Archive for 2010

I’m not meaning to pile on but the opening ceremonies for the Winter Olympics were hardly a pinnacle of design.    And I’m not even talking about the US uniforms with their positively colossal Polo logo.  That was subtle wasn’t it?

For starters there was the hideous Olympic torch… apparently designed as a partnership by the Canadian aerospace and transportation company – Bombardier in collaboration with the Vancouver Organizing Committee.

I’m quoting from the official press release here:  The almost one-metre-long torch, inspired by both the lines carved into the snow by skiers schushing down mountains and the undulating beauty of the snowy Canadian landscape. Huh?

Now we’ve done a few design projects involving flame here at Design Concepts and fire is inarguably tricky as a design element.  Its appeal is inherently primal which probably runs in a bit of conflict with the intended majesty of the Olympics.  And I’m wondering if the “designed in collaboration with the Organizing Committee” provides some insight into a group design process that lead to what, for me, is a pretty uninspired and frankly sort of odd looking device.  Sort of like a cross between a flaming toothbrush handle and a presentation-scale butter knife.  Oh well.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  In my opinion it was a sorry follow up to the Beijing torch that somehow managed to capture the sprit and culture of the host country in a far more elegant and – let’s be honest here – more attractive manner.

Finally there was the embarrassing malfunction of the pillar apparatus.  If you didn’t see it, the design intent was for the Olympic caldron to rise spectacularly out of the stadium floor in conjunction with four massive pillars that would feed the flame up from the torch-bearers.  Except one of the pillars remained  recalcitrantly stuck.  Hyraulics problems apparently.  Darn.  An obviously uncomfortable Wayne Gretsky fidgeted while holding his ugly torch while NBC’s Bob Costas improvised his coverage.  I suspect that one had to leave a few marks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/feb/13/winter-olympics-opening-ceremony-glitch

Ever so often I lament instances where designers and engineers remain as unsung, unrecognized bit players in the tapestry of our lives.  Well this is one instance where I’m pretty certain there were a couple of engineers wanting to crawl into a hole and just as pleased to not be in the spotlight.

So we had one of our famous brown-bag lunch-and-learn sessions today – sort of group training / design philosophy / technical-chops-throw-down all rolled into one.  Today’s topic was a fairly esoteric design technique known as curvature continuous surfaces.  I know… I can hear the yawns.  Curvature Continuous surfacing is a fairly sophisticated computer modeling technique used for creating highly stylized product forms and shapes on certain products– particularly ones that are highly reflective or feature flowing lines.  Think shiny car bodies on a wet road under streetlights and you’ll get the picture.

Anyway, I found myself reflecting on a few things (no pun intended).  The first was the range of employees and backgrounds that were enthusiastically and actively participating in our session.   It used to be that the subject of highly esoteric computer modeling skills was relegated to the land of a select group of designers and perhaps computer geeks.  If anything one could expect some fairly traditional battle lines to be drawn – industrial designers arguing that engineers didn’t understand or appreciate the subtleties of form and aesthetics.  Engineers complaining about designers who obsessed over picayune and meaningless details.  Blah blah blah blah…

Rather, at today’s session there were product designers of all stripes – industrial designers, engineers, mechanical designers, even members of our prototyping staff passionately advocating for the value of highly sophisticated exterior form development.   The relative merits of Honda cars and Apple’s I-Pod form were contrasted and products we’d designed and engineered were critiqued.   I was once again proud and impressed by the nuanced eye today’s product development specialist brings to their craft… and left with a couple of impression… First, a continued respect and realization for the erosion of typical barriers and stereotypes in product development.  We’ve done a lot of talking and work about trans-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary skill sets and I really see that coming to life.  I was also struck by the level of design prowess and sophistication being brought to a remarkable range of products.   Call it the ipodification of our products but as consumers we have a level of expectation  for finesse, refinement and elegance that continues to test the mettle of those who practice design as their craft.  I, for one, find this exhilarating to be around.

Oh, and if you care about curvature continuous surfacing and want a copy of our notes from the session just drop me a line.

I actually enjoyed watching the Super Bowl half time show last night – but not for the aging hystrionics of Roger Daltry, Pete Townsend and a bunch of stand-in musicians now calling themselves The Who.  I guess The Who must be considered a “safe” choice as they fit the bill for that sort of large stadium spectacle.  CBS didn’t help matters by showing stock footage of a significantly younger Who during the promotional commercials only emphasizing the contrast when the actual band took the stage. I noticed they didn’t play “My Generation” which now has sort of an ironic overtone doesn’t it?  I wonder if they regret the lyrics “I hope I die before I get old”.  Oh well.  Never the less, it was sort of painful to watch. 

What wasn’t hard for me to watch was the spectacular stage set up.  I did a bit of google sleuthing and wasn’t able to find out who did the conceptual design, engineering or production on it but I thought it was pretty darn cool!  If you didn’t see it – the stage was a circular array of multi-colored lights that had been programmed to for a variety of conventional lighting and video effects.  The fact that it was circular was particularly interesting and I suspect presented some software and hardware challenges as we are most used to thinking of our output displays in rectangular format.  The electronic aspects of the stage were integrated with the Laser Light show and Pyrotechnics to form a pretty compelling visual image.  All-in-all The Who got kind of lost in the production which was just fine by me.

In a previous post I promised to provide my guesses on what factors may have contributed to the recalls Toyota is facing right now.  Here are a few: 

a)            Increasing interwoven system complexity.  What were once purely mechanical system with very intuitive failure modes (hey… that cable broke) have evolved to electro-mechanical systems and now electro-mechanical systems with integrated micro-processor control and firmware.  Failure modes that previously lay entirely within a single discipline now splash messily across functional areas.  Electrical and software problems are particularly bedeviling and notoriously hard to faithfully observe, detect and eradicate. 

b)            Increased reliance on outside suppliers for subsystem engineering.  Once upon a time a company’s engineers would design and meticulously test each and every aspect of a product’s function.  No more.  More often suppliers are brought in to “black box” or “gray box” subsystem leaving the company’s engineers to often function as “system integrators” – a sort of general contractor.  At its best this system can leave the details to subsystem experts.  At its worst, it is a recipe for omissions, mistakes, confusion, finger pointing. 

c)            Platform Engineering.  Toyota is the mastery of assembling a huge variety of unique cars from a building block of components and systems that are fundamentally identical.   At its best, this practice allows for reduced costs, increased development speed and adoption of best practices.  At its worse, systems end up over-designed for some applications or under designed for others.  Change can be slow and improvements forgone because of the interwoven complexity of validating revisions on every instance where a system is used.  Furthermore, as this situation has shown, if design errors do crop up in fundamental components and systems used through the platform the effects and scope can be far-reaching.   I was sharing this theory with a former classmate and he commented on the similarity between platform engineering and the risks associated with a lack of genetic diversity…

‘It is not a trivial thing to lose your genetic variation,” said Dr. Stephen O’Brien, head of the research team. ”Genetic variation exists so ecological pressures can be adapted to.’

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/17/science/loss-of-gene-diversity-is-threat-to-cheetahs.html

d)            Finally, I firmly believe a potential culprit is Toyota’s massive recent success combined with relentless plans for expansion.  It seems entirely probable that Toyota tremendous expansion and a well publicized plan for industry domination lead to a degree of rapid growth, internal pressure, hubris, disorganization and errors.

Looks like Toyota is headed for a software fix for the Prius brakes.  Weirdly enough, I feel like I have a personal intersection with Toyota’s alleged ABS brake difficulty.  I own a 1997 Toyota 4-runner.  Several times in the life of that car I have experience a complete loss of braking – always when braking while riding over significant bumps.  The first time it happened was weird… but not overly terrifying.  I quickly assumed the failure was being caused by “resonance” or the unhappy combination of the ABS choosing to brake when a wheel was virtually mid-air and then releasing just as the wheel hit the ground as the wheels bounced over the bumps.  If this explanation is right it could and perhaps should have been solved by tuning the ABS braking frequency to ensure that the natural frequency of the suspension could never match the ABS braking rate.  

Perhaps this explanation is naïve or just plain wrong.  Regardless I am left to wonder if my 1997 car suffers from the same flaws as the 2010 Toyotas.  Is it possible that these cars share the same basic control strategies and algorithms even after all these years???  If so this highlights a weakness of platform engineering and presenting a pretty damning portrait of their ability to spot and eradicate problems.  I’ve never experienced this phenomena on any other car I’ve ever driven.  Alternately perhaps it’s the same engineering team making the same mistakes year after year.  It is ironic that as an engineer I simply wrote this off to a freak combination of speed, bumps and possibly a sloppy -  but not criminal – job of engineering.  The brakes on the 4-runner have always been pretty marginal and even need to be pumped a few times in very cold weather before they’ll work.  Like many engineers I think I’m perhaps too tolerant of design related issues.