I am fascinated by anything
mechanical, especially with an engine. Not in a petrol head way, but more throughan empathy with mechanical
objects. I figure it started aged three through motherly praise for being able
to reassemble broken wooden clothes pegs and has escalated to become a form of
escapism. It’s just another way to look at objects.
Think about it, how can you understand the strength
of anything unless you push it until it breaks? How can you understand the
effort, thought, logic and ingenuity that went into making the things around
us, say a compact camera, a car or a health system, unless you have taken one
apart and seen inside?
The current way design is taught rarely allows or
trusts intuition. Yet because of this the craft of design is being rapidly
lost, replaced by reliance on ‘the computer says so’. Does this loss matter; well I guess we now make
so very little in Europe you could argue why bother attempting to impart this intuition?
But Brunel used intuition for most of what he designed; Howard Hughes managed
to make a massive Spruce Goose flying boat take to the air with a blend of
intuition and elementary calculations.
Intuition is the bedrock upon which innovation is built. Its absence leaves the necessity to rely on a complicated computer process to get any feel for what is possible, which can stifle invention and narrows our horizons. Accurate calculations are vital to engineer an item down to the lightest possible weight in instances where weight versus strength is key. But away from aeroplanes or performance bicycles this aspect of engineering becomes far less relevant simply, because of safety factors that can be easily built in. Safety Factor is a ratio between how strong something needs to be to just prevent it breaking versus how strong it actually is. For most objects we daily encounter this ratio is typically in the range 5:1, meaning something is usually five times stronger than absolutely necessary providing a wide margin of error. Only for highly stressed objects like the aeroplane does that number drop to just 1.5:1 and even that does not make it unsafe to fly, you just need to know more accurately what a maximum load might be to add the appropriate margin of error. For everything else reliance on a computer to calculate strength can be overkill, unless of course it is your business to sell computer software. Generally it needs neither their accuracy nor precision but without intuition what else can you rely on?
Really the value of intuition depends on the type of
society we are and want to become. If we continue to accept a predominantly
disposable society that landfills at will we come under pressure to conserve
resources making it worth engineering out weight; less plastic means less
landfill. If, on the other hand, you see the fallacy of disposability then the
future would lie in making fewer, better things that last longer, where weight
equates to strength and longetivity? If so then the experience that sufficed
for a century from Brunel to Concorde could still be relevant. Sadly now we no
longer value it or trust it.
I met a lifelong friend at British Leyland in the
1970’s. 35 years later he works for Ford in Detroit poor man. He was asked to
sort out a product recall on the Ford F150 SUV, that gross overkill of a
vehicle that slipped through the US regulations because it had the word Utility
between the words Sport and Vehicle. On
needing to find a way to fix a bracket breaking in the cooling system he asked
his team for ideas.
This may be sounding luddite to you but I led the
use of computer aided design in UK design consultancies. In the mid 1990’s we
had five seats of this complicated software, each costing nearly £40,000
because II saw its immense benefits; but I soon appreciating its drawbacks also.
Is this process any different from looking at a Van
Gogh and appreciating the speed and certainty with which the paint was applied?
Or in the Anita Eckberg drawings by David Hockney where he capture shape, depth
and perspective with a single fine outer line, the form depicted with the
barest minimum of mark. Picasso’s early sketches in the museum in Barcelona
show what an outstanding draughtsman he was in his early teens and it is vital
to appreciate that skill before commenting on his later disjointed figures. Barbara
Frink sculptures show her hand marks, thumbs sliding in the clay of a maquette
to produce human forms with emotion and expression yet crude and unfinished.
So in taking apart an object I can see the thought
processes and decisions made. It is possible to see where the need for quick
assembly led to otherwise inexplicable complexity. Where a material choice
allowed a component to perform several functions and more frequently where
assembly is clearly impossible by hand and must have been automated.
In the late 1990’s I was travelling fortnightly to
Austria to the Philips factories in Vienna where the Persona contraceptive
system we had designed was to be manufactured. At these facilities Philips
personal stereo CD players were being designed and developed. On one wall of their development facility
were fixed two long thin panels, one above the other. Displayed on the top one
were all the generations of CD players developed by Philips over a five year
period. The Philips generations were highly innovative, brilliant breakthroughs
of miniaturisation and invention, each one a clean sheet of paper exercise that
took huge effort to perfect, was often delivered late but produced hugely
successful step changes once delivered. Below were all those developed by Sony,
their direct rival. A pattern was obvious, a simple first product, followed
quickly by a second with identical CD transport mechanism but smaller electronics
and more elegant outer casings that was in reality a triviality to develop.
Then the next used a similar outer of the earlier generation but with a newly
developed smaller CD transport mechanism. And so the pattern repeated along the
board. Philips had been ground breaking in their approach Sony iterative; they
both competed in a fast moving market but who was right? Which way was best? Which
feels intuitively right to you? Are you maybe of Asian or European origin and
does your answer correlate to that divide?
Now you see why you have to break it to understand it.
