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) |