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/05_the-birth-of-desktop-3d-printing-matt-griffin.en.txt
[MUSIC] [NOISE] Hi, | |
I'm here in a New York City taxi, we're on our way to | |
meet with Matt Griffin. I first met Matt back in 2010 when I build | |
my First 3D printer, a MakerBot Cupcake. Since that time, Matt has moved | |
onto a variety of other jobs and has recently begun as the new community | |
manager for Ultimaker, the Desktop 3D printer that we'll be featuring in the | |
hardware segment of this specialization. Matt, thanks for meeting with us today. >> Great, glad to meet with you. >> Let's start from the beginning, | |
how you got interested in 3D printing. >> I had been working in film and theater producing and | |
insulation art and that sort of thing. I started going over to NYC Resistor | |
in Brooklyn and I saw the first prototype of the MakerBots and started | |
thinking about what might be possible. At that time, I was focused on | |
like stop motion animation and puppetry and installation art, | |
like what I could do if I had a 3D printer because I didn't have money | |
to get one and I wanted to use one. >> The only other route was to go pitch in | |
to help put together the kits at MakerBot, because they were just | |
starting out as a business. They had no employees yet. I made a short video of the first | |
high school classroom that had a 3D printer in the curriculum. It was Liz Aaron's class | |
over at Saint Ann's, in Brooklyn, and the students who | |
had adopted it, like a class pet, were doing such incredible work with | |
it and helping each other to use it. I was kind of all in, and | |
was lucky employee 13 at MakerBot and was basically there all the way up to | |
launch of the Replicator2 in Wired. NYC Resistor is a hacker space, one of the early ones that was | |
popular in the United States. It was bringing the model | |
over from Europe. It was a natural place for | |
3D printing to be fostered because the width and style of making these | |
early 3D desktop printers was to find the simplest solution for | |
these little Cartesian machines. That would allow them to use | |
at hand parts, make things using a laser cutter to frame out machines | |
and platforms and those kinds of elements. In the early days, | |
the machines were much tougher to use so you could be really happy to make just | |
a pulley that spins, like that was great compared with today where | |
the level of ambition is much higher. The early days, it was sort of | |
the excitement of saying okay, I need exactly this thing, | |
it's very simple. But instead of going to buy it, | |
we could use some free software, or affordable software, and | |
work our way towards these ideas. Getting feedback from other | |
people who are also similarly trying to solve these problems and then | |
see the tangible results in front of us. If you could race to try things and then | |
it wasn't that upsetting if it didn't work out because you're only using | |
like a dollar worth of plastic. MakerBot came out of the RepRap movement. There had been 3D printers for 20 years, | |
I guess at this point, maybe 25 years. People who were working in engineering or | |
manufacturing, they knew about them and they had a certain place in | |
the tool chain for prototyping. The RepRap movement emerged out of | |
the idea, what if we find a cheaper way to solve the problem of making these | |
machines that have been around using as few specialized parts as possible so | |
that more people can make them? So, the efforts you go into solving your | |
machine can then be replicated by another, which then shaped into replicating itself. They were using like threaded rod and | |
as many 3D printed parts as possible. The goal then became we want to make something like | |
a dedicated machine to make these parts. We're not as concerned about | |
the self-replication part of this, which had been instrumental in spreading | |
the word that this might be possible. MakerBot was essentially the first | |
company to get a lot of attention for being able to offer | |
a machine that would work without you having to have | |
another 3D printer to produce it. The U.S. launch of Ultimaker happened | |
at an event that I was helping to throw at MakerBot at in Brooklyn, BotoCon0. >> Okay. >> I had known about Erik de Bruijn, | |
one of the three founders of Ultimaker because he was another | |
one of the core RepRap people. In fact, he was the first one to | |
successfully produce a working Darwin. The first of the breed of RepRap that | |
people were making in the world and nobody other than Adrian Bowyer, | |
the founder of this movement, | |
had managed to make one that worked. He had that kind of cred, if you will. I knew about him. I knew about his interest. He came to speak in | |
the event we were doing and I have been following | |
their work the whole time. I think that these | |
machines are fantastic and I love how they keep the spirit, | |
the value of community alive. Ultimaker is still an open-source hardware | |
platform and there's an opportunity to introduce more people and more types | |
of communities to these machines. They're setting up a North American | |
branch, and I'm the director of community. [SOUND] Desktop 3D printers | |
are pretty affordable, pretty safe ways to produce | |
something that you need right then to go from a digital | |
file to a physical object. While there are other ways to do this | |
sort of thing, the close connection of having a computer controlled tool and | |
producing parts in a hard plastic that can be used for so many different things | |
means that you can use a desktop 3D printer as a general tool to solve | |
a huge range of problems and needs. One of the things that's new, as far as | |
far as the experience of a designer or engineer using a desktop 3D printer | |
is that the process of creation becomes one that closely ties the digital | |
design with the physical world. The objects that you're | |
making end up being these digital objects where you can kind of keep | |
thinking and sketching anywhere you are, making contributions towards | |
what you're trying to get, regardless of what kind | |
of project you're making. You can basically use a tool like | |
this to think in the real world and be able to show other people | |
what you mean by something by allowing them to encounter it. I think this is a fantastic opportunity | |
for people who are curious and want to learn more about the world. At this point, in the highly accelerated | |
story of desktop 3D printing, we've gone from being excited that it even works to | |
being really picky about how it works. In my opinion, the story is shifting | |
now from the kind of hype that floated around the idea of having | |
a machine that can produce something for you to a more specific understanding | |
of what you can use these tools for with the excitement being located | |
in what you actually do with it. I really think that this is actually | |
a more exciting time in 3D printing than the last couple of years. I have been seeing more and more projects, | |
where instead of the need for every element of it to be 3D printed and | |
going through extreme efforts to solve any sort of problem with the tool you have | |
at hand, that people are now using a 3D printer in a context where they have other | |
tools and other ways to solve things. I'm seeing more clever solutions | |
using a 3D printer when people are faced with, I want to produce | |
the outer shell with this material. Maybe I have this already done, but | |
I need it to attach to this thing and there's not really an off | |
the shelf solution for that, so I'm going to solve this right now by | |
measuring and 3D printing a solution. That coupled with all of the new | |
materials, that geometrically increases the capability of | |
a machine like a desktop 3D printer. And all of the excellent | |
3D printing services, including 3D hubs where you have a crowd sourced opportunity to work with other | |
individuals using machines like this. You're seeing more interesting problems | |
solved because the focus is shifting from like 3D printing is great, to I really | |
want to solve these problems in robotics, in design, in fashion, in construction. And these tools are helping | |
me do more than I could if I was only | |
using traditional tools. [SOUND] The question of whether | |
a desktop 3D printer really is or should be a consumer product, | |
it comes up all the time. To some degree, there are many people | |
I know who never really will have an interest in designing and printing | |
their own objects, which is totally fine. But there is a couple of interesting | |
opportunities as you see more and more places, like universities and | |
local community centers, for people to have access to 3D printers | |
when they need them, even if they wouldn't think of themselves as somebody | |
really that focused on 3D printing. [SOUND] Right now, | |
there are more resources going online for 3D printing than ever before. In particular, a huge range of | |
tutorials created by individual users, as well as the companies producing | |
software tools and hardware tools. You can go online and find videos and tutorials for almost every | |
problem you might encounter and to couple that with asking questions and | |
downloading completed projects from Thingiverse, | |
YouMagine, MyMiniFactory. Places where the people | |
sharing those parts have battle tested them and might even respond | |
to your questions if you're wondering like how this specific feature was produce. And that seems to be a key way to pick up the technical tools for how to do this kind of work and so | |
I would say that resource is fantastic but what you want to make sure you're | |
exploring as well is the design thinking. And you getting more of a sense of how | |
what you're working on might fit into a creative process going from | |
a concept to final piece. For that, taking advantage of classes | |
at local schools and after school programs and universities | |
that are really helping you to see not just how to solve something | |
with the specific machine. [SOUND] Ultimaker has an incredibly | |
warm and inviting community. You can go to ultimaker.com to see the | |
site and learn about the recent products, but you want to make sure to go on into | |
the forums and go to YouMagine and see all these exciting projects that people | |
are doing and then sharing with the world. >> Thank you for your time, Matt. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Great job. [MUSIC] [SOUND] |