On the Market: Manage Bryn Mawr College’s new makerspace

On the Market is a Technical.ly column where we highlight noteworthy job openings and the people who are lookin’. Got a submission? Email us and tell us why it belongs in the roundup.

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Bryn Mawr College is adding a makerspace to its liberal arts offerings, and it’s hiring a coordinator to run it.

Working within the Digital Scholarship, Critical Making, and Digital Collections Management department of the Main Line school’s Library and Information Technology Services (LITS), the person in this role should have some existing making skills and be passionate about education, said David Consiglio, director of assessment, learning spaces and special projects at LITS.

“Bryn Mawr College is approaching our makerspace with a bent towards critical making,” Consiglio wrote in an email. “Critical making looks at making activities in the context of how they fit into society, not only in terms of the materials being produced but also the socio-political aspects of the activities themselves. For example, this semester a class is gathering invasive plants found locally and repurposing them as paper.”

When we hear “makerspace,” we think of NextFab or the now-defunct Hacktory, not necessarily academic institutions (with the exception of Drexel University’s new 10,000-square-foot Center for Functional Fabrics). Is it common for school to have such spaces?

“It is not as uncommon as you might think,” Consiglio said. “That said, we are approaching it from a slightly different angle than most. We want the Bryn Mawr College campus to be viewed as a makerspace. Bryn Mawr has a variety of making activities taking place across several different locations on campus. A successful makerspace coordinator will collaborate with these locations to integrate the makerspace into a wider Bryn Mawr making community.”

The two-room space, divided to accommodate the likes of both woodworking and electronics making, will be open to all Bryn Mawr faculty, staff and students, regardless of experience level and include tech such as 3D printers and a laser cutter, with plans to purchase more according to future needs.

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Liana Dragoman, now the director of strategic design for the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation, wrote in 2017 that “design for the entirety of an experience or how all the artifacts and people within a service work together to provide a cohesive experience over time.” In the context of city government, that might means service designers are working alongside service providers in the areas of “foreclosure prevention, affordable and supportive housing, emergency preparedness and response, and services related to the health and wellness of people, families and communities.”

The Office of the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) announced earlier this month that it’s creating an in-government service design studio to launch by the end of 2019. Now, it’s building out its founding team to work hand-in-hand with city agencies, policymakers, program directors and city employees to strengthen public services in Philadelphia.

CAO is receiving applications until Monday, Oct. 7, at 5 p.m. Open positions:

• Service design strategist
• Service designer
• Senior design researcher

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Just a few miles down 95, the “new” DuPont is hiring for an innovation community developer position to join its Emerging Innovation team in Wilmington.

The job description screams “intrapreneurship,” as the person in this role is tasked with supporting early-stage companies growing within the corporation:

“We work hand-in-hand with the businesses to (1) identify emerging innovation opportunities beyond our core businesses, (2) rapidly reduce critical uncertainties, and (3) develop and incubate the most promising projects. We help build, sustain, and realize a strong innovation portfolio.”

Definitely not your typical 9-to-5 job. Candidates should have experience building an innovation brand along with an entrepreneurial mindset.

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Technical.ly is honoring stand-out programmers and other technologists via our new RealLIST Engineers. Tell us here by mid-October, what devs do you know who deserve to be celebrated for their technical aptitude, community leadership and collaborative practices? We’ll vet the nominations and publish a list later in the fall. (Yes, you can nominate yourself.)

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This year’s NET/WORK Suburbs job fair is happening Thursday, Oct. 17, at Deacom in Chesterbrook. Come to network and learn about at least 17 local tech companies looking for local talent, including Vanguard, AWeber, Oracle and iPipeline. Register here.

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Philly, get ready for a wave of opportunities: ‘Tis the season of employment with quality tech companies knocking on your local job board. Take a look at some recent postings below:

• Operations (DevOps) Engineer at Azavea*
• Senior Java/AWS Developers at Chariot Solutions*
• Senior Software Developer at Deacom*
• Software Engineer, Back End at Guru*
• Interactive Developer at The Philadelphia Inquirer*
• Manager, People Operations at Inspire*
• Data Engineer at IntegriChain*
• Cloud Development Representative at Linode*
• Application Developer at Macquarie*
• Sr. Project Manager at Odessa*
• Product Owner/Business Transformation Specialist at Penn Mutual*
• UX Designer at Perpay*
• Senior Software Engineers at Pinnacle 21*
• Senior React Native Engineer at PromptWorks*
• Technical Lead- Artificial Intelligence(AI) Machine Learning (ML) Engineer at Vanguard*
• Software Engineer at Vistar Media*

*Denotes a Technical.ly Talent client, which guarantees inclusion in On the Market.