MIX Lab and Partners Producing PPEs to Support Local Hospitals

Racing Against Time

Montclair State’s MIX Lab is innovating to deliver thousands of face shields to COVID-19 front line workers.

When Montclair State’s MIX Lab team started producing face shields on 3D printers amid the growing COVID-19 pandemic, they quickly realized it wasn’t enough. The team needed to figure out how to make more – and fast.

“The need for PPE (personal protective equipment) is at scale,” says Iain Kerr, co-director of the MIX Lab and professor of Innovation Design. Kerr reports that in northern New Jersey alone, the demand is for hundreds of thousands of face shields, if not more. 

The MIX Lab, founded in 2015 and housed in Montclair State University’s Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (FCE&I), is a facility where students and community members work together to solve problems using innovation and digitally mediated “making” – aka 3-D printing. 

To address the need for better design and process in making mass quantities of face shields, the MIX Lab has joined with Montclair Design Week/DesignShed and Michael Rees of William Paterson University. The team is now collaborating on everything from research to design to supply chain management to hospital interface, volunteer recruitment, social media outreach and fundraising.

The MIX Lab (Making and Innovating for X, where X is the unknown) is the innovation research hub under the umbrella of the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation located in the Feliciano School of Business at Montclair State University.

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