 The A&U Makerspace was really started from the philosophy that people learn by doing, and they learn from one another. So it brings people from diverse backgrounds together to share resource, to give them access to tools that are sometimes hard to get, but most importantly to learn from each other and build something bigger than the sum of their themselves. I'm John Debs. I'm a quantum physicist by background, a passionate educator, and I founded the A&U Makerspace. I'm Rachel Handrick. I am a maker. I'm an engineer. My background covers engineering and woodworking. Right at this moment, I'm project managing a PPE production project, producing eye protection face shields for healthcare workers. Sort of three or four weeks ago, there was a lot of panic around what COVID would mean for Australia. It was a very uncertain time. When we realised COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and it was ramping up in a way that was really fast and unpredictable. It was really clear that PPE was going to be an issue. We'd seen stories emerging of people with 3D printers and things like that starting to try to prototype and provide solutions and we thought, well, this is definitely something we can do. So I reached out to a contact at the health department in the ACT who used to be a member of the space and asked him if there was a need and he got back to us really quickly and said, absolutely, let's talk. As a testament to our agility as a community, it was only three weeks ago that we asked the question, is there a demand for this? And since then, we've answered that question, produced the prototype, settled on the design and are now in a position to produce 17,000 face shields. So with the face masks, we saw a potential need there. We reached out to some textiles staff and alumni over at the School of Art and Design and brought them in as a prototyping team and we've gone through and prototyped masks which are currently going out to testing. The masks we're looking at are not for frontline health care workers, they are more for places like pathology labs or where there's actually just no alternatives. So I think making is fundamentally human. I think we sometimes underestimate this in the modern world where we buy a lot of things and we just consume but everyone makes and we do so often in communities, it's how we teach each other and therefore how we learn from one another. So I'm not remotely surprised that the team's been able to pull this off so quickly and so effectively but I could not have imagined it in my wildest dreams. I mean, I don't think many people could have imagined COVID-19 and how it's evolved so quickly. This is what these sorts of communities do. I mean, I don't use the word innovation very often. I try to reserve it for very special cases and I think the maker space is a very good example of what it means to be innovative, to be able to be a responsive agile. We didn't overthink this, we just got in there and we did it and we connected to our members and our community. One of the most rewarding things of my career has been starting this space and I could not have imagined where it would get to. Nurturing and growing this team to where we were able to provide this kind of response at a time like this is the most rewarding thing.