On 17 March 2005 one of the most beautiful stories of recent Italian innovation began: Arduino was born. In fact, one of his inventors, and co-founder of the company that bears his name, that is Massimo Banzi, says that this is only the day of his baptism, “when we chose the name, the project was born a few months earlier, but it did not have a first name.
Except that we had to go into production with the first card, and the factory had cornered us, they wanted a name, and so with the other co-founder, David Cuartielles, we decided to call it after the bar in Ivrea where they had an aperitif, the Arduino bar “. If after all these years in which it has been talked about, you still don’t know what Arduino is you are unforgivable, but since this is an Almanac, to make you forgive I will ask you to read how I described the birth of Arduino in a small book that I published in 2013 (with minor corrections from the original to make it more understandable).
“One morning in April 2002 a big bearded boy with a passion for electronics arrived in Ivrea… it was Massimo Banzi. He was 32 years old (curious, the same age as Piergiorgio Perotto when he started the 101 Program in Ivrea) and a rather unlikely curriculum: apparently he was only one geek like so many others who had fallen in love with electronics as a child playing with the popular kit made for Braun by German designer Dieter Rams (“I took apart everything and attached wires: when things didn’t explode or ignite, I had learned something”). At that moment in his life Banzi was in search of his destiny: he had a modest diploma in an industrial technical institute; an interrupted course of study in engineering (“we watched slides all day without ever doing anything concrete, a deadly bore”); an experience as a webmaster for ItaliaOnline, a position he had given up on the spot when, in the face of nights spent sleeping on the floor in the office to start the portal, in 1994 he was offered 87,000 gross lire increase; he had then ended up in London, where for a while he had worked in a venture capital fund, which did not appeal to him at all, but at least he had learned English well.
Here: this language story must have turned out to be more important than expected in the job interview that April morning. Across the table was a real super star: Gillian Crampton Smith. She came from the Royal College of Art in London where she had invented the first course of interaction design of the world: he taught to design objects that interacted with people; digital in this field, as we will see, is very important. And so when Telecom Italia – which in the meantime had acquired a lifeless Olivetti – in 2001 decided to open a futuristic Institute of Interaction Design in Ivrea, she had called to direct it. Banzi had sent her a letter of application to try to teach, “the most beautiful letter she has ever written”, but despite this, with that curriculum full of broken roads, he was certainly not the ideal candidate for the director. In any case, since a professor had suddenly returned home to Denmark for personal reasons and someone who could handle some electronics and speak fluent English was needed, Crampton Smith had called him to plug that hole on the fly.
Initially Banzi had to stay in Ivrea for only a couple of weeks to supervise the students’ work in view of an exhibition in Turin; but he remained there for four years, until the unexpected closure of the Institute, which took place in May 2006. That school was a true breeding ground of talents that today are scattered between New York, Copenhagen, Lugano, Helsinki and who knows where still with important positions. But who really made a revolution on it was Banzi. He quickly realized that there was something wrong with the learning method. He started from the assumption that if you design in this century you cannot limit yourself to computer simulations, those can do them all and in the end they prove nothing. Imagine a wooden iPhone: it is a perfectly useless object to understand what it could be. If you are a designer in this century you have to rather make prototypes that work: with real interaction. In short, you must know how to use electronics. The students agreed, but the tools on the market for experimenting were too complicated and too expensive: in a word, out of date. “I wanted to do something that demystifies technology. The interesting thing for the user is the final product, no matter if the software is written in C or in Java. It only counts if the prototype is functional ”.
“Clearly referring to the project of engineer Perotto – who had disappeared just the year before – Banzi launched the“ 2003 Program ”; and then, at the end of February 2005, what would become the tool of the industrial revolution underway: Arduino. The name he decided with his three partners at the last moment before going into production, inspired by the sign of the bar in Ivrea where they were talking: “Antica Caffetteria Arduino”. He thus discovered that Arduino had been an Italian king of the year 1000, not bad as a patron saint; then it also sounded good in English and it was not a detail since from the first moment this wanted to be a project destined for the whole world. But what is electronic Arduino? Correctly said, it is “a platform based on very simple hardware and on an equally simple and flexible software that allows rapid prototyping with electronics”. Translated for the rest of the world, it is a small computer the size of a credit card that costs just twenty euros: you connect it to your personal computer with a USB cable, write the action you want a certain object to do and magically that card it becomes the heart of a series of objects that can interact with us. AND’ the Internet of Things made by people instead of large companies and it’s easier to do than to say: Arduino, in fact, is designed to be used by beginners and not by technicians. Children, for example, are very good at creating intelligent objects, just like little Banzi enjoyed playing with the Braun kit. Is called learning by doing: if you want to learn something, the best way is to start doing it.
“That twenty-euro card, designed by a failed engineer and built by small companies on the verge of bankruptcy as they had sprung up around the Olivetti in the golden age, was the beginning of a new world. A world where you can try to produce what you have in mind by yourself. Banzi said this best of all when he opened Ted Global in Edinburgh in 2012 in front of the innovation elite: “Now you no longer need anyone’s permission to do wonderful things”.
Today Arduino is a company of 160 employees and a community of thousands of people. Arduino Week will be held around the world next week, hundreds of events to celebrate another way of doing innovation.