[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]
