It’s been twenty years since the Art School MacLab had any major work done. The lab moved into its current location in 1993, and those twenty years have seen an incredible change in how designers use technology. Back then hardly any students owned their own Mac, the MacLab was the place you went to sit at the computer and actually make your work, usually all night long, if you were a grad student and lucky enough to have 24hr access. It was the days of floppy disks, Quark Xpress, SyQuest drives and no internet! Many a design student spent more time in the MacLab than any other place on campus, especially his or her own bed!

MacLab Director Shelley Stepp remembers, “Before 1993 the MacLab was actually in what is now the design director’s office, with two Amigas and two Mac 512ks (the days when faculty Eric Martin would put his cigarette on top of the Macs and leave burn marks!). Students naturally gravitated toward the Macs, which resulted in the move to get a grant for the next MacLab in A211-h across from the Art office. The MacLab moved to its current space at the end of October 1993 and less than 3 months later, the earthquake hit in January. Kary Arimoto-Mercer, Mr Keedy, and Dave Muller had built the lab right before the earthquake. After the earthquake Deb Littlejohn and I had to move all the Macs out to a Broad studio for testing, to see which machines worked and what didn’t, since they all ended up on the ground!”

Thanks to the hard work and perseverance of Shelley Stepp, 2014 sees the redesigned MacLab open with the space totally reconfigured as a classroom teaching space. A new projector, new sound system, teaching station, motorized screen and window shades, makes the space unrecognizable from its 1993 incarnation. As a reminder of how much times have changed (and to make the faculty feel their age!), a row of colored plastic iMacs sits in the display cases alongside work from the poster archive. Strange to think that in another twenty years the sleek silver iMacs we now use will probably be on display as antiques in the same cases.