[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]