Health Fair Meet Maker Faire! Part 3: Our Announcement!!

You saw Part One, in which the idea was born, and Part Two, in which the concept was tested and proven. So what actually happened? We’re doing it. We’re really DOING IT! By “it” I mean a health-themed maker faire/fest at the University of Michigan. REALLY!

WHAT:

We Make Health: http://makehealth.us

Emily Puckett Rogers had given us a heads-up about requirements for working with the official Maker Faire folk, which I had not realized was an actual brand name. So we don’t yet know if this is going to be a Mini-Maker Faire or a Maker Fest or what, but it is definitely happening!

Please note that the We Make Health event is a project of Health Design By Us, a participatory behavior change project funded as part of the UM Provost’s Third Century Initiative. It’s a completely awesome and wonderful collaboration, and you’ll be hearing more about it if you read this blog regularly.

WHEN:

Saturday, August 16, 2014

We are still settling on what happens when during the day. We are brainstorming roughly 10am to 6pm, but that may change.

WHERE:

Palmer Commons: https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Washtenaw+Ave/@42.2807486,-83.7335814,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x883cae4266554837:0x732dcfa6f8fb7dbe

WHO:

Us! We!

Well, Joyce Lee, Matt Kenyon, and I are taking point on planning the project (with the capable assistance of Emily Hirschfeld). Joyce is from the UM Medical School and Mott Children’s Hospital, Matt is with the School of Art and Design, and I, of course, am part of the University Libraries, Taubman Health Sciences Library. However, we have an email list for folk interested in the event which currently has over 90 people signed up. Many of them have contributed ideas, suggested contacts, volunteered to do booths or presentations, and so forth. We are reaching out to many community maker communities, and have received endorsements from several of them. You’ll hear more about our partners as the event moves closer.

CONTACTS:

1) Sign up at the We Make Health web site to receive information and updates from the Health Design By Us project.

2) If you are part of the University of Michigan, you can sign up through M-Community for the MakeHealthUM email list.

3) If you want to contact the event coordinators, our Make Health Team, you can reach us at: MAKEHEALTH at-sign UMICH dot EDU.

4) Twitter! The event itself is on twitter, as is Health Design By Us.

Make Health: @MakeHealthUM
Health Design By Us: @HealthByUs

If you want to chat with Joyce or me individually, we are also pretty easily reached through Twitter:

Joyce: @joyclee
Patricia: @pfanderson

5) Please feel free to comment on this post! We will have a blog for the actual event, but that’s still being set up. More soon!

WHAT’S NEXT:

What’s coming next is more blogposts and more news! We will highlight some of the technologies and people that will be highlighted at our event, the partners we’re working with, and exciting spinoff projects to help the energy last beyond the actual event. We’ll tell you more about some of the other folk working on health maker events, and other maker communities around the University and the Ann Arbor community.