Why child-like intuition is important if you want to make new technologies
Nature was my first real teacher in the world of engineering. Twigs, stones and mud were the ‘building materials’ I used during my early childhood.
Many years later and now working as a design engineer I still spend many hours using my hands making things, and only now do I realise how these early experiments informed my work.
For example, I am designing something involving the application of force and stress upon a certain material. More often than not, I have an innate sense of when and how it will break or whether one material has more natural elasticity than another. As students of design and engineering at university, we were exposed to all of the world’s material science, but in some ways, so much of these theoretical and practical experiences can also be found in the natural world if one is willing to go out and look for them.
Making things with your hands gives you a tactile appreciation for mechanics, in a way that can’t be replicated.
My first real piece of engineering was a ‘bird hotel’. I was unsatisfied with the standard birdhouse model, which is very anthropomorphic. I set myself the task of trying to imagine what a bird would find exciting, making it more adventurous, and filled with ‘bird friendly’ surprises which only a bird would be able to access.
My younger self was quite experimental. By studying exactly how birds used the standardised feeders, I created experiences for the birds including hiding food at the end of winding channels which required them to climb through in order to eat these morsels.
Today I would use the maxim: “form follows function”, but back then as a child it was just fun.
While I am not advocating this little experiment should be included on the curriculum, I think it could help to challenge our current education system a little in favour of a more hands-on approach to experimentation rather than simply finding solutions to problems from a standardised kit with a guidebook of worked examples.
STEM skills have done a lot for science and engineering courses in the past decade, but they often become quickly focused on professional rigour at the expense of allowing students to take a more creative and handmade approach to their experiments.
I often cite a curious example of how encouraging this type of childlike experimentation can have much larger consequences. In the late 90’s a popular BBC series called Robot Wars which was like cage fighting for robots.
Hobbyist engineers would create fighting machines armed with an array of giant hammers, spikes or a number of different weapons which an adult human might imagine would inflict the most damage. However, a competitor called Hypnodisc entered the arena equipped with a ridiculously hefty, dustbin-lid-shaped spinning disc on its front. It looked inadequate — until it went into action. It wreaked utter carnage upon its enemies with the lethal spinning flywheel. It was arguably one of the most successful robots in the tournament’s history.
But the inventor says he actually got the inspiration from his son, who’d one day asked: “What happens if you just have a big spin-y thing on the front of it and it bumps into things?”
Conventional wisdom would have stopped other inventors from using this approach despite the fact that the mechanics of the weapon really do add up. If you’ve got a mass on the end of a wheel spinning at hundreds of RPM the impact force it generates is massive and higher than any pneumatic sledgehammer could deliver.
In my experience, the best way of teaching students the importance of blending the professionally rigorous and the naïvely creative is using “biomimicry” — which takes the natural world as a starting point for design inspiration. The cyclone in the Dyson vacuum is a good example; separating dust using a centrifugal force is just a smaller version of what happens in a tornado.
Indeed, my own entry into the James Dyson Award some years ago in 2009 was influenced by nature: The Pressure Alert, was a medical device which had a small warning unit designed to tell an anaesthetist if they had sealed the airway during anaesthesia at too high a pressure. The ‘pilot’ balloon I developed was a small analogue solution to the problem which would simply inflate and ‘pop up’ a button to indicate if the pressure was incorrect. Initially, I worked with NHS Glasgow at Yorkhill Children’s Hospital, to test the idea and ultimately came second in the international JDA competition. Once again, the idea was actually inspired by nature. I had been watching a David Attenborough TV documentary which showed that some seed pods had an ‘explosive charge’ that was triggered when something touched them. The seeds are launched over a distance or hooking into an animal’s fur to be carried away and eventually deposited elsewhere.
I became intrigued by the popping mechanism itself. Eventually I realised that there must be a very subtle change in pressure in the seed pods to cause them to explode and I thought, rightly as it turns out, that I could use this phenomenon as a way to indicate the subtle difference in pressure in the unit.
It’s clear that the natural world is far and away one of the most incredible engineers out there. The more one explores the most seemingly complex system of organic mechanisms or chemical interactions, the more one also discovers how elegantly simple the components really are. In this respect, nature is the ultimate antidote to over-engineering.
In my opinion, one of the most exciting things a young inventor can do is design something completely alien to his/her own experience. It’s a skill that increasingly seems to fade with age and arguably after an over exposure to formal education but I believe that young people should be encouraged to invent and be creative as much as possible while they still can.
When I was a child messing around with my ‘user-centric bird hotel’ I was limited by the technology of my time. But students today have access to coding, rapid manufacturing techniques, well-made electrical components at their disposal. Not to mention things like VR and machine learning. Many birds, for example, have 360-degree vision. I created an optical experience based solely on my human 20/20 vision. But if a child with the right tools to help them realise their vision knew that that birds see in 360 degrees who knows what their otherworldly birdhouse would be like.
Words: Jude Pullen, Inventor
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