Design_at_the_edge

James Dyson — inventor? inovator?

  James Dyson — inventor 
  Originally uploaded by Bob Naylor

You know the feeling when some everyday product lets you down. ‘I could have designed this better myself’, you think. But how many of us turn our thoughts into actions? James Dyson does. He is a man who likes to make things work better. With his research team he has developed products that have achieved sales of over £3 billion worldwide. Whilst at the Royal College of Art (1970) he designed the Sea Truck for Rotork.

This was intended to be the equivalent of a Land Rover, able to move equipment, stores and livestock between islands, etc.

The buyers/users of the Sea Truck tended to abuse the boat thinking its 6-inch draft made it indestructible... ( extracted from Against the Odds) "As a result they tended to ram it into rocks more often than was strictly good or wholesome.

As designers we knew that we could enhance the product by making it unpuncturable. And the best way to do that was to take our lead from those large plastic water pipes which will not even break if you hit them with a hammer..... the pipes would be bunged with what looked like plastic footballs,..

We bought a farmhouse.. in the Cotswolds. With drystone walls to be built.... I found myself spending a lot of time in the company of a wheel barrow... I discovered what a crummy piece of equipment it [ a navvy barrow] really was.

...It was off to France to test the Tube Boat - ....- where we needed to bung the polyethylene pipes, and where I learned how to mould unpuncturable low-density polyethylene into a sphere. And as I turned my first plasic sphere, I knew waht was happening and I said to myself "This is it matey. This is the answer to all my problems."  A revolutionary wheel.

And the Ball Barrow was born

The frames of the Ball Barrow were sprayed with an epoxy powder which was then baked on. Much of the spray ended up on the conveyor and would be sucked onto a screen. Every hour the line stopped as the blocked screen was cleared. Our suppliers told us that big users had a cyclone installed to centrifuge the powder and collected at the bottom of a conical section.. but it was 30 feet high! And £75,000!

On the way home one night Dyson sketched the Cyclone on the roof of the local sawmill, climbed all over it to see how it worked,and used this knowledge  to construct one of his own. As Against all Odds describes.. it worked! And this also was the inspired solution for the vacuum cleaner problem.. The Dyson cleaner that was the end result of Dyson observing observing how quickly existing bag vacuums lost their suction when he was using one at home.

It is this technology that has proved to be the platform for the Dyson successful growth.

But it is intriguing how each nugget of knowledge has been re-used on other user problems. It is just making the connections that is a necessary start. As to whether we should call James Dyson Inventive  or Innovative....:

 

Inventive Merit... Relieves or avoids the constraints of existing ways of doing things
Innovative Merit... Changes the life of the customer. It changes the life of the customer in some way or the world in which the customer experiences things.
Conclusion.. both terms apply!
 

A peep into the future

A peep into the future
Originally uploaded by timtom.ch

'Virtually any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next five to 10 years has already been around for about 10 years,' Bill Buxton said. So our challenge must be: how do we stumble across them?

The Christmas edition of The Economist in 'Face value' writes about the accidental innovator Evan Williams; extracts below

"AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights.......

"So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious............

So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?

.....All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question......He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious ......

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things."

Depending on your point of view we too could have had the idea for Twitter if we blogged a lot and used SMS a great deal and saw that a lot of the traffic is about 'What are you doing?"' Our iPhone could then 'twit' at us.

The Economist September 2003 Technology Quarterly introduction refers to Carl Franklin (Why Innovation Fails) and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky (Creativity in Product Innovation) and writes of how to Expect the unexpected citing the highest innovation success rate as Random event spotting (92.9% successes), whilst referring to several techniques including Evan Williams mental tricks referred to above.

Twitter is interesting as it has proved to be a valid idea (some consumers like it) whilst its overall success is not proven yet as it has not demonstrated viability ( will it make money-directly or indirectly- for its producers?). Winning products and services are a balancing act between validity and viability; risk taking is allowing valid ideas to travel long enough to confirm, or otherwise, the viability of the tangible outcome of that original energising insight or idea. Many established organisations would have killed Twitter by now, but look at the odds of success in Designs on innovation.

The challenge for successful actions energised by the discovery of consumer  insights that become winning innovation is not to look around us but to travel in unfamiliar territory, to look from different points of view, reflect on what we observe and recognise in other words as William Gibson put it

Picture uploaded by david.alliet . Used with thanks under CC.

"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."

He finds small groups of people doing revolutionary things and then imagines what it would be like if everybody was doing those things.

So our 2008 challenge is going the location of what is unevenly distributed, and on reflection knowing we have been there!

Picture uploaded by Joe Shlabotnik . Used with thanks under CC.

Laser? Maser? It'll never catch on! 47 years later...

link to picture of Theodore Maiman

I mentioned Lasers in a post about Technology adoption a while back. Today I noticed in the Independent an obituary for Theodore Maiman- the physicist that built the first (ruby) laser. They wrote:

Theodore Maiman launched the laser age by demonstrating the world's first laser on 16 May 1960. Other groups had already started trying to build lasers when Maiman decided to tackle the problem in mid-1959. He owed his quick success to a particularly elegant design and a keen understanding of the properties of the material he used, synthetic ruby.

Small enough to fit in his hand, the ruby laser worked on the first try - a rarity in cutting-edge research made possible by Maiman's knowledge of physics and his knack for engineering. The ruby laser also changed the course of laser development; unlike the other types being developed at the time, it concentrated its power into pulses. Engineers soon tested pulsed lasers by blasting holes in razor blades and measuring their power in "gillettes" (the number of razor blades through which the laser could burn a hole). Physicists used pulsed lasers to discover new optical effects. Charles Townes, who received the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for developing the maser-laser principle, called Maiman's laser "an important start to a tremendously important field of science and technology".

Picture from Elk Industries

It was only twelve years later that we were using them to solve a difficult problem in making narrow deep holes in "unmachinable" materials with a depth/width ratio of some 15/1.

The obit. really shows how bitter a pill to swallow is new technology!