously is prestigious. I mean, it’s world renowned. And so, there’s a trust factor there.” (Edgeville recipient)
Pressuring “For my equipment being released… it had to do with creating FOMO (fear of missing out)… because the [institution] was uncomfortable until they got tremendous pressure.” (Triport producer)
Matching “It was kind of the Wild West… The hospitals can command a huge amount of money to meet these brand name minimum order quantities that the vendors are placing on PPE. And the small guys couldn’t do that. And they weren’t good at banding together to make bulk orders for the group. So, when we started thinking about serving nursing homes, we found that the need was worse there than at a lot of the hospitals. And they would take anything, they would take anything that you would give them and there was no [quality assurance] process. There was no infection control department in these nursing homes. They were just desperate for whatever you can get them. And it went directly onto people’s faces.” (Triport producer)
Coordination “The maker space community is pretty well connected because people just know of each other… A bunch of people from maker spaces all over the Midburg area gathered together… on this big Zoom call, and we were all emailing back and forth and sharing information… to see if we could combine our efforts in any way.” (Midburg producer)
Embeddedness “One of the foundational ideas behind the way that we approach this is… localism, which is the idea that you take care of your immediate community around you… And so, we figured, as long as we had people in those geographic areas, they would be able to meet the needs of their healthcare institutions.” (Triport producer)