Outside-the-box thinker
When an aspiring mechanical engineer on a budget wants a top-of-the-line guitar, what does he do? He makes it himself, of course. At age 13, Nathan Spielberg — now an MIT senior — began building his first guitar, a process that consumed his attention for eight hours a day, every weekend, for 3 1/2 years. Reminiscing now, he calls it a full-time hobby, but it was also pure inspiration: Strumming away on what was once a mere block of wood, Spielberg grew to appreciate the potential to turn an abstract idea into a functional object. As a mechanical engineering major at MIT, he has held onto this tenet, but turned his attention to a new means of production: 3-D printing. Until recently, Spielberg worked in the MIT Media Lab with Neri Oxman, the Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. There, he focused on optimizing system designs that...
