Contributors

Daniel Weiss (Uncle Bill’s Magic Tricks) is a computer geek at heart but likes to work with materials he can touch in the real world as well. “That,” he says, “leads to my strong interest in being a maker.” He lives in “steamy Saint Louis” with his wife, Jan, and two kids who are makers themselves and love to perform the tricks he’s built. He’s currently working on yet more magic-related projects, including a set of magician’s tables “designed for easy setup, teardown, and carrying around.” A consultant for IBM by day, he loves “to create things people can appreciate for the final result, but also (hopefully) for the effort or technique that went into the project.”

Tall, dark, and geeky, rogue technologist Edwin Wise (Boom Stick) admits to working in “anything except wood, ’cause a guy has got to have limits. And I hate sanding.” He loves Halloween, and volunteers as an actor, designer, and special effects maker for a charity haunted house. A bit of a maverick, he says, “Some people collect money; I collect skills. I’m not the best at any of them, but I have a nice collection and it’s growing every year.” Among them are writing, ballroom dancing with his wife, jewelry making, robotics, and working with metal and digital hardware.

Dr. Steven Griffin (Smart Structure) is an aerospace engineer who enjoys finding simple solutions to multidisciplinary problems. He has explored the use of smart structures in applications from musical instruments to space launch vehicles and is always on the lookout for new opportunities. He’s currently working on “a musical shoe, and an active bridge for a guitar or violin.” He lives in Albuquerque, N.M., with his wife and two children, and loves hiking with them in the mountains for fun (as well as training for local trail runs and triathlons).

Kris Magri (engineering intern) became enamored with R2-D2 at an early age and built her first robot from plans in a book when she was in high school. Before returning to school to study mechanical engineering, she earned a degree in electrical engineering and worked at Parallax, where “my crowning achievement was to get eight robots to do the Hokey Pokey.” She’s also worked in the oil field, detonated dynamite, and taken down many a machine, from the smallest micro to big Unix servers, with her stellar programming skills. She teaches robotics to eighth-graders, and hopes to someday make a clean, neat, reliable robot with no visible black tape.

Brian McNamara (Toy Music Sequencer ) has been pulling things apart since he was 2 or 3; many years later, he has figured out how to put some things back together. Some of them even seem to be useful. After working in a wide range of electronics workshops, from avionic to scientific, Brian finally decided to set up his own workshop at home and started inventing fun stuff. Apart from electronics, Brian loves music, gardening, and taking his two kids on hiking adventures.

As the youngest child of three, Noah Webb (Proto photography) always had to sit in the back of the “sparkly brown” family station wagon, so he gained a sharp eye at an early age. That back seat, he says, “forced me to become a photographer. Looking through that window was like looking through a big view camera watching the world go by.” He lives in Los Angeles in a 1910 Craftsman home, and loves cookies, swimming, snowboarding, and “pushing my body’s limits as I grow older.” His latest project is a handmade book about a trip to Ecuador.

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