People enjoy making things, as the recently burgeoning “maker movement” shows.  While often seen as a vehicle to engage young people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the maker movement presents far wider opportunities to engage people in design and creativity.

Mark D. Gross, professor of computer science and director of the ATLAS Institute at University of Colorado, Boulder, will discuss “Design, Making and Creativity (or Please Pass the Polymaths)” in the first ISTeC lecture of the semester, Sept. 12, 11 a.m.-noon, in the Morgan Library Event Hall. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be preceded by a reception at 10:30 a.m.

Gross will address how the new machinery for making things—laser cutters, 3D printers and more—cry out for better tools and technologies for design, and practice making things invites people to become more creative.  Some of the most exciting opportunities and powerful insights belong to polymaths who can defy conventional disciplinary boundaries and learn to apply expertise developed in one discipline to others.

Gross earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His interests include design methods, modular robotics, computationally enhanced construction kits and crafts, sketch tools and applications, and physical computing.  Gross is co-founder with former students in three local companies spun out of his university research laboratories. In the 1980s he worked at Atari’s Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For more information about ISTeC — the Information Science and Technology Center — and upcoming lectures at CSU, visit the website.