March/April 2008

The Fearless Inventor

Continued from page 1

By Tom Nugent

Raised in Sydney, Australia, as the son of a textile engineer father and an artist mother who gave him what he calls an "incredibly rich and creative childhood," Griffith studied metallurgical engineering at the University of New South Wales before arriving at the Institute in 1998. His time at MIT was "a fabulous six years," he says, sitting at a gadget- and tool-cluttered worktable at Squid Labs, which he founded in 2004 with Eric J. Wilhelm '99, SM '01, PhD '04; Colin A. Bulthaup '01, MEng '01; and former Media Lab researcher Dan Goldwater. "I don't think there's anyplace on earth quite like Cambridge when it comes to working with smart, creative people."

"I certainly wasn't a classical graduate student, content to work on projects handed down by the academic lords above," he says. "I was always getting distracted by this, that, and the other." Describing his dissertation as "so far out that it was almost a science fiction project," Griffith notes that he was "lucky to get a very generous advisor, Joe Jacobson."

One of Griffith's key achievements at the Media Lab was to create self-replicating objects made of collections of small particles with built-in instructions for assembling and even improving themselves, says his colleague Paul W. K. Rothemund, a senior research fellow in computer science at Caltech. "Saul created objects that could encode binary information which can be faithfully replicated," Rothemund says, "and his clever mechanisms for making them were a nice step forward." Although Griffith's objects didn't do anything that could be commercialized, they could one day lead to machines capable of reproducing without human assistance. (Imagine throwing a truck made of Legos into a bucket of Lego components and shaking it, Griffith says; then imagine the truck giving its information to the components, which would harness the energy of the vibrating bucket to assemble into more trucks. That's kind of the idea.)

Griffith has worked on several other projects linking logic and information theory to materials science, and on top of everything else, he and some of his colleagues have put together an open-source technology website (www.instructables.com) where do-it-yourselfers can trade engineering ideas and designs.

Then there are the "howtoons" that Griffith and Joost Bonsen, EE '90, started creating while they were still MIT grad students. Eager to encourage the next generation of inventors and technology enthusiasts, they began collaborating with DC Comics illustrator Nick Dragotta on cartoons to show kids of all ages how to build such devices as a balloon-powered hovercraft and safety goggles cut from plastic soft-drink bottles. They posted them online, and last fall HarperCollins published a compilation of 15 of them in the book Howtoons: The Possibilities Are Endless!