
Cabrillo College Makerspace Director Payson McNett handles a gypsum printed architectural model produced by one of the Makerspace 3-D printers at Cabrillo College. (Dan Coyro — Santa Cruz Sentinel)
APTOS >> Layer by colorful layer, plastic figurines form in the bellies of a row of 3-D printers at Cabrillo College’s new Makerspace.
The figurines, slowly growing into a rainbow of gnomes in pointed hats, seem oddly juxtaposed with the workshop’s high-tech equipment until Makerspace Director and Art Studio Instructor Payson McNett invokes a quote by the late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Standing in a workshop with the ability to print, etch and cut an array of materials into almost any imaginable design, it is easy to understand what Clarke meant.
“This…