Tonight, the grand opening for The Garage was captured by NUIT AMPS and celebrated as a giant step forward in supporting innovation and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University. Inspired by Northwestern student teams winning innovation contests at other universities, Northwestern leadership insisted on a high tech facility to support these endeavors locally.
Built as part of the North Parking garage the 2nd floor at 2311 N Campus Drive, sharing space with McCormick School of Engineering classrooms as well as the School of Communications Audiology department, The Garage brings to the University an outstanding developmental incubation space to support collaborative projects.
http://thegarage.northwestern.edu/
The space is intentially designed to appear to be a level in an actual parking garage – exposed concrete and conduits, garage doors, and simulated parking spaces which add to the raw nature of the space. Supporting the collaborative groups will be a number of 4K display systems with cloud-based conferencing capabilities to support world-wide collaboration, and a leading edge technology solution called Bluescape that will enable group collaboration, interactivity from remote locations, a gigantic landscape of workspace all of which is cloud-based and manipulated via touch on 84″ 4K monitors.
It’s all very impressive, as was the turnout tonight – nearly all of the NU Board of Trustees members as well as dozens of special guests (about 150 or so).
