Archive for the ‘ design ’ Category
This is a really bad design for cleaning up the Pacific Trash Vortex.
I came across a post at Core77 about a concept design for a device to clean up the Pacific Trash Vortex, a region of the north Pacific Ocean that seems to be gathering garbage, particularly plastic, where global ocean currents converge. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad design. I will sketch a solution that I think is much better.
The Pacific Trash Vortex is an interesting phenomenon that no one really saw coming till the 1980s, but, in hindsight, seemed rather obvious. Floating garbage will be carried by currents. Any gyre where several such currents meet will result in collections of garbage. This garbage eventually starts to poison the water and the wildlife that lives in it.
The idea behind the design in the Core77 post is that a device slowly wanders through the Vortex, collecting garbage in its net. When it’s full, it gets pulled up to a “mothership,” emptied, and then sent back for more.
My disdain for this design caused me to post about it on Google Plus. The ensuing discussion got me thinking more about it, and that motivated me to post about it here. I should note that some of the points I make here are based on comments posted by others on G+. Rather than reproduce their names here to give them credit, I will just refer you to my G+ post (linked above) which shows who everyone is.
Let’s start with the problems in this design.
First, most ocean-going organisms (and vessels) have some kind of control surfaces, even if it’s just an asymmetry of general shape. That’s because one needs to stabilize oneself with respect to cross-currents and inertial forces. The only way to do that, that I can see, with this design, is to pivot the thrusters extending from the front collar of the thing. Except that, without knowing about the actual dynamics of the thing, it’s not clear to me that using the thrusters will be an efficient solution. Indeed, I suspect it will be terribly inefficient. And the last thing we need if for a device like this to be unnecessarily inefficient.
Second, what happens to the garbage when the device is full, and it’s emptied into the “mothership?” So far, all you’ve done is gotten it out of the water. While that’s a good start, you’re still not out of the woods. Presumably, the mothership would lug the garbage back to terra firma, where it would be processed. That will itself have an environmental impact. And considering that, by some accounts, the size of the Pacific Trash Vortex is comparable to the USA, I can imagine it will take quite a few trips to clean the Vortex up to any significant degree. Remember, too, that more trash is always arriving at the Vortex from all over the Pacific Rim. For this design to make sense at all, one would have to have enough of these devices, and enough motherships, to pull the garbage out of the water faster than it accumulates. But all this design does is move the garbage around without actually doing anything with it; and it does so at some environmental cost. That doesn’t really sound useful to me. Clearly, systems thinking was not on the designers’ minds when they concocted this thing.
Third, it is suggested that some kind of irritating sonic signal will be used to keep fish and other marine life out of the device. Obviously, that’s a concern. These submarine vacuums are probably at least the size of pick-up trucks if not much larger. We don’t want to be killing the ocean life that happens to wander into them by mistake. But the sonic signal thing doesn’t wash. Sound is already considered a source of pollution under water. Sounds made by boats and other machinery may already be damaging submarine ecosystems. Do we really want to go down that road? And which sounds will work on which organisms? And will some sounds repel some organisms but attract others? I just can’t see the sonic thing working out at all.
So, let me suggest an alternative design, which I came up with in a matter of minutes – so it’s not very polished – that I think will actually do the job much better.
Build a massive floating platform and float it into the Vortex. The facility will collect garbage from the water and process it directly on-site, thus generating usable products and raw material rather than garbage to be transported elsewhere.
The platform will generate its own power via a combination of ocean thermal energy (OTEC) and solar energy (both PV for electricity and solar thermal for hot water). It will probably need lots of electricity. The convergence zone for the garbage seems to be at a latitude comparable with the southern USA. This suggests an area of medium to high insolation – and therefore suitable as a solar power source, and an area with a good vertical water temperature differential to run the OTEC system.
The platform will be large enough to contain greenhouses, and maybe even grazing land for small animals like rabbits and goats, for growing food for those who work there, thus minimizing the number of cargo transports that will add to the system’s environmental impact. These green areas will also act as green “roofs” to help insulate the living areas of the platform. Obviously, waste will be recycled on-site too.
A substantial amount of heat will be generated by the machinery and the biomass on the platform. Areas of the platform will be designed using Passivhaus design principles to keep ambient heat out, and also use that internal waste heat for other purposes (e.g. pre-heating water).
The OTEC system itself will require a structure extending from the surface down to quite a depth. That same structure can be used as a spine on which waste collection units will be attached. The only reasonable way to collect garbage is just suctioning water and straining the garbage from it. Once filtered of garbage, the water is used by the OTEC system to generate electricity.
This leaves the fish problem. I’m not sure how to deal with that, but I think a number of different measures will be needed (i.e. there’s no silver bullet). If the suction is mild enough (and made up for by the rather massive size of the installation and the number of input vents it would have), then we might consider using light and scent rather than sound. Light, especially at depth, could very well keep some organisms away. A scent of some predator species might also work. The system could be designed so water containing scent will very quickly be sucked into the system, where the scent chemical can be removed and reused. It might even be useful to actually use large predator organisms – sharks for instance as deterrents to other organisms. The system could be designed so that the sharks are too powerful to be suctioned into it, yet they will eat anything that’s alive near the inlets. There might even be solutions to this problem using magnetic fields that may disorient some organisms. Or perhaps a particular maze-like shape will discourage organisms. In any case, what I’m saying here is that there are probably a wide variety of solutions to keep organisms away from the inlets. I don’t know enough to offer a solution I think would work, but I do know enough to believe such solutions exist.
A small scientific station will also be located on the platform. The station will accommodate scientists who will study the phenomenon of the Vortex, its contents, its growth, and its impact on the marine ecosystem.
Finally, we get to the garbage itself. Rather than ship garbage, the platform would act as a manufacturing facility, turning the garbage into useful products. Indeed, some of the manufactured goods could be used directly on the platform itself. Perhaps it could manufacture recycled plastic bottles or containers. Perhaps it could use the sea water itself, and concentrate sunlight on a slurry of water and garbage to make it decompose into more easily manufactured materials. Whatever is done, the point is that the material shipped from the platform would be usable, not garbage.
There’s a lot of open questions here. I did about 10 minutes research while writing this post. I can’t even decide if the idea is feasible.
But it’s not impossible. And it has the potential of being a serious solution to the problem of the Pacific Trash Vortex. (And the other trash vortices – the one in the Pacific isn’t the only one.)
A major intersection in Toronto is closed for two weeks to renovate the streetcar tracks that pass through it. Whether the intersection should have been closed only at night – turning a two week job into a two-month nightmare – is a question on the minds of many. Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure, because no one seems interested in determining the balance point of this situation.
The intersection of Queen and Spadina in Toronto is not only one of the city’s busiest intersections, it is one of the very few with all-way streetcar tracks that can turn in any direction. The complexity of the track system at that intersection is huge. And it needs to be renovated.
So the City of Toronto has decided to close the entire intersection down for two whole weeks to get the work done as quickly as possible. This has obviously raised the hackles of many drivers who use that intersection in their commutes to and from work.
The alternative would have been to only close the intersection at night, but the cost of the renovation would have been much, much higher. Workers get paid extra; equipment is in use only a few hours a day; there’s more security needed; there’s increased risk of damage during the day, as well as increased danger of accidents between cars driving through the intersection….
You would think that, given all the risks and costs associated with doing the work only at night, it would be plainly obvious to everyone that a little pain now will save significant costs and risk in the longer term. Yet people are angry. And if obvious why: their lives are being directly affected by the two-week closure. If the intersection had only been closed at night, they could have still gotten through – albeit more slowly – and their lives would not have been so disrupted.
It’s a good argument. And unfortunately, there seems to be no information to suggest that a proper cost-benefit analysis was done of the project. It seems instead that some kind of educated guess was used to decide that a two-week closure was the more economical and less risky option.
Unfortunately, these kinds of decisions are far too complex to be made via guesses, educated or otherwise.
Yes, there are definite costs and risks associated with working only at night that are not present in the two-straight-weeks scenario. However, the two-week closure imposes a number of cost sources that, quite frankly, I doubt the City politicians considered.
Now, I can find neither evidence that a deep analysis was conducted, nor that it was not conducted. This in itself is a shame. If I were a reporter preparing an article about this project, I most certainly would have wanted to know the nature of the analysis done to decide how best to implement it. This appears not to be the case.
So it may well be that an appropriate analysis was conducted. But based on how the current administration of the City tends to work, I would be quite frankly surprised. Also, if they had done the analysis, it could have been used to put a positive spin: Our calculations have shown that, taking into account lost revenues of nearby business, and lost productivity of commuters who use the intersection, there remain long-term benefits – that is, accounting for both the City costs and the costs of its citizens and businesses, we know a two-week closure is the overall best solution.
See what I mean?
Here’s my point: I really don’t think the City planners took a properly balanced approach to deciding how to do the renovations at Queen and Spadina. I don’t think they tried to balance the costs to the City against the costs to its citizens and businesses. If they had done the analysis, it would have made their case for them. They didn’t use it, so it seems they didn’t do it either.
And that’s a problem for me. Balance is fundamental to any situation. Considering the relative fragility of our economy, it seems unwise to not have done all the appropriate analyses to decide the approach that is, overall, the most economical. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do. There’s plenty of data about traffic patterns in the area, and Toronto has extensive abilities to simulate traffic. They could have done the analyses with a reasonable degree of certainty. And then they would have known, instead of just guessing.
In the Cambrian period, there was an “explosion” of life. During that time, over 500 million years ago, pretty much all the major animal phyla evolved over just a few million years. I’m starting to wonder if we’re not experiencing an explosion of robotic “life.”
Consider the following:
All these advances in robotics happened in the very recent past. It suddenly struck me that the massive surge in robotic innovation might not be a parallel to what happened to life on Earth. Why is robotic development experiencing this sudden growth? I theorize that it isn’t the result of any planning by anyone, but rather by the unintended achievement of a technological “sweet-spot” where technical capacity and cost have hit values that allow a whole new generation of ideas to be pursued. And each idea that is tried leads to even more ideas.
I’m also interested by the nature of these new robots. They remain quite task-specific. While it’s hard to see how this aspect of robotics might be considered in any way “natural,” I think it may well be. That is, these robots are “fit” to exist in the artificial contexts in which humans designed and built them. What do I mean by context? Well, consider any of the examples I give above and think of the very limited scope in which those robots could be defined as “useful” – that’s their context.
In many ways, humans are not responsible for creating the contexts. Engineers design rescue robots that work only to find survivors in disaster areas, but those engineers did not intentionally create the context of the disaster. Rather, those contexts arise due to other forces that are beyond the control of the engineer, even though they may have contributed somewhat to those forces. This seems entirely consistent with how evolution works, where species evolve in response to environmental effects that may be due in part to their impact but nonetheless not under their intentional control.
You can think of humans, then, as the DNA of robots. We represent the templates that produce them; and when external forces drive us – be they technological or contextual – we change the ways that robots look and act, just like changes in DNA change how natural organisms look and act. When we come up with a design (a DNA sequence) for a robot that is highly successful, that design tends to stick, and even to propagate to other types of robots – just like how genes can propagate through a population, and even how the same functionality (like vision systems and eyes) can evolve multiple independent times.
Engineers will work on the first sensible idea they find. They won’t say: Here’s a great idea! Let’s find more before deciding which to pursue! They will instead say: Here’s a great idea! Let’s build it and see what happens! And those ideas will be largely stimulated by their own experiences, technologies with which they are familiar, contexts that they know well, and all the other robots that had been built to date. New robots share a lot with old robots, or at least with biological inspirations derived from other natural sources (like the robotic snake example). This too is quite like how evolution works. New species are built by changing old ones; this is how we can trace species back in time genetically, because we can track the changes in genes back in time. Humans, as a result, are partly fish. In the same way, there are basics underlying every robot that could be said to be their shared genetic heritage, even if that shared heritage is only the knowledge passed down through the years from one robotics engineer to the other.
Please don’t interpret this as my suggesting that there is some conscious intent behind evolution. That would be creationist bullshit. (Creationists and believers in so-called Intelligent Design are worthy only of your derision, contempt, and profanity.) Instead, I think the opposite is true: humans exert no conscious control over the development of robots; robots are a natural and “automatic” response by humans, given certain technologies, to specific contexts. Robots are, in this view, unavoidable developments.
So we have these multitudinous “species” of robots, each quite well-adapted to very specific environments, having developed through an unconscious, uncontrolled process mediated by humans who also exert no intentional control over the process…. Sounds a lot like evolution, really.
If this is so, then we’re probably well on our way to someday creating a true artificial intelligence. Just as we evolved to be conscious and intelligence creatures from “unconscious” and unintelligence creatures without any intention or plan, so too may we someday (rather soon I think) develop quite by accident a truly intelligent robot. We may not realize it at first, but I think it is quite inevitable. And we may be seeing the first truly massive advance just now, with all these weird types of new robots springing up, just like the Cambrian Explosion.
Of course, that first robotic intelligence is very unlikely to be like HAL, or SkyNet. It will probably be much stupider than we are; so stupid, in fact, that we might not even notice it and destroy it as we would any malfunctioning piece of automated equipment. But I suspect that one way or the other, much as natural life arose naturally, so too will artificial life arise artificially, whether we want it to or not.
This project is open only to members of the Design Society, but it’s so cool that I wanted to broadcast it widely. Here’s the writeup, quoted directly from the Design Society Advisory Board:
As one of its activities towards promoting its members’ research, The Design Society is partnering with Google Scholar to pilot a new service, aimed at promoting DS members’ publications and citations. Please read on if you are interested in being a part of this experiment…
“Quality publications and high citation counts” is the ever-increasing focus of the academic research assessment exercise worldwide. The design research community provides great theoretical and empirical research results, but compared to neighbouring science fields, we have a challenge in upping our game with respect to publications and citations.
The Design Society has approached Google Scholar with the proposal of establishing a “scholar community”, where the DS can promote its members and their publications, so as to increase the visibility of our community’s work. Google Scholar has agreed to run a pilot with DS, based on Google Scholar Citations pages and a concept proposed by DS. The pilot will test a number of functions and services that could dramatically enhance the visibility of our community’s research results on the internet. All we need are 200 current DS members to sign up (by end of July 2012), so that the pilot can become a reality.
Even if your university only focuses on ISI or Scopus measurements, increasing numbers of academics use Google Scholar for their bibliographic searches – so optimising visibility on this medium is a smart move for all!
How to join in:
• If you do not already have a Google Scholar Citations profile, then register for one via this dedicated link: http://tinyurl.com/dspubs. [It’s important that you use this link, so we can track that you’re registering via the Design Society]
• If you do have a Google Scholar Citations profile and would like to affiliate this to the pilot project mentioned above, then follow this link http://tinyurl.com/ds-signup , and fill in the form.
• If you already registered your interest in this experiment at the DESIGN2012 conference, then there is no need to do any more at this point!
Once having done either of the above steps, wait for us to contact you about the new pilot service (this will take some weeks, as we first need to collect 200 profiles). The attached pdf file shows a presentation with further background and conceptualisation of this experiment.
A design disaster of a boat.
Scientific American has reported on a solar powered catamaran that has circumnavigated the globe. This thing is, in my humble opinion, a ridiculous and utterly useless design.
Some stats about the boat and it’s trip:
But then, there’s a comment by one Rock LeBateau (as if that’s his real name), that reads:
So let me get this right, It takes 38,000 solar cells, 6 men, nearly 2 years and 24 million bucks to get a boat round the world. But in 2005 it took 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes and 33 seconds for a tiny little Englishwoman Ellen MacArthur to sail her boat round the world. Her boat was solar powered too using wind as the energy transfer mechanism. Oh, and she went the hard way round – Cape of Good Hope, Roaring Forties, South of Australia, Cape Horn and back.
All of a sudden, the massive pile of solar tech on that catamaran doesn’t seem quite so impressive. In fact, I think it’s downright stupid. I mean, check out the pic of the lavish, ultra-computerized cockpit in the SciAm article!
Here we have another case of designer’s ego: so obsessed does one get with an idea that one utterly loses all perspective on the matter. Clearly, MacArthur’s voyage was far more sustainable/green/whatever than that of the solar powered monstrosity. It was also both more efficient and effective a solution. Any sensible designer would have been able to step back from the situation and say: My god! This is abomination!
Indeed, the kind of thinking that led the makers of the Tûranor PlanetSolar is exactly the kind of thinking that’s causing climate change, urban decay, and mass consumerism. As proof of concept, all that this boat proves is that some concepts are detestable.
Here’s a better idea. Wind happens because of the sun. Wind is solar power, ready to use. Let’s develop some solar cell fabric that can be used as sail cloth. Heck, given how sails can vibrate, let’s make them piezoelectric too. Let’s use that power to run the boat’s systems – which would be little more than whatever Ellen MacArthur had on her little boat. Now we’ve got a real solar-powered boat that’s both more effective and more efficient than the ham-fisted design of the Tûranor PlanetSolar.
Art Markman wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review on innovation (11 Jan 2012) in which he advises “Don’t Think Different, Think About Different Things.” Unfortunately, his approach is obscure and shrouded in weird zen stuff that’s just not necessary. I won’t be describing here how anyone can be innovative at anything, but I will describe one method, which you can use to increase the odds of being innovative, is well described by Markman’s (rather tired) example of the Dyson vacuum.
Markman writes “When you need to solve a problem in a new way, you have two options. One is pure research and development. The other requires finding knowledge (which we already know) that offers a novel solution.” He goes on to advise us that we should seek meanings in proverbs to learn how to think differently. He’s really talking about lateral thinking here, which is also nothing new. Lateral thinking is hard, because there’s no real method to it; one just practises it until one gets good at it – on the assumption that one can apply lateral thinking to any domain equally well. The assumption is ridiculous, but that’s another story.
The story of how James Dyson re-designed the vacuum cleaner, as recounted by Markman, is an excellent example of a design method that is quite well known. We don’t need all the zen-i-ness that Markman suggests. Here’s how it works.
First: identify a shortcoming. In the case of the vacuum, it’s that they lose suction. This should be apparent from user feedback about existent vacuums, product tests, etc. However, this isn’t quite as easy as it seems, because the only way you can notice is something is bad, is if you have something good to compare it to. After all, fish don’t know they’re wet.
Second: question the premises. By looking at the alternative vacuum designs that all suffer the problem, one looks for the common features. The bag is the common feature. The assumption is that a bag is necessary. One then simply asks Why is the bag necessary? In some ways, this step can be done without step 1; but knowing what shortcomings exist is a product can be a big help.
Third: look for functional alternatives to the assumption. The bag serves certain functions in the vacuum cleaner. Any technology that can provide the same function is a candidate replacement for the bag. One can then evaluate those technologies to look for ones that are “innovative.”
That’s all there is to it. Dyson didn’t look very far to find something. Indeed, as with so many innovative designs, the answer lay in the designer’s own experience. It might be difficult to imagine that Dyson saw a similarity between domestic vacuums and sawmills, but it becomes simple if you think about function instead of structure. Vacuums suck dust up using air; the vacuum must therefore internally separate the dust from the air. That’s exactly what the function of the vacuum bag is – to trap dirt and let air through. In the sawmill, an industrial cyclone is used to separate sawdust from air. Notice that the functions served by the bag on the one hand and the cyclone on the other are exactly the same. It’s much easier to see the connection when you think about function.
And that’s exactly what one needs to do to find an innovative solution to this problem: look for ways of providing the same function as the bag provides.
Indeed, this case is also an example of another technique of developing potentially innovative designs: change the state of matter used to provide a function. The bag uses mass (the bag itself) to separate dust from air. One could use liquid to do this – that’s the principle of those wet vacuums for carpets. One could also use gas – which is how the Dyson vacuum works. Finally (since matter and energy are related thanks to Einstein), one can use energy – a static electric charge (like in a Swiffer) that attracts and holds dust.
So in the end, all the mumbo-jumbo that Markman espouses might make a consultant rich, but it’s not necessary to design creatively. Simple methods like this one can work too.
And if after reading this, you go out and invent something amazing, I won’t expect payment. Just think kindly of me.
I recently read a piece in the Toronto Star that suggests there’s a problem with buying stuff a part of the price of which goes to charity. The author makes and excellent point and makes plain a rather disturbing phenomenon, but she doesn’t go far enough.
There’s a marketing technique, called cause marketing, that gets you to buy stuff because a fraction of the price you pay goes to some worthy charity. Sounds great: you get something you want, and so does some charity.
But Prof. Aradhna Krishna of University of Michigan has discovered through her research that the more you pay for cause-marketed goods, the less you’ll donate directly to the charity itself. You can see that this can end up actually lowering the total funding available to charities. This problem is exacerbated by the rather vague and opaque ways that the actual amounts given to charity are described. In some case, the amount donated can amount to only a few percent of the price you pay for an item. Basically, you can rarely tell how much of the money you spend to buy, say, a t-shirt will actually go to, say, support breast cancer research. That opens the door for unscrupulous companies to make more profit by only giving a tiny fraction of the unit price to charity.
While Prof. Krishna explains the phenomenon very well, she doesn’t actually propose any easy fixes. My spidey-design-sense got tingling, and I thought I should offer up some possibilities.
Government regulation. It makes sense that if food producers are required to tell you how much sodium or fat is in the food you’re buying, they could also tell marketers that they have to specify exactly how much money is going to charity per unit sale. But governments have been very slow in requiring nutritional labelling on food – in fact, labelling is still not as good as it should be. If we start now, we might expect to address the cause-marketed goods in a couple of decades or more.
Do we really need to wait that long?
Protests to motivate government. The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to be doing rather well. Perhaps we need to mobilize people to demand that governments act to deal with this matter.
I don’t see this happening any time soon. We don’t want to dilute OWS by introducing other goals; OWS has pretty significant goals anyways. And who’s going to hear a few people complaining about abuses in cause marketing, given the din over the gluttony of big banks and insurance companies?
Direct action and communication. This is, given current events, probably the best way forward. One could put together, rather easily, an online movement that can include facebook, twitter, google+, and other social networks, as well as online petitions via avaaz or change.org, to begin to spread the word. Find the right few people to champion it, and it will probably take off far faster than any other way.
But what word should one spread on this matter?
Should one advocate for an abolition of cause marketing? No, of course not. There are good instances of cause marketing – why should those efforts be eliminated? No, what is needed is a way to deal with the unscrupulous that doesn’t unnecessarily hinder the scrupulous.
Governments cannot help. Scruples are in short supply there generally, and they work at a near glacial pace on any issue that doesn’t directly threaten their continued hold of power. No, governments cannot be expected to work here.
But the grass roots approach could, I think, do the trick.
I think, the message that should be sent out is to boycott companies who do not engage in open and transparent cause marketing. I think the message must contain the information that people need to spot an opaque cause marketing campaign, and the education to know that there are better ways of getting things done. Like, for instance, buying a competitor’s product that is not cause marketed, but also then giving directly to a charity the amount that you would think should be donated.
The argument is simple: if we boycott those brands who practise opaque cause marketing, but not those who practise it openly and transparently, then we’ll actually exert pressure on the marketers to only practise it in an ethical and scrupulous way. I see that as a win-win situation.
What about you? Have you got any other suggestions for improving how cause marketing is done?
Feedback loops will save us - or destroy us.
This article from CleanTechnica is a great example showing that unlimited growth cannot continue indefinitely. There are no known cases of perpetual unlimited growth anywhere in the universe. What’s makes us think we can do better?
Need I say more?
I love Google. They’re not perfect, but they’re one of the best companies out there. And, I’d note, though they pay careful attention to what people say about them and their products, it seems that their primary source of direction and innovation is their own expertise. This may fly in the face of some basic tenets of design, but it’s working for Google. Indeed, this summer looks to be another fascinating googletime.
Design-Related CFPs My Productivity Blog: Do Fast & Well
