Australian Student wins International Award

“I am still extremely interested in this area,” he enthuses. “The idea of Open Source Hardware and people sharing their design code over the web is very powerful. I think it’s actually more relevant to more people than pure open source software. I'd love to see everyone involved in product development by sharing designs on the web and manufacturing their own personal items at home or in properly resourced local libraries.”

“So I'm very interested in developing this molding concept in areas outside of lenses and that is something I will be doing in a small start-up company (www.squid-labs.com) when I finish at MIT in a few months and the low-cost eye testing device will also be developed in that company.

Griffith attributes his inventiveness to his nurturing parents, an artist (http://www.pamelagriffith.com/) and an academic who reside in his native Sydney, Australia. “I was always tinkering with things I found laying around, just to get ideas,” he recalled. “When you’re a kid you don’t really think about it, but you learn a lot about how stuff works. Now, I can subconsciously draw upon all of the things I broke growing up. Fortunately, my parents encouraged my toy de-construction!” The Howtoons Project

When awarding the Lemelson prize, the judges also noted the work Griffith had done in a project named Howtoons (www.howtoons.org), in which Griffith seeks to instill that same mischievous spirit of discovery in future generations of kids. Part comic strip and part science experiment, the one-page Howtoons help children find imaginative new uses for soda bottles, plastic buckets, duct tape, balloons, ice, salt and other household materials.

Griffith said the project aims to inspire kids to see the world not for what it is, but for what it could be. “I'm currently very passionate about www.howtoons.org and believe education in the physical world around us is incredibly important,” said Griffith.

"Too many people grow up with no understanding of the technology that is pervasive in their lives. We are pursuing a very hands on educational content that is also just damned mischievous and fun, I am intrigued by cartoons as a high-bandwidth visual communication tool. I'm currently looking at a book deal to make those happen in the real world, and potentially TV and film as well.

Much of Griffith’s research is in industrial materials science and manufacturing. “I’m influenced by the elegant way nature manufactures things, which is significantly better, in most cases, than the way humans do. I hope to develop new manufacturing processes that are simpler and can make things more efficiently and with less waste. You can characterise my work as ‘tools of mass construction,’” he said.

Griffith’s doctoral thesis at the MIT Media Laboratory explores the relationship between information and physical structure in materials and self-assembly. He is looking at ways to build programmatically assembling machines and materials with higher complexity and function than current self-assembling systems. His research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Center for Bits and Atoms and DARPA.

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