### World's Most Wired

Rogue Inventor Saul Griffith ————-

Saul Griffith and co-worker Della Shea prepare leftovers for lunch in the communal kitchen at Otherlab. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

As an inventor of large, innovative devices, it only makes sense that Saul Griffith also has a resolution to create a new sport every year. They're not just any sports, either; he's most interested in sports that use technology in new ways. Also, most of them can kill you.

That's how he found himself trapped under water, his foot strapped to a kitesurf board, with a friend dangling from a kite dozens of feet above him. The idea was to use the force between a kitesurfer and his kite to hoist a partner, like a parasailer. But then the nose of the board caught the water.

"The board, when it was put under tension under water, dove down into the bottom of the ocean, and got stuck in the sand," says Eric Wilhelm, who was recording the event. "So [Saul's] got the board stuck in the sand, tied to him, and then he's tied to Tim [Anderson], who's up in the air."

Griffith couldn't cut himself loose, because the tension was what kept Anderson from plummeting into the surf.

That story may not make Griffith — a MacArthur "genius" Fellow and co-founder, with Wilhelm, of Instructables — sound like your prototypical maker. But it's his creative spirit bleeding over from his day job running Otherlab, an independent research and development company in San Francisco.

"I think there's an infinite number of cool technology sports that should exist that don't," says Griffith. "Now we can sort of mix robotics with sports equipment, that suggests a whole range of crazy, interesting possibilities."

A range of crazy, interesting possibilities is also a good way to describe what happens at Otherlab. Griffith and his 20 employees spend their time working on a range of projects, based almost entirely on what they find interesting.

"We do research and development and engineering for things that we care about," says Griffith, who wanders the lab barefoot. "We do some contract R&D work, but only really if the people contracting want to do something that we were going to do already."

The result is a handful of projects — currently five main ones — that range from software creation to hardware engineering to digital publishing, all coexisting in a narrow three-story building Otherlab bought from a pipe organ manufacturer.

It makes an unusual setting for an unusual endeavor. Organ parts still lay scattered, sharing space with 3D printed figures. Shelves and cabinets are either old remnants from the factory, or new laser-cut wood. Rife with entropy, it typically hosts 15 or so employees and Rumpus, Griffith's unkempt black schnauzer.

"If you use the same tools as everyone else, you build the same products. If you write your own tools, you can see new things, design new things." — Saul Griffith ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————

A loud buzz emanates from the room Otherlabbers call the "Organ Room." It's the sound of the Othercutter, a knife-based CNC alternative to a laser cutter, designed with high school students in mind.

Martine Neider is operating the cutter, programming it to adapt to different materials. It cuts by vibrating an X-Acto blade up and down so fast it's a blur, like a high-speed sewing machine. The blade, which can rotate 360 degrees, can cut at different depths depending on material — the cutter can tackle plastic, cardboard, foam core, chip board, and other materials — and a system of motors, rollers, and tracks help it move itself and the material into position.

"The future of education," she says. "Saving children with a razor blade."

The purpose of all this is to develop an alternative to laser cutters. In fact, it looks a lot like a small laser cutter, but it can cut things that lasers can't, like foam core and certain plastics, and it doesn't require ventilation. Also, it's cheap enough to appear in high schools, or so thinks Darpa, which commissioned the device. Otherlab's goal is to have them in 10 local schools by the start of next semester, a hundred next year, and a thousand the year after.

"I actually think it's awesome, 'cause you give children, the students, the capacity to understand that they in fact can design the physical world around them, and that by doing so they can determine what their future will look like," says Griffith. "I think that's a pretty beautiful promise."

The Way Things Work is often in Griffith's mind. One of his projects, Howtoons, illustrates DIY projects for kids. But he's also concerned with the way the industry works. Before World War II, most research was done in independent labs, he says. Since, it's been largely at universities and large corporations.

"That became an incredibly dominant paradigm," he says. "And there are some advantages and some nice things about that system, but I certainly don't think that it's the only way to do R&D that's valuable to the world, and even profitable, and I think it's really worth trying to reinvigorate small independent research labs. I still think they are the most cost-efficient, they can attract talent, they can be very nimble and move very quickly, and I think there should be a lot more places like this."

"I think it actually, it doesn't cost much anymore to have a research facility that can compete with Stanford and Berkeley and MIT," he says, adding that Otherlab has acquired enough tools to do most of what he could at MIT, where he got his doctorate in engineering. "You might need a couple of specialized expensive tools, but it's democratized."

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Raw Materials ————-



Based on the theory that any 3D shape can be formed, roughly, out of a single length of linear material, Griffith and the Otherlab team programmed a strand of virtual DNA to fold into the shape of Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson's head.

Saul transports his son, Huxley, 3, and Huxley's best friend, Ian, 4, from preschool to OtherLab in an electric tricycle he built. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Sharing the Organ Room with the Othercutter are five inflatable robot arms, looking a little like sturdier versions of the arms from the wacky waving inflatable tube men you see outside car dealerships. It's a project headed up by Pete Lynn, who says the nature of inflatable robotics is suited to tasks performed in a niche between high-precision hard robots and humans — ideal for handling food and other less resilient materials.

"Unlike a rigid structure, an inflatable structure can be bent in half, yet return to its original shape structurally unharmed," says Lynn. "Inflatable structures are inherently compliant. This can make them very robust and human safe, although this can make them less precise and thereby more difficult to control."

Saul is regularly shadowed by his puppy, Rumpus, who nips at his ankles as he walks through the office. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

7 Favorite Tools —————-

"I like really specific hand tools that do one job brilliantly. I also love very big powerful CNC machines that can make many things accurately. I don't yet like 3D printers because they are slow and most good material properties come from the thermodynamics of the processing steps, something people seem not to appreciate."

— Saul Griffith

1 Hot knife — Just awesome for prototyping in fabrics and foam.

2 Five-axis vertical machining center — Like a 3D printer, but it has balls and can make things that are big and useful out of materials that are shiny.

3 Industrial-strength router with at least a 4x8 bed size — Most materials come in 4x8 and routers are fast, accurate, and awesome.

4 Laser cutter — Again, bigger = better. It costs too much, but you need it anyway.

5 Water jet — I love it. Cut weird things, fast. Surprisingly easy to use.

6 Our own in-house Othercutter — It's a robotic X-Acto knife that is awesome and will give lots of people great design and CNC experience.

7 Splicing fid — I love splices in ropes so nothing is quite as beautiful as a fid set for making splices. A friend (thanks Joe Brock) made me a set out of hollow stainless steel knitting needles and they are the most perfectly wonderful thing ever.

The latest versions feature static inflatable bladders for shape, and dynamic inflatable sacs at the joints. Compressed air is fed through valves to control the joints and make the arm swing about. With about 20 PSI, the arms can lift around one-fifth what a human can, says Lynn — not bad for two pounds and around $25 worth of materials that fold flat. Add to that the price of the valves, which can run up to $250 (and two are required to run each joint), but Lynn expects to be able to scale up the strength to exceed that of a person by tightening up the seams and running closer to 200 PSI.

The system offers a surprisingly quick movement. The arms snap around, hard enough to bruise. But if a visitor follows Lynn's instructions and puts his head in the four-fingered hand, it grasps gently enough not to hurt, but strong enough he can't tug free.

Griffith's team had to write modeling software for the inflatables, because nobody had done anything like it before. But Otherlab creates its own software much of the time anyway. The 123D line of 3D modeling software offered by Autodesk grew out of one of his projects.

"We write all of our own tools, no matter what project we're building," Griffith says. "Pretty much anything that we're doing requires some sort of design tool that didn't exist before. In fact, the design tools that we write to do the projects that we're doing are a sort of product in and of themselves."

"I think in reality, today, if you use the same tools as everyone else, you kind of build the same products," he says. "If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things."

Griffith has a history of trying new things — and not just new sports. He also co-founded (with Wilhelm and several others) Squid Labs, a design firm that is no longer operating, and Makani Power, which is developing a tethered, kite-like wind turbine.

"So I guess the answer to what's the big-picture question, I thought the experiment was worth running. I thought it would be economically viable, and it's turning out to be very, a very good thing to do," he says, speaking about Otherlab. But his words are similar to how he explains a lot of his projects, though he doesn't expect any of his sports to become popular.

Griffith survived his kiteboarding dunk. He managed to kick free of the ankle leash, escaping to the surface without letting Anderson go. (Footage of another try on the kiteboard parasail is up on YouTube. In this version, Wilhelm is aloft, Anderson is surfing, and Griffith is behind the camera.)

The experience hasn't tempered Griffith's enthusiasm for DIY extreme sports. Next, he says, he wants to make a robotic trampoline. By putting electrically controlled wheels and a vision system under the trampoline, he thinks he can program it to follow whomever's jumping on it, so they always land in the middle.

"So now you want to go down the street, you start running in that direction, but you can jump like Superman and the trampoline will always catch you," he says. "So obviously this is kind of dangerous, and the first time it doesn't work, you go flying off. But I still think it's worth doing. I think it'd be awesome. I think you can see why it would be awesome. How else do you feel like Superman?"

### World's Most Wired

Wired is putting a spotlight on the brightest geniuses you've never heard of — the entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and designers who are quietly shaping the future behind the scenes. They're the World's Most Wired, and we'll be profiling one of them bi-weekly through the end of the year. Check it out here.