Spaghetti Bridges

Thirty Eighth Post: Spaghetti Bridges

It is a common exercise to build spaghetti bridges in a course that teaches the basics of design. Weights are hung from the bridge to see how much weight it holds and how the bridge handles the strain.

I will start by admitting the idea presented here was not mine but by two other Point Park College students. We were in the lab using the stress test machine thingy and they began to talk about spaghetti bridges. There was a debate about what pasta would work the best when one student decided he would use a pasta maker machine to make custom pasta pieces for the bridge. Picture “Play Doh” stamped out of the “Play Doh Factory Machine,” the one that creates the different clay shapes (sort like a stamper). Now picture adding this knowledge to a spaghetti machine to make custom shapes and all the advantages that it would have over store shelve pastas.

So what makes a simple idea so creative? In psychology there is a description called “functional fixedness.” Simply state it just has to deal with what uses a person finds for a tool. Functional fixedness is only using a tool or object for its common use and not using it in new ways. For instance, there is a machine that separates soil into its different consistencies for testing. My instructor noted that it would be good for making different types of textures for model train’s scenery. This and the spaghetti maker show different uses for a tool that’s use had already been defined.

So basically when you find a new way to use an object, you have just found a way to express the minds creativity. The term functional fixedness is not new. It first originated in the mid 1980's when a man named Macgyver used duck tape and a swiss army knife to blow things up. LOL. Only joking about the Macgyver thing, but Macgyver did not at all have functional fixedness. He knew the cure: improvising and using the mind to form new things from what is given in the environment. That and a sticky situation led to some great contraptions.