Member Spotlight: Joshua Guthrie

Tell me about what you do.

I am between jobs right now. Since graduation, I worked at H&M Company, architects and engineers here in town, but then I started having a sense that this just wasn’t it as far as long-term career. It was a great job, awesome company, great to work for, but it just wasn’t fitting. And so, I decided to quit my job back at the end of the year. I’ve always known that I’m very left-brain, problem-solving, that sort of thing—but also very right-brain, creative, and I needed an outlet to experiment with that. So theCO has been a really great opportunity to try some ideas, work on some things that I’ve been thinking about for a while but just haven’t because I never had the time, so I don’t have a business per say, but I am considering trying to mass-produce what I’ve been working, which is a computer monitor stand.

Tell me about your monitor stand.

If you have this on your desk, you can put your monitor on top, which brings it up to eye-level but also gives you some storage space and space to push your keyboard out of the way and clear your space if you want to just write or draw. This is something that I’ve wanted for a while, and I’ve looked for options online but just haven’t been able to find anything that (a) looks good or (b) looks functional like I want it to be.

That’s just one of the things that I’ve been working on. Jameson [Winter, theCO’s Community Manager] and I have a podcast, I’m auditing a class, and I always have something I’m working on. The problem when I was working was that I always had hobbies and things that I enjoyed doing in free time that I didn’t have time to do stuff like this computer monitor stand.

How do you make the stand?

The design was done in Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to draw lines with precise dimensions to them, then that file was made into G-code, which was then used to cut it on the CNC router here at theCO. So this is eight layers of ¾-inch thick plywood, and they’re just bolted together. And I’m thinking of doing one that’s made out of nice wood and, instead of bolting them together, gluing them together. Another good thing about theCO and their equipment is that you can rapid prototype stuff, and because it’s their equipment, their makerspace, you can just flow in and out, not have to worry too much about how things are organized or whatever.

Any other projects in the works?

[The stand] is the main thing right now, but there’s always stuff milling around in my head. I’m also big on strategy board games, and oftentimes, especially some of the bigger ones, they have a lot of pieces and stuff in it. I know that there are companies that sell box inserts so that you can sort your pieces, but I have some unique ideas on how I would like to implement that myself, so it would be a little more on a smaller scale and probably using the thin plywood [with] the laser cutter as opposed to the CNC router.

If you were trying to convince someone to join theCO, what would you tell them about it?

One thing is the resources here. They have access to things that I could get access to but would be really expensive—the CNC router, the laser cutter—and they’re getting new equipment, like Carvey, which is the mini CNC, and stuff like that. So just the equipment that have to offer is convenient and they have any tool you could want back there.

But I think the biggest thing for me is the community of it and the creative environment. A lot of these things that I’ve thought about, I could do on my own, but putting myself in an environment that is creative makes me more creative. It makes me more excited to be creative. You know, if I’m in here on my computer working on my project and I look over and see Ricky [Santos, intern for Adelsberger Marketing] working on his movie or graphic design stuff, that gets me even more excited to do what I’m doing.