Maker Spotlight: Matthew Borgatti

3D Printing & Imaging Art & Sculpture Craft & Design Digital Fabrication
Maker Spotlight: Matthew Borgatti

Name: Matthew Borgatti

Home: Brooklyn, New York

Makerspace: NYC Resistor

Day Job: Running Super-Releaser, the soft robotics research, development, and design company. I also consult on design engineering, industrial design, and mechanical design projects for clients ranging from Cadillac to Google X to NASA (through a subcontract with Final Frontier Design, the spacesuit design company in the Brooklyn Navy Yard).

Getting drawn by a pen plotter designed by Trammell Hudson

Portfolio | Twitter | Instagram

How did you get started making?

Although I’ve always kept a sketchbook and sculpted little clay things, I started out my professional making-stuff career in high school as an illustrator and web designer. In college I switched majors from illustration to industrial design – in large part due to the influence of professors Jonathan Bonner and Merlin Szasz. I enjoyed the challenges they presented for solving problems in physical space. During school I landed an internship at The Character Shop, working on animatronics for Snakes on a Plane, and a full-time job at ADI, machining parts and building mechanisms for Alien Vs Predator 2: Requiem. As my career progressed, I started seeing how much digital fabrication could speed up what I was exploring, and that put me into contact with the maker community.

The Little Spaceman Lamp, first sculpted in clay, and then cast in Smooth-on resin

What type of maker would you classify yourself as?

Dielectrical Materialist. Seriously though, I do think about how being excited to make things and solve problems with stuff you’ve built can make people miss the root causes of problems. You always have to ask why the problem you’re trying to address with any design is there in the first place, and whether your intervention is going to address those material conditions. You could call this etiological design, if you wanted to box it up in snappy academic jargon.

I tend towards working with my hands, making a lot of quick iterations on ideas, starting with sketching and working from there, and leaning on CAD for spatial problem solving and simulation (I’ve been using SolidWorks for 15 years now). I like combining digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing, and CNC machining) with quick and dirty building techniques to get things out into the physical world as quickly as possible to evaluate and understand. I’m also a big advocate of multidisciplinary design and casting a really wide net on potential solutions to problems and what other research is out there before falling in love with your own ideas.

Different iterations on a stamp design for a series of custom made scratch-off business cards.

I can highlight how this multidisciplinary thinking really amplifies design with an example from a project my collaborator Kari Love and I did for Google Wing. We needed to figure out a way to make impact resistant drone shells at scale. The biggest challenge was that the Google team wanted to make the drone use the visual language of something you’d want around your home like a lamp or a piece of furniture rather than a slick futuristic surveillance bot. We started looking to fashion, garment design, origami, hat making, shoe design, and furnishings for inspiration. We bought a ton of materials and made quick physical sketches. Simultaneously, we reached out to experts in hat making, costuming, soft goods, and any field we could think of that shared some of the same space as the problem we were tackling. Eventually, an expert haberdasher advised us about a cool natural fiber that could be formed like a plastic, and a professional broadway costume material sourcer connected us up with an artificial flower shop that could press the material into any shape we requested at any volume we could hope for. If we hadn’t broken the problem down, asking about the essential features we needed and what fields could provide solutions, we never would have come up with a solution that fit the problem so well.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve made? 

I’m pretty fond of the soft robotic spacesuit airlocks (called Wrist Dams) I designed for the Mechanical Counterpressure Glove System in the next-gen EVA spacesuit. That project involved a lot of work making the process for casting complex silicone parts quick enough to iterate on. It’s so hard to model the dynamics of these soft mechanisms. You really have to make one and test it to see what it will do – every hour I shaved off the time it took to make a casting added up to a bunch more shots I had at perfecting the design within the time and budget constraints of the contract.

The first iteration of the Wrist Dam and the mold that generated it. This design was generated via rapid prototyping to validate the concept for the NASA evaluators during the short pre-proposal period. This mold design features a collapsable core held together with magnets so that the wrist dam forms a seamless airtight hollow toroid

I’m also really proud of the microscopic tardigrade aquarium I made for Midnight Commercial and Google ATAP. It was this microlens-array powered microscope that looked into a tiny self-contained biome of waterbears, algae, and other microscopic critters we mixed up as an artificial biome – all designed to live in your phone and let you watch this little world through your screen. I got to do everything from design biological research experiments, to diving into whitepapers on micro-optics and tardigrade lifecycles, to simulating EDM cut sheet metal flexures, to figuring out how to cheaply duplicate micro-machined lenses using silicone casting.

The Tardigrade Team at Midnight Commercial: (from left to right) David Nunez, Sam Posner, Jesse Gonzalez, Bailey Meadows, Noah Feehan, Matthew Borgatti, Jennifer Bernstein
Evaluating micro lens arrays (MLA’s) using a piece of equipment I designed called the POE. The POE (for Precision Optical Evaluator) was a flexure-based microstage that could accurately position test MLA’s and tardigrade biomes within 25µm and read out their relative positions via laser triangulation. This contraption helped us identify how accurate our manufacturing process had to be to get good focus on our final image as we planned out full-scale production

Any advice for people reading this? 

Everything has history. Always look for mentors and people with experience who have been around the block a few times. I find that people are really eager to talk with people who are excited to solve problems, and they really want to prevent them from hitting the wall on the same challenges they’ve faced.

You don’t need to be a world expert to try something, but you should always be looking across your field and others to make certain you’re not reinventing the wheel or ignoring important complications that weren’t on your radar. Don’t hesitate to try new things. Don’t hesitate to ask questions, even if they might make you sound dumb.

Find and solve the underlying, fundamental problem whenever you can. If you don’t bring moral ambition, the needs of the user, and the impact of your intervention into your work, who will?

Holding the Editor’s Choice Blue Ribbon at Maker Faire for my musical sculpture: The Anywhere Organ

We highlight different makers from our broad community to show you the faces and stories behind the projects. Meet all the amazing people featured in Maker Spotlight. Want to nominate someone, maybe even yourself? Send a note with your responses to the bolded prompts above to makerspotlight@makermedia.com.

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I get ridiculously excited seeing people make things. I just want to revel in the creativity I see in makers. My favorite thing in the world is sharing a maker's story. find me at CalebKraft.com

View more articles by Caleb Kraft

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