When I was in college, I spent a year on and off building things with my hands for fun. The way I did that was generally by misappropriating study time and instead spending it in the machine shop. It’s a place where:
- people build different things
- people see each other build different things, and ask what they’re working on & why they’re working on it
- people broadcast feedback and advice on the things other people were building
The machine shop was a community uniquely tailored to encouraging friendcatching in the lowest-resistance way. You can imagine the value of low-resistance socialization when the social group in question is a dozen engineering students, each with a slightly awkward social manner.