Looking for Design and Engineering surprises

Seventieth Post: Looking for Design and Engineering surprises

If you are some type of designer (even an amateur like me) or scientist you should always be looking for some type of problem to solve or way to do something better. With this method however, there is the question of where this problem comes from. The designer will be the one to find which problem they work on, but which problems are the right ones that will lead to a solution and are worth spending time to work on?

Again this seems to be the judgement of the designer, but what about us amateurs? Where do we get our ideas, since no major company is funding our research for a problem the company wants solved? For us amateurs most of ideas come from finding problems to the things were encounter in our daily lives. The things we read, the things on tv, and working with different pieces of equipment such as a car, socket wrench, etc are all ways for our imaginations to work on new ideas.

The best solutions often come out of a problem that fills some sort of need. People run into these problems every day. To find a worthwhile problem to work on, many solutions are often found when people share there ideas and problems.

Imagine if there was a website that contained nothing but people sharing problems and working on solutions together. There could be a list of top ten problems and solutions. Both the problems and solutions would be well documented. Everything would be open source and all the World’s problems would be solved.

It all sounds great, but there is one minor problem: People want credit and profit for their solutions. For example someone invents a better way to capture hydrogen. It would end the dependence on oil, but the inventor would want people to pay to use his method. Fuel use might become as dependent on his company as it were on fossil fuels. Also some would seek to steal the inventors method. The oil companies would not be happy about lost profits. So something that could help the world has just become a tangled mess.

I have been recently looking for books that teach engineering or industrial design. It is surprising how few books are available. What I was looking for is a book that proposes problems that need some sort of design or solution. The best book and best value I have found is the magazine “Make.” It has projects and proposes problems that need solution. Still I want a decent textbook format that deals with design. I’ll keep you, the reader, posted on what I find.