Making things for fun
MIT senior Spencer Wilson says his family’s porch in rural southern Georgia was where he and his parents would often sit and “pull random ideas, and put them together into something new.” His mother, an entrepreneur, was always thinking up new ventures, while his father, an architect and carpenter, designed functional sculptures and furniture. The family often puzzled over problems together. Wilson would then head to his father’s backyard wood and metal shop, where he would attempt to hammer some of the ideas into material form. In fact, Wilson spent a good part of his teens either on the porch or in the shop, focused on a single project: the restoration of a 1967 Volkswagen Microbus. He encountered his first VW bus on a middle-school trip to Washington, D.C. “I had never seen a car like that before,” Wilson recalls. Upon returning home, he started to cast around for a Microbus of his...