On Saturday 11 July, Laidlaw Scholars will be visiting Makespace, a community workshop in the heart of Cambridge, as part of their leadership training. As well as participating in hands-on ‘Micro Makes’, they will also hear from a series of entrepreneurial Makespace members, all of whom have used the space to develop and test out their products.
Ben Tristem
Ben Tristem is the founder of GameDev.tv, the Cambridge-based online game development school that has helped more than two million students in over 150 countries learn to make games. Launched in 2014 on the back of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, GameDev.tv's courses — including the best-selling Complete Unity Developer — are built on Ben's conviction that people learn by doing, not just watching.
A computing graduate of Imperial College London, Ben started working for himself at 15 and explored careers as a commercial pilot, stuntman, and rock climbing instructor before building and selling a computer support business and becoming an angel investor and mentor in Cambridge. He is also a prolific maker and former Makespace member, using CAD and 3D printing to solve his own and others' everyday problems — a true purveyor of the Makespace mindset of getting stuck in and discovering what works by doing. He brings sharp insight on "vertical slice" product approaches: building the smallest complete version of an idea first, and letting reality do the teaching.
David Jordan
David is an independent researcher, engineer, and founding director of the Living Physics Lab. Backed by the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), his work merges theory, experiments, and engineering to understand how living cells learn, adapt, and compute.
David has been a long-time MakeSpace member and has designed and has built custom bioreactors at MakeSpace, for use in his research projects.
Josh Jones
Josh Jones is a brand strategist, creative director, and illustrator. For over a decade he has helped science and technology companies, in quantum computing, genomic diagnostics, and AI-guided surgery, turn deep technical work into brands that investors, partners, and customers can actually understand: positioning, naming, messaging, and visual identity. He is also a Maker and part of the management team at MakeSpace.
Peter Cassell
Peter is an AI engineer and a long-term member of MakeSpace, Cambridge's community workshop. He builds AI agents — software systems that can plan, act, and check their own work — and has put them to use in the real world, from automated software testing to legaltech applications. Equally at home in code and in the workshop, Peter embodies the MakeSpace approach of getting stuck in and learning by building: prototype it, test it against reality, and let what you discover shape the next iteration. He is part of the team bringing this session to MakeSpace in partnership with the King's Entrepreneurship Lab.