"It's the third name he's had since I've known him," Griffith says.
One of the first things Griffith does when he arrives at work is remove his Crocs. He then proceeds to carry out his day, in a workshop full of screws, nails, razor blades, and wood chips, barefoot.
"There are two theories on safety," he pronounces. "There's the SUV model: You wear steel-toed boots and helmets and just survive the injury. Or you go naked, and you're hyperaware of your surroundings. That's ninja style. I'm ninja."
So Saul Griffith works barefoot in a workshop.
"Don't tell OSHA."
He and Bachrach have a conference call scheduled with one of the world's largest toymakers, based in Germany, and because Griffith is stuck with unexpected child care, he hasn't been able to make a model he needs. So the two men convene over a drafting table, and Griffith begins to cut a cardboard model that appears to be a giant puzzle piece while cooing at his son.
Later, Bachrach suggests to me that one thing that makes Other Lab effective (and nimble) is that it can easily produce prototypes in-house; impromptu fabrication is a strength for both him and Griffith, on top of their individual specialties. Bachrach was inspired recently by a friend who is a toymaker and who churns out prototypes and stows them away in a cabinet. When the market appears primed for a specific kind of toy, he pulls one out and sells it. Then it goes on top of the cabinet as a totem of his success. And the collection grows. Some will be hits. Others might fail.
"To some degree, we want to do that," Bachrach says. "We're playing around with the idea of building a reputation as a home of cool ideas."
The tip of Griffith's razor blade snaps off and pings across the office, just one more hazard waiting to test the ninja scientist.
What else is going on here? So many things.
The bikes and partial bikes are study pieces for the kid-carrying trike. Griffith shows me a model built out of Legos -- it is more stretched than the clunky Danish bike, has two wheels up front, and leans with the rider. "Legos -- the best prototyping tool of all time," he says.
At one point, a deliveryman wanders in and announces the arrival of 400 pounds of lightweight metal shafts, a peculiar order. "It's for a bike-rack project," Griffith says, and then produces a model for a small, customizable, lightweight, and easily assembled bike rack that can be fit to any car in any configuration. You just cut the shafts to size and put it together. The design of the rack is, essentially, in the joints. "It could be a bike rack, a surfboard rack, anything," he says.
In Griffith's world, almost everything can be improved, and almost anything is worth the time that might take. Not because the world so desperately needs a smarter bike rack but because there are direct but invisible threads that run from the frivolous to the profound.
Many things under way at Other Lab relate to a DARPA project on programmable matter (DARPA being the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the famous federal government research laboratory in which far-fetched ideas are pursued until they become not-so-far-fetched. For instance, the Internet). "It's cool math for decomposing 3-D geometry," Griffith says.
Space-filling curves
Patterns for a 3-D chain that can create any shape. Now
Currently, the men are fiddling with toy applications based around some nifty modeling software written by Bachrach (that's the math Griffith is talking about). Using the software, they can scan or design pretty much any object and then print it in pieces so the object can be assembled in 3-D. The first tangible application of this project is the 3-D puzzle. Sitting here and there are plastic elephants and dinosaurs that appear to be inflatable but are actually puzzles made up of interlocking plastic pieces. There's a metal ball, made of pieces, as well as a 3-D gorilla made by stacking flat pieces of cardboard on top of one another.
"What's the mega-application?" I wonder.
"I'm not sure there is one," Griffith says. "Making car bodies a little easier to assemble, maybe? Sometimes you gotta enjoy an idea for what it is and hand it off to somebody and see what they can do."
For the more linear among us, it would seem hard to create a productive day out of this mess, but a mind like this doesn't require conventional structure. You seamlessly shift from toys to energy and then make a bike rack over coffee.
"Did I promise you something other than chaos?" Griffith asks me at one point. "If so, I'm sorry."
Inflatable airfoil
A study for a lightweight airfoil, or wing. The goal was to see how much distortion occurred when the wing was inflated and how that affected performance.
Look! Up in the Sky!
"Basically, I just spent two and a half years working on utility-scale energy," Griffith says with a sigh as he chews at a slice of fancy pizza. By this he means an energy project
that could produce electrons for the grid in mass quantity, as opposed to
something clever that barely generates more energy than you put in to build it. "For me, energy is the issue of the century, both in consumption and the way we make it."
By 2007, Squid Labs had splintered into the various component parts that it had spawned: OptiOpia; Howtoons; Instructables, a user-generated DIY site that teaches people how to make just about anything at home; Potenco, which makes hand-held human-powered generators that can be used to recharge cell phones and laptops, and which is also working on bike-mounted units that could bring power to remote areas; MonkeyLectric, which makes some seriously cool bike lighting that is now on sale in bike shops around the world; and Makani Power, where Griffith chose to deep-dive.
Griffith devised a way to harness wind energy where no one else was -- high in the sky, where it blows hard and, more important, consistently. Makani's plan was to deploy robotic kites the size of corporate jets. They would fly at 1,000 feet to 5,000 feet, converting wind to energy through a turbine and running the energy down to earth via a tether line. A fleet of Makani kites, Griffith believes, could power a city. The company received $15 million in investment from Google as part of that company's renewable-power initiative. "It's a matter of time before someone makes high-altitude wind energy a commercial success," Griffith says. "It's not going to be next year, but it's not 100 years away. "
