You have got to break it to understand it

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. For over 50 years I have taken apart all manner of objects and machinery. Nearly everything I have owned or used I have at some time taken apart having inadvertently and sometimes wilfully, bent, twisted, cracked disassembled, dropped and abused things I own. I have a professional reputation for breaking things which I deny assiduously, I don’t break them I test them and anyway I will usually manage to repair them or reassemble them successfully.

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? I argue that in order to have the ability to design something strong enough to work, something that will not break easily when you use it, capable of resisting the abuse of use, you face two choices. You can choose to follow the current designer vogue and buy the most powerful computing hardware available, with the most sophisticated software, easily £5000 a licence,  often much more, then learn how to use it, then learn how to enter meaningful data and then learn how to understand what it tells you at the end. Massive cost, massive effort just in order to know how thick the screen of an iPhone must be. The other choice is to know by intuition, by feel, by experience.

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. ‘Do we have  an idea of the strength this needs to be and will it fit the space?’ he asked. Silence. ‘Come on someone must have a feel for it?’ Silence.  ‘What’s the problem?’ he raged to a circle of blank faces, then settled on one. ‘I don’t know’ came the reply, ‘but I could work it out on computer’.  No feel meant no idea meant snail’s pace development process leading to delay and cost.

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. So why do I take things to pieces? Because by looking inside an object you see a form of industrial archaeology, the thought patterns by which that object was formed, the decisions made, the compromises needed, the level of ingenuity or plodding obviousness is there on display.

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 the same way Etorre Bugatti left his fingerprints on a Bugatti Type 35. He joined a spring to a damper with a beautiful shaped form of metal that not only looks effortlessly right but cleverly performs multiple functions, a fitness for purpose that can only be appreciated by someone who has struggled for weeks to achieve that pure simplicity, and failed. 

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. Whilst not elevating engineering to the level of art I am saying it is possible to appreciate mastery and dullness within it. Are not Brunel bridges and Concorde both called beautiful? So why not appreciate the ability to combine beauty with form and function in object designed to be used and rate it a little higher when compared to a cow in formaldehyde?

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? Sorry I am not going to provide answers, you decide! The iteration created a more dynamic market with each model quickly becoming out dated and therefore suits a more fashion orientated disposable approach. The step change approach is riskier in fast moving markets but delivers more significant improvements to the consumer.

Now you see why you have to break it to understand it.