Design Innovation...

In this blog article I talked about design innovation in elevator technology. I have been to the Marquis several times in the past year, and am yet to see any marked improvement in the travel times. I think this technology is useful in office buildings with heavy traffic at peak times. Since Marquis is a hotel, I never found peak traffic necessitating the new logic. I always had to wait through at least two cars before my 'designated' car arrived. It is a pleasant departure from the usual elevator technology, but needs to be wetted out in other usecases before implementing it.

Another design innovation I recently stumbled upon is in the field of timepieces. We are all familiar with the mechanical (with the escapement and all) as well as the quartz watch movements, and of course, the digital watches with their digital number readouts. Apart from going crazy with LEDs and Barcodes (which Tokyo Flash does), how would you innovate on the display of a timepiece?

Urwerk takes the cake in creating a watch that combines both the traditional analog display (hour/min hands) with numbers, and coming up with an extremely complicated watch. The main goal in creating a timepiece is to minimize the number of moving elements, while increasing the accuracy of the instrument. Urwerk has succeeded in increasing the number of moving elements, and adding to the complexity of the design which trying to create a piece that watch aficionados drool over.

UR-202 is an automatic self-winding watch that uses the classic ratchet mechanism to wind itself. Where it is different is the way it uses pneumatics to control the swing of the rotor (see animation video to learn how). The other area where it is different is in its unconventional display. Even though, at first glance, it looks alien, the display is quite simple albeit the complex mechanism (with cams and all) to make it happen. The biggest disadvantage of this display is that you need to be able to read the number to tell time. In conventional watches, the location of the hour/min hand itself is sufficient to tell time. In the UR-202, the hand position alone doesn't tell time since there are three hour hands (with four faces each)! Go figure... Of course, this means the UR-202 can never be a timepiece for the blind.

All in all, the watch is a genius mechanical marvel (an expensive one, at over $100G) worthy of sitting in a museum. This is a classic example of design innovation for the sake of design innovation. This watch does not address or solve any of the problems faced by the classic timepiece, nor does it make it simpler.

Lessons in sports photography

I have always admired sports photography for the stunning action images as well as the emotions they portray. I wanted to first hand experience how easy/difficult it was to capture such images. So, on the first opportunity I had I went to the Marymoor velodrome armed with my camera and lenses. Here is an account of what I learnt, and how to take better sports pictures.

First of all, here is what I took:

- DigiSLR

- 100- 300mm (1:4.5-5.6) zoom lens

- 16- 35mm (1:2.8) wide angle zoom lens

First mistake that you notice is that I didn't pack my tripod! My lenses are not extremely fast, and to top it off, the races were held at night. I realized this as soon as darkness engulfed us, and flood lights turned on.

Lesson #1: Do your homework on the gear you will need.

As a spectator, I had visited the velodrome several times, but had never thought of the different locations and the angles they provide. Armed with a camera, I started noticing all of this when I started shooting, and looking for the angles you see on a sports publication. As I started shooting, and moving around, I discovered that most of the coveted spots were already taken!

Lesson #2: Do your scouting in advance and pick the best location.

When it comes to angles and composition, it pays to know a bit about the sport. How does it start? What happens during the event? How does it end? What do the competitors do: before, during and after the event? Knowing all these lets you pick the right spot, and be there when the action is happening. Strategize in advance.

Lesson #3: Learn about the sport you are shooting.

I shot a lots of pics from different angles, locations, and most of them turned out mediocre (see examples above). About a third of them were blurred. Many of these can be attributed to the equipment I had.

It is always a good idea to experiment and shoot lots of pics and keep good notes on the parameters used.

First of all, you need a fast lens to shoot in low light. Since you need to use fast shutter speed to freeze action (if that is the intent), a fast lens helps immensely. Image stabilization on top of it will add to the sharpness. Setting a higher film speed also helps, but there is threshold (ISO 800?) beyond which the images become grainy.

A long lens adds to the effect by laterally compressing the scene. A wide angle lens lets you capture the bigger picture, including the spectators. Larger apertures are helpful in blurring out the background.

A tripod would help, but a monopod will do better. A monopod will offer a lot of flexibility when the subject keeps moving and changing direction. I would love to take a monopod during my next visit.

Last, but not the least, shoot a variety of pictures. Keep in mind that your subject in a sporting event is not only the sportsperson during the event, but also the sportsperson before and after the event. Your subject could also be the spectators and their reaction. Your subject could be the equipment, the organizers, the concession stands. It could be anything that symbolizes the sport and the spirit of the sport.

Final lesson: Look at the bigger picture.

Airport Design

I was looking at the airport terminal maps on a recent flight for various international airports and noticed that no two airports looked similar. I had to figure out a way of transferring between two terminals in SFO in the shortest possible time. Only after I ran through the airport did I discover that I had to go through airport security once again, even though I was just changing planes! That is when I started thinking about airport designs.

Why isn't there a standard airport terminal design that is optimized for airplane traffic as well as passenger traffic?

Airports have been around for quite sometime and there are hunderds around the world. A lot of thinking goes into airport design such as environmental concerns, reuse, use of natural light, efficient heating/cooling, etc. I have seen several contemporary airport terminal designs, each expressing their own style and culture.

But, what is surprising is the fact that the terminal maps and the runways are different in every airport. I had imagined that studies had been conducted and standard designs would have come out of optimizing the operations of an airport. Most airports are built upon a rectangular patch of ground. Of course, some airports will have certain constraints, but none too great to not use a standard, efficient and proven layout.

I am all for unleashing ones creativity when it comes to the cosmetic design of the terminals. But, when it comes to efficient design of the runways, taxiways as well as the terminals, there needs to be a study conducted by an operations research scientist. I am sure someone has already done this, but I fail to see it in use anywhere.

Total Recall

I was at a birthday party a few weeks ago. The party was for a toddler and was held at a theme park. One of the attractions was a water ride in which kids rode around a water way on a small canoe. The ride was manned by a teenage girl, and what was interesting about her was her incredible memory. Kids would get onto the boats on one side of the ride, and she would talk to them and ask their names. When the boats came back, she would greet each and every one of them using their names. Remember, there were 4-5 boats in the loop. What was even more interesting was that I met her in the concession stand a half hour later, and remarked about her incredible memory. She thanked me, and went on to correctly name my daughter as well as the other kids who rode with her!!

Some people are blessed with incredible photographic memory (I think it is called Eidetic memory). I started wondering how that girl could put this talent of hers to use. Apart from excelling in her studies, being able to recall the content of any page of a text book, remembering shopping lists, remembering names, I could not think of many other uses.

Having the ability to memorize things in great detail is of not much use if the information is not used. It is similar to a database; you can store a lot of information. But, if the information is fragmented and not properly indexed, it is pretty much useless. The same can happen with people who have great memory.

One of the gifts that a human is born with is memory, especially variable storage memory. Our ability to easily forget memories that we do not cherish is one of the boons. If one has eidetic memory and holds everything down, it may be hard to forget things too. That would make their life miserable.

All in all, good memory is always beneficial since it helps one excel in studies, socially as well as professionally.

Spurring creativity...

Here is a great design for a multi-purpose container. It starts out its life as a water bottle, and turns into a toy. Great way to encourage people (in this case, children) to reuse the empty container.

Now you have two reasons to buy y-water! What a concept.

Lessons in out-of-the-box thinking

I recently saw this post on how to achieve what seems to be impossible, and the lessons learnt from it.

To summarize the lessons learnt:
- Don't assume
- Question habits
- Be creative
- Look for a better way
- Impossibilities often aren;t

"All children are born artists.

The problem is to remain one as we grow up" - Picasso.

Here is an excellant talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the importance of creativity in education. He says that creativity is as important as literacy. He talks about how we are educating people out of their creativity.

If you ever notice a little kid draw or paint, you will see the lack of self-doubt, judgement or fear of doing wrong. Sir Ken says "Kids are not afraid of being wrong. If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original".

Enjoy the thought provoking as well as humorous talk.