Feature Stories

Oscar Rios (left) and his brother William are dressed to the nines in this 1956 photograph. Puerto Ricans often confounded the rigid black-white-only racial order of Chicago. Members of the Rios family shared stories of how each negotiated conceptions of race and space, citizenship and belonging.

As a young girl in Chicago’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods, Professor Merida Rua took “field trips” every Sunday after church to study her family’s history. Her father steered their Buick through the struggling neighborhoods of his 1950s childhood to the “places of his aspirations”—the skyline of Lake Shore Drive and the imposing walls of the University of Chicago. Rua and her mother, two sisters and grandmother listened, rapt, to his stories, which spoke to the larger Puerto Rican experience in Chicago.

Rua, associate professor of Latina/o studies and chair of American studies, returned to her home city as an academic researcher to explore the impact of Puerto Rican migration on Chicago and the communities in which they lived and worked. In her book A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods (Oxford University Press, 2012) Rua blends history and ethnography to tell the story of how a post-war migration of a small number of recruited household workers and laborers grew into the third-largest Puerto Rican population in the continental U.S. Along the way they built strong communities that were challenged by economic struggle, job discrimination, and the upheaval of urban renewal and the tumultuous 1960s. “My work,” she says, “focuses on neighborhoods people have lost.”

Her search to reclaim their stories took Rua to Chicago’s first Puerto Rican-owned funeral home, which she lived above in an apartment while conducting her research. Listening to family and friends of the deceased tell stories at wakes and services, she discovered a novel lens through which to view the history of Puerto Ricans in Chicago and the neighborhoods they remembered. The first wave of Puerto Rican migrants to the city found themselves in a unique position as outsiders in the country of their citizenship and struggling for fair treatment in employment, housing, and education. But the stories Rua heard in the funeral home were a testament to the pride in what Puerto Ricans had achieved in Chicago and a deep attachment to the neighborhoods that sustained them over the decades.

“They were hopeful stories of resiliency and strong connection to community despite obstacles and struggles” Rua says.

Rua is sharing her research as part of the weekly Faculty Lecture Series, which continues through March 14. See the complete schedule here.

“3D printing is going to be pervasive in the future, and I want to be able to say I was involved from the first,” says sophomore Christine M. Cunningham ’15, a likely computer science major. As one of the team of 10 students that worked with design engineer and model maker Michael Taylor and computer science professor Morgan McGuire to build a 3D printer during Winter Study, Cunningham has reason to be proud.

Christine Cunningham ’15, Morgan McGuire, Michael Taylor, and Sam Donow ’16. Photo by Daniel Seidita ’16.

3D printing, also known as desktop fabrication, is being used to produce components in a variety of industries from the medical industry to toy manufacturers. Somewhat like a dot-matrix printer, the head of this machine moves across a flat glass surface, spelling out its final product in blue plastic—not onto paper but through a thin tube of plastic attached to the top in a large spool. One of the students unwinds it little by little, allowing the machine to have a continuous supply. The hot head of the machine feeds the melted plastic into a shape determined by the electronic file the printer reads from a nearby laptop.

As the head moves back and forth along the square glass plate, the first layer of blue plastic is laid down in the shape of an airplane, line by line, slowly moving back and forth, up and down, and around the glass. The second layer’s applied as the head raises itself a fraction of a millimeter. And on it goes, moving vertically up with each layer, along what the students call the Z-axis, at a rate nearly imperceptible to the eye.

The students built this printer from directions they cobbled together through open-source materials. People all over the world who are building 3D printers contribute their stories, measurements, and instructions to various websites: think Wikipedia for DIY computer engineers. With no clear set of instructions or a ready-made kit, the students figured out what materials they would need, and how to put them together, through a lot of trial and error.

The team recognizes that their printer’s a work in progress, maintaining that the glass surface is not perfectly flat and that the temperature the heads heats the plastic is not as precise as they would like. But the printer impressively gets the job done. After about 15 minutes, there exists something that, moments before, was a spool of plastic tubing: a small blue airplane.

Their biggest goal, says team member Daniel Seidita ’16, is “to create the college’s first usable 3D printer, and to use that to create some of the parts necessary to build another 3D printer.” To that end, the team is proudly contributing their printer to the computer science workshop, so Williams students can continue to improve—and use—the printer into the future.

The goal of SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” created by Eugene Korsunskiy ’08 and classmates at Stanford Design School, was to ignite a life-long love of creating things, one group of fourth graders at a time. Photo by Larry Rippel.

Build a robot using a watch battery, a vibrating pager motor, some tape, and a Popsicle stick.

Those are the instructions Eugene Korsunskiy ’08 gave to groups of fourth graders as he and a team of fellow Stanford Design School students drove coast-to-coast last summer in a redesigned delivery van called SparkTruck. Stopping along the way at schools, science fairs, museums, and libraries, their goal was helping kids learn an essential step in the road to success—failure.

Korsunskiy and his team were charged for their master’s project to “Do anything you want. Make sure it has a positive impact on people. You have a year.” The students had been moved by Sir Ken Robinson’s famous TED talk calling for more creativity in education. “SparkTruck was a response to that call,” Korsunskiy says.

“Creativity happens when you stumble on something that doesn’t feel right, so you poke around and try to make it better,” he says. “That chair is ugly; I will paint it. That tool is clunky; I will design a new one.” Korsunskiy, who studied art at Williams before earning his master of fine arts in design from Stanford in 2012, wanted kids to know it’s OK to poke around.

“You’re much more likely to make something that succeeds if you’re okay with failing several times before you get there,” he says. “If we can instill in kids a resilient mindset—one that prepares them to learn from setbacks rather than be discouraged by them—they are much more likely to persist when tackling complicated problems.”

To fund the project, Korsunskiy and his team ran a campaign on Kickstarter—a fundraising platform in which donor pledges are not collected unless the dollar goal is met. They raised more than $30,000 from 426 backers. It was enough to purchase a used truck and much of the equipment they needed, including a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, and hand tools. Additional donations came in the form of 3-D printers, and food and lodging expenses were covered by the organizations the team visited. “Sometimes people put us up in their houses,” Korsunskiy says.

In the workshops involving the robot, the children often approached Korsunskiy to ask for his help. He’d respond by asking “What do you think?” and, he says, “It was really cool to see their eyes light up and a gear shift take place in their head as they realized that they were expected to tinker their way to their own solution.”

Now that the SparkTruck team is back in Stanford, Korsunskiy is shifting gears, having accepted a teaching position in the Stanford Design Program. The truck itself may become an ongoing project run by design students.

Whether on the road or in the classroom, Korsunskiy offers this advice on how to keep the creative spark alive: “Stumbling is virtually guaranteed as long as you keep exploring new ideas. So try to fix something broken. You might not get it right the first time, but you’ll learn a lot along the way.”

For more about SparkTruck visit http://sparktruck.org