How to use remixing in creating a product that stands out?
Have you ever tried to start anything new from 0 to 1 and found it challenging to create a problem-solving product? Today we have startups and companies to solve any kind of problem humanity faces. We are in a chaos of choices where we have many choices for almost everything, and it can be difficult to know which option to choose. So it is even more challenging to create something new when we are already in the “paradox of choice.” For a startup founder in the tech world, it is often a challenge to increase a user base and to stand out of the crowd where there is competition among every startup to grow and retain users. Is there any way to come out of this saturation point and stand out from the crowd? Can copying the ideas from other successful businesses or solutions help us to go out of the blockage that the product is facing?
What if we do a “Remix of Product” in order to stand out from the crowd and create something new from the old?
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari tells us about how humankind became the dominant species on earth.
Humans began to rise in the ranks of the animal kingdom as we developed ways to communicate with each other. Developing languages shared by human groups allowed species to gather, exchange, and receive information in ways other animals could not, leading to a major change in humankind’s way of life. The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating started the Cognitive Revolution. Humans could retain the information communicated, allowing them to record the stories, the world around them, and even completely fabricated things. Humans have built a society around this communication, forming bonds and increasing their chances of survival. Humans have gradually developed ways of storing information to help teach people to live in society. Each advance we made was based upon the previous development. So can we say that every new thing created was inspired and produced from the old? Can we call it remixing? Is creativity all about remixing?
Kirby Ferguson in his channel Everything is Remix stays that — Creativity is about remixing, where we get inspired from something existing, and we combine and transform them to produce something new. According to him the basic elements of creativity are: Copy | Transform | Combine.
Let’s explore the basic elements of creativity in more detail and find out how this method is been used to create something new from the existing one.
Elements of Creativity — Copy, Transform and Combine
The term remix means to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new, it was originally applied to music. When we say remixing, it is associated with music or song incorporating sampling from existing recordings. But remixing can be of anything from music, movies, photos, product, and even nature. Hybridization of an animal or a plant can also be said as remixing. Even “Biomimicry” can be said as remixing where the design, material, or functionality of the new product created is inspired by nature.
In the digital age, today with a help of software, anybody can remix anything from music, video, and photos, or anything that can be distributed globally. According to Kirby Ferguson, these techniques of copying materials, transforming them, and combining fundamentally remain the same for everything that we create.
Everything you create is Copy — Transform — Combine with our culture. And just like our creations are remixed from the world around us, our beliefs are remixed from what we experience about life from the five senses.
“We make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known.” — Douglas Hofstadter ( Scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature)
Hofstader claims that this process of analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking. We want familiar things because we want old things to understand new. We associate, and we become better at it. We use old stories to understand new stories.
Let’s look at one famous example of copy, transform, and combine
The aerodynamics of the improved Japanese bullet train Shinkansen 500 Series was modeled after the beak of a Kingfisher bird. It used biomimicry to reduce energy consumption by 15%, increase speeds by 10% and reduce noise levels while increasing passenger comfort. This was done by making the train’s front have the shape of a kingfisher’s beak.
Problem: In the early design of the bullet train Shinkansen 100 Series, the high-speed train running at speed of 150–200mph when passed through the tunnel used to make a sonic boom. Atmospheric pressure waves build up in front of the train. Shinkansen trains ran through many tunnels in dense neighborhoods, and the sonic booms were so forceful that residents could hear them 400 meters away.
Copy
Eiji Nakatsu the general manager of the technical development department and avid bird watcher copied the inspiration for the next bullet train Shinkansen 500 Series from various birds that also included the Kingfisher bird.
Kingfishers are birds that can dive from the air (low resistance) to water (high resistance) at speeds of up to 25mph without making a splash. Knowing this, Nakatsu believed Kingfishers could dive like that because of the streamlined shape of their long, pointed, wedge-shaped beak.
Transform
Inspired by the wings of an owl, the belly of a penguin, and the nose of a Kingfisher, the team of engineers transformed the various train components to suit their requirements to create an even better version of the existing bullet train.
Combine
When the transformed components of the train combined, the new design reduced the noise of the sonic booms when the train came out of the tunnel at even higher speeds.
The new Shinkansen 500 series can run up to 300 km/h which needs less power, consumes less fuel, and is cheaper, faster, cleaner, and quieter.
The above case study is an example of biomimicry. Here the various components of the train designs are copied, transformed, and combined to create something new that is even better than the existing one.
The inspiration for new designs and innovations is all around us. The lesson to learn here is that whenever we feel saturated in the world of competition and choices, and want to stand out of the crowd, the inspiration for designing new products, creating a new system, or developing a functionality can come out of remixing something that already exists. Life has been around on Earth for 3.8 billion years — and that’s a lot of research and development time. The people who design our world have a lot to learn from the natural and human-made world. All we have to do is take a look.
Thank you so much for reading, this is one of the blogs where we explore more about remixing of products, and look into having fair use of what we copy from others. In later blogs, we will also create case studies where we will analyze some existing successful websites and apps and use elements from them to create something new, i.e. Remixing of Product.
Please share your views on remixing. Let’s explore more on this…
Sources — This blog has copied, transformed, and combined various elements from the below sources: