ENGINEERING

Maker, in order to scale restoration efforts in the same way as you might scale manufacturing.

Coral Maker’s method aims to speed up restoration by mass producing new limestone skeletons and grafting live coral onto them. When deployed in the ocean, the groupings of coral on the structure join up and fuse, coating the manufactured skeletons much faster and giving them the potential to reach adult size within 12-18 months.

Pro Bono Support

Work on this method began while Foster was working at the California Academy of Sciences on a Fulbright Fellowship. With Coral Maker founded, Foster joined the Autodesk Technology Centers Outsight Network residency.

Through pro bono support from the Autodesk Foundation, Autodesk employees located across North America and the UK assisted Coral Maker on the design, engineering, advanced manufacturing and robotic automation capabilities needed to help scale production.

“Taryn comes up with these great ideas and she sketches them down, but she doesn’t know how to translate that sketch into a physical product. And that’s kind of where we came in,” says Rob Bowerman, an Autodesk principal technology consultant based in its Technology Centre in Birmingham, UK.

“We would use Fusion 360 to turn that sketch into a physical model, and then as soon as we have that physical model, she could get a real feel for what that would look