A wheelless world

Please watch only the first 10 seconds of this movie as that's the only meaningful part. This walking bicycle gave me a good smirk as being one of the least empowering human extensions I ever saw. It is still an interesting thought that in nature, as far as I know nothing freely revolves around an axis, and indeed without humans, the wheel would probably never have evolved.

Expanding Spheres

Chuck Hoberman (www.hoberman.com) is an American inventor of transformable physical structures. His work is so optimally engineered that there is an inherent simplicity pervading all his structures. His design approach follows that of Richard Buckminster Fuller, who wanted man to become a comprehensive, scientific thinker, using minimal materials for maximum effects as to minimize waste, and free man from having to clean up all the mess that results from short-sighted behaviour. Hoberman's structures are extremely smart on a material level, the structural efficiency making it almost look like an idealized natural construction, living and breathing. It seems like the perfect symbiosis of a structural form and its behaviour. Humans could learn something from that.

Exemplified in the movie shown below, his work is often presented very sculpturally. Nevertheless, many applications can be thought of that would integrate his elegance more pervasively into the world. Think nanobots too small for the naked eye that suddenly become visible by expanding, think cellphones that throb like a heart when someone is calling, think autonomous balls that learn to bounce and steer themselves. Not that I would encourage people to look for killer apps; experiencing the beauty of the thought process and resulting work, embracing and critically absorbing it, is much more satisfying.

Book recommendation

To get a feel for evolution and design, the book 'Invention and Evolution: Design in Nature and Engineering' by Michael French is a great starter. It is a fairly old book (1988) but therefore also very clear and recognizable. It talks about important inventions and how they can be optimized by adopting processes from natural evolution.

Did you know that suspension bridges are very much the same design as the skeleton of a Brachiosaur?




This book truly gives you a feel for why things are the way they are, and especially handles mechanical design issues. But the most important thing you can obtain from it is a feeling for the elegance with which nature solves things, and how designers can adopt this way of integrative thinking. Of course, there is much more than mechanical design to be tackled by designers currently, like how designs help people to change, or to give them a certain experience. But still, I think that this way of thinking should also be applied to those issues; i.e. with minimal means reach optimal, elegant results.

The book is ideal for students, is written in a light way, and richly illustrated by all kinds of inventions. Highly recommended, so order it here on Amazon!