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Global Constraints

01/14/2016

Repurposing Products of Technology (Trash)

I have a fairly complete home shop and like to make things. I also have access to a huge amount of old scrap material at a friend’s farm, and discarded objects put out on the street for the twice a year free trash pickup in the area of my house. I frequently attend shows of antique machinery, which typically DSC_0008have a so-called swap meet, where no-longer-used pieces of equipment and components are available for very friendly prices. I have discovered that I can please not only myself, but friends and neighbors by turning old stuff back into useful objects. Eventually this scrap will be recycled either into raw materials (iron, aluminum, etc) or ground fill. Why not get some use out of it in the interim?

This post is about turning scrap metal into so-called yard art. I recently was not only annoyed, but flattered when a bird I had made out of various discarded objects was actually stolen. I just thought I was having fun, not creating objects of value. It is shown in the photo before it flew away.  Since I spent a year as an art student at UCLA, and was brainwashed as to what real art is, I do not consider this real art, but it is fun.  Maybe it is yard decoration.

In fact I have done a lot of this sort of stuff, now that I have outlived my art teachers. The photos DSC_0004below  show two more birds, an ant ,and a flower that also reside in our yard.

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I also enjoy making functional looking things that do nothing. The next photo looks like water runs through it, or at least in and out of it, but that is not the case. As you know, I also restore abandoned machines, so that they operate and retain some of their early glory. A few are shown in the following picture, and I will talk about that use of time  in a future post. The final two are of  a restored pump-jack  holding our mail box ((corny, but Marian (yellow vest with bird and ant, likes it)) and a restored  oil pump doing nothing but sticking in the ground. (Incidentally, I realize that the layout of this post is awful, but I use the Typepad service, and no matter what I do, the service screws it up.)

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Posted at 12:18 PM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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12/30/2015

A Great Book About Everything

 Every once in a while I read a book that really impresses me. Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari (HarperCollins books, more info on recommended books at left), is one of these. Maybe it is because I am working on a book concerning the influence of our evolution on problem solving. Sapiens is a book about us, including  a bit about the evolution of our brains. Maybe it’s because I learned a lot and tend to agree with what he says.

It also impresses me because Harari writes better than I do, is better at referencing sources than I am, and perhaps is smarter and knows more than I do about the history of the human race. But I will only admit this to those of you who read my posts, because I trust you not to tell anyone. And it doesn’t make me feel too bad, because he is a historian (writing and referencing), and probably doesn’t know as much techy stuff as I do. But his photo doesn’t make him look very old…………..

I have read many books about the origins and evolution of homo sapiens, but none that are as fun to read and that cover as broad a span of material. There is a quote on the front of his book from Jared Diamond, who is definitely no slouch in the knowledge and writing departments, and it pretty well summarizes the book. It is “Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language”.

The book is divided into four sections, The Cognitive Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution, The Unification of Humankind, and The Scientific Revolution. It’s emphasis is more on relatively recent times rather than primitive (more history available after we developed writing). It gives a few insights into where the author thinks it is all going, and although he leaves open the option that we have that ability to destroy ourselves, and may do so, it is generally positive, although he does point out a few mistakes he thinks we may have made. One example I found interesting, was his questioning of the agricultural revolution. He suggests, for example, after talking about life before and after the Neolithic Revolution, that wheat domesticated us instead of the opposite, turning us into slaves to increase it’s population and health at the expense of our free time and relatively crime and worry free lives.

Another interesting section is his ambivalence about money (economics). He is definitely convinced that money was one of the main reasons that we went through a major change in our material world. When we bartered for our help and goods, we were restricted on what we could get by what we had to offer. When money, which could buy almost anything, came into the picture, we not only had more access to what we wanted, but we could now grow in our ability to do this buying through loans and other financial means.

But as he does a good job of pointing out, modern economic systems are entirely based on faith, require growth, and lead to leveraging. He believes that in the long term the world will become one (if nothing else, business pushes this), and our varying faith in money and financial institutions as to the value of money could cause much more serious and wide-spread panics and crashes.

But enough. If you haven’t already, read the book. You’ll enjoy it, learn some things, and be able to argue with your friends about it.

Posted at 02:06 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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12/17/2015

Politicians,Their Fantasies, and Change

I wrote a post on October 28th concerning resistance to change, and I briefly described my Homo Demi Sapiens book effort in my last one, but the best recent show of Homo Demi Sapiens has been the Republican presidential candidate debates, which recently concluded . I understand that politicians try to say things that will cause people to vote for them, and that they usually drift toward the middle after elected (Reagan ended up raising taxes). And also that they infer that they have detailed plans (seldom published) as to how to fix everything that is wrong quickly and cheaply, But give me a break. Change is not easy nor does it happen rapidly in a society, and individual politicians are not that much smarter than each other, although some of them certainly think they are.

In the last debate, they were discussing national security—keeping people safe. The recent “extremist muslim terrorist” shootings in San Bernardino California received a lot of attention. They were tragic, and therefore newsworthy, but not off of the chart. I went to high school in San Bernardino, and even then it was far from a crime-free city. There were 46 murders in San Bernardino in 2013 with no terrorist involvement at all. At present the San Bernardino overall crime rating is about twice the national average, and as I mentioned in a previous post, is in terrible shape at present due to the closing of Norton Air Force Base, the Santa Fe Railroad Shops, and Kaiser Steel Mill and the disappearance of agriculture. True, the 14 deaths in San Bernardino were outrageous, but we don’t seem to be as outraged by the approximately 30,000 deaths per year in traffic accidents, the approximately 11,000 murders per year from gun violence, or by the 2-1/2 million people who just die each year in the U.S.

Yet this shooting of fourteen people by a Muslim couple was a prime subject of discussion by the candidates, most of whom seemed to have a simple-sounding solution to the terrorism problem. Of course, their solution had much to do with their favorite causes (Trump immigration, Fiorino technology, etc.) And the all agreed that the “bad guys” should be killed (the instigator of the San Bernardino killings was apparently a woman) and that terrorist shootings and bombings should be stopped immediately (A lot of people are trying and it seems to be difficult). Interestingly, there was little if any attention paid to Russia, China, North Korea, or other such nuclear-armed countries that we seem to be worried about.

The problems with terrorism are complex. We seem to want to blame Muslims, but only a tiny percentage of muslims are terrorists, and those that are vary widely. The husband of the couple blamed for the San Bernardino shootings was born in the U.S. To my knowledge, few if any terrorists are from countries such as India, Indonesia, Turkey, and many other countries with large numbers of Muslims. The source seems to be the Middle-East, and we have demonstrated our inabilities there.

Terrorists are not killing themselves and other people because it is fun. They are doing it because it is consistent with their beliefs and the frustrations of their lives. Terrorism seems to be very effective against the U.S. Look at the effects the perpetrators of 9/11 have had on us, not only in casualties and property damage, but in confidence and convenience (think airport). The U.S. became scared, and is still scared, and therefore weaker. Nor do we seem to be able to agree as to whether we need more guns or fewer guns. So some level of terrorism will probably continue as long as it works, or until it seems to go out of style or is no longer news worthy (remember youth gang killings), or until nations shape up their act. People who have fought in and study the mid east believe that we will be there for a long time. And as for keeping them out of the U.S. as long as we succeed in getting our spies into other countries, a few terrorists will probably get into the U.S. (or already be here)

As an aside, although I have never met the man, the campaigning Trump was an overwhelming example of Homo Demi Sapiens. He was again trumpeting about the evils of Mexican immigrants and the need for his wall, but Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin has stated the Canadian border should received more worry than the Mexican border as far as national security is concerned. And as competing candidates timidly pointed out, his fixes for stopping terrorism violate many U.S. ideals.

His suggested wall would be an insult to everyone. Remember “El Chapo” Guzman’s escape from a high security prison via a relatively luxurious tunnel which ended in his prison shower? I have spent a reasonable amount of time on the border (relatives in Somerton Arizona, U.S. Air Force duty in El Centro, California), and it is long and unsettled, and a wall along it would take many years to build, require an immense amount of money and labor, and could be breached either by tunnel, airplane, boat, or explosives. And hopefully the U.S. would not get the reputation of killing Mexican people crossing it, as was the case with the comparatively short Berlin Wall. Historically, walls have not worked well in the long run—even the Great Wall of China. But politically, there is apparently enough fear in the U.S. (cleverly bolstered a bit by Trump) and lack of knowledge about the money and labor necessary to build such a wall, that some people actually seem not only to accept the concept, but be in favor of it.  I am very fond of Mexico and its people, have spent a reasonable amount of time there and going to school and working with Mexicans here, and do not remember any of them being murderers or rapists. But maybe Trump sees building the wall as a potential excellent construction job if he is not elected and can sell the concept.

Maybe some day we will accept an economy and elect a congress that keeps the infrastructure up and supports those who retire, those who are unable to support themselves, and the necessary military,. Maybe we’ll even stop killing and raping each other and be able to provide acceptable food, shelter, and medical care for all. But this is not all going to occur in the four or eight years after the next president is elected. The British are smart, educated, and civilized, and they have been tinkering with their government furnished medical care since 1948 and are still unhappy with it.

I will talk more about change in the future, but let me just say here that even though such things as technology, population size, expectations, and awareness of the finite nature of “natural” resources are changing rapidly, changes in large numbers of people move slowly, and the more disruption of which people are aware (thank the media and presidential candidates), the more they look to the past, which was never as benign as people remember it to be.

It would be nice if these candidate debates were based a bit more on well thought-out and realistic plans rather than opinions and desires for power on the part of the participants. But that doesn’t seem to be how the electoral process works, especially in the days of TV, marketing, and the internet, so bring on the fantasies. They are at least entertaining.

Posted at 10:12 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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10/28/2015

Resistance to Change:

Anthropologists sometimes speak in terms of generations (25 years) and in those terms, our species (homo) has been around some 240,000 generations (6,000,000 years), This is plenty of time for us to evolve a la Mr. Darwin.  But we did not have the advantage of stone tools until the Paleolithic period which began about 100,000 generations (2.5 million years) ago – 140,000 generations with no tools, probably no fire, definitely no athletic shoes, roaming the land in small groups (probably extended families )for our food and shelter, but plenty of time to evolve into tool users.   

 The Neolithic Revolution, when we discovered agriculture and began living in fixed areas, was about 500 generations ago (12,500 years). This period of time since we began farming and building towns and cities is a bit shorter, and we are obviously still involved in working the wrinkles out of such activities. 

 But think of what we have done to ourselves since the industrial revolution which occurred in Europe only about 10 generations (250 years) ago—or for that matter since transistors were invented some 70  years ago (three generations)—a major change in our life style with little opportunity to evolve to match it.

 I have been expecting a back lash against the recent high rate of changes in our lives, much of it resulting from developments in science and technology, over the past few years, but so far it has not happened.  In fact, we seem to be fascinated and entertained by these changes, providing that they don’t inconvenience us too much as individuals.  But there are signs that a backlash is beginning, ranging from mutterings of people being forced into “upgrading” their computer software, to the increasing worry about job loss, traffic, scarcity, and environmental degradation, to the increasing gap between the rich and poor, and the loss of the essential middle class.

 An example is an angry article in the October 25th issue of the New York Times written  by Mark Lynas, and entitled Europe Turns Against Science.  It is here.  The article criticizes the 17 countries in Europe that have announced bans on the cultivation of genetically modified(G.M.) crops.  The author feels that this will not only be extremely costly, but even though the bans do not include research, will cause these countries to fall behind those who are including genetically modified plants in their agriculture (the U.S.?).  These European countries have great influence in the world, and apparently much of sub-Saharan Africa is also forbidding the growing of G.M. foods.  This is in spite of a great amount of research showing that G.M. foods are safe, and strange inconsistencies, such as the importing of some 30 million tons per years of soy and corn based animal feeds by these European countries, much genetically modified, and much from the U.S.  And since many G.M. foods are designed to be immune to many pests and diseases,  the use of pesticides and other polluting and expensive chemical agents will continue to increase in these countries.

 And then there is the problem of sufficient food production in the world.  G.M. crops  often are more productive.  The United Nations, which keeps track of  population trends in the world, has for some time predicted that the world population would peak at  9 million by the end of this century.  We are now at 7.3 billion (the last billion of which happened in only 12 years).  The U.N. has now upped its prediction for the end of the century to 11 million, a large portion of which will be in Africa.  In fact, one prediction is that by 2050, Nigeria will have a larger population than the  U.S.  Where is the food going to come from to feed everyone?  Lynas has a couple of quotes in his article to back up  his argument about some extreme African attitudes toward G.M.foods.  One is by Tobaiwa Mudede, described as a crony of Robert Mugabe, who singles out G.M. food as the cause of the “huge problem of sexual dysfunction in the U.S”. , where “males become impotent around the age of 24, at the prime of life”. The author also mentions being interrupted while giving a talk in Tanzania by a farmer who said  he would never grow biotech crops because “they would turn my children into homosexuals”.

 I blame resistances such as these on changes happening too fast for the comfort zones of our species.  We don’t seem to be that bothered by the much slower ongoing activities in “improving” plants through cross-breeding. There is some value in this typical  human resistance to change, because it results in thorough study of secondary effects of new developments. And I am expecting the next resistance to appear either in the area of associated with computers and the internet, or to extreme and very expensive developments in medicine oriented toward immortality .  But the downside is that many people who could benefit from these developments are deprived of them. The undernourished in Africa?

Posted at 09:42 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/22/2015

Product Quality, Maintenance, Service, and Standardization

In his now classic paper “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality”, Published in 1987 in the Harvard Business Review, David Garvin included serviceability as one of the critical eight.  This service must sometimes be performed by experts (the Boeing airliner), but often can be accomplished by the customer (oil level in a car, a bent prong on an electric plug, maybe replacing plumbing or getting a recalcitrant gas engine or your furnace to run).  People like me prefer servicing everything possible ourselves, for reasons ranging from economic to satisfaction.

 Products become more complex over time, as more features are added and technology becomes more sophisticated, and it seems to me that manufacturers are paying less attention to the owner’s ability to service the product.  The incentive for them to improve serviceability is offset by the profit to be made by being able to convince people to throw away the malfunctioning product and buy a new “upgrade” , and by the money to be made by the professional service people.  A clear example is Apple, whose products are very difficult to maintain, and who obviously don’t mind people taking their ailing equipment to the Apple store, so that Apple “geniuses” can try to sell them new equipment and while they are there, add-ons such as cool cases and new apps.

 But I am personally fed up with what appears to me a strong emphasis on designing for manufacturing (good), but less on owner service.  As a minor specific example, let me say a few words about the proliferation of nuts, bolts, and screws in the world.  We in the U.S. are somewhat guilty, since we insist on refusing to join the metric system, even though all nations except for Myanmar and Liberia have ( I think a wonderful example of U.S. arrogance ), and because of our major dependence  on  and participation in trade, have caused the world to use both systems, even though the metric system is far more straight forward and much easier to use. 

 But beyond that, although sizes and thread dimensions seem to be standardized, people continue to invent new geometries, and granted that many have advantages (especially in manufacturing), the tool requirements on the owner are getting ridiculous.  If you want to get an idea of the diversity in screws, nuts and bolts, run down the several pages of a table that might interest you here.

  IMG_0758The photo shows some of my own “standard” (slotted and Phillips head) screwdrivers.  Granted there is some duplication here, caused by defending against the normal response of borrowing but never getting around to returning screwdrivers, but due to modifications I have made on various ones to fit various odd screws, I use them all.  And of course I have a complete set of “Allen” hex (six sided)  wrenches (metric and U.S.) and a complete set of sockets and screw drivers for Torx screws (invented by the automobile industry but spreading widely).  But still I run into developments that amaze me, like the alternate screws developed by Apple to prevent “tampering” (which includes changing a battery,etc.)  The good news I suppose is that it opened up a new market for tools ( see the Amazon offerings here), and I have already participated by buying a battery kit over the internet, (but not without major resentment).  The bad news is that it is difficult for the average tinkerer to keep up with the tool requirements needed to use the expanding array of fasteners.

 So my plea to the manufacturers of the world is “Pay more attention to the ability of your customers to service your product”, because even the best of commercial service is an convenience and typically slow and expensive.  And my  plea to the rest of us to be more aware of the real cost (including resources and environmental damage) in throwing away a dishwasher because a new control panel plus a visit from a professional costs almost as much as a new one.

And there are many other reasons for making services simpler.  When I was younger my friends and I loved to “work on our cars”, and therefore were a natural market for well-used and cheaper ones, and came to love cars in general.    Nowadays, cars are much more difficult to “work on”.  Also the interest in cars among young people is plunging.  Suppose there is a correlation, auto manufacturers?  Kids don’t have as much money, but they are your hoped for future customers.

 

 

Posted at 09:24 AM in Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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03/09/2015

Life and the Distractions of Technology

In 2006, Matthew Crawford wrote an article in the New Atlantis magazine entitled “Shopcraft as Soulcraft”.  It is here.  My friends and I who are believers in the benefits, if not necessity, of working with the hands on tangible objects, loved it.  He followed with a book of the same title in 2008.  I have never met him, but think I should because I have been working on a similar book (working title Making, Fixing, and Tinkering) for several years. I am far from a full time writer— partly due to necessary hobbies involving working with my hands— so I don’t know when I will finish.  But I have suspected since I saw his original article in the New Atlantis that we think along similar lines.

 Now I am sure of it, because I just encountered an article he wrote in the Sunday Review Section of the March 8, 2015 edition of the New York Times entitled “The Cost of Paying Attention”.  The article was based on another book of his that is forthcoming entitled The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.  The article from The New Atlantis is here.   I am excited about reading the book when it appears, and will comment on it in a future post.

 The article in the Times has to do with the constant distractions we have from such things as television, print, digital devices, and marketeers.  He uses the example of the difference in feelings and ability to think or focus on specific activities in the lounges associated with upper class flying, and the general waiting areas, which are papered with advertisements and filled with noise and other distractions.  His final short paragraph summarizes his thoughts: “I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed.  This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested”

 To me, an example of distraction is social networking..  When I retired from active professoring in 1999, the internet and mobile phones and computers were not nearly as central to life on the campus.  But realizing that I was not yet dead two or three years ago, I figured that I had better catch up to our culture, and that social networking was a part of it.  So I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in.  I linked to a few close friends, and was immediately overwhelmed.  I had not realized the capability of  these “services” to find people I knew in the world and harangue me about linking to them.  Neither did I realize the number of people I did not know in the world who wanted to link to me for reasons of possible employment, support for graduate study, a source of contacts, or simply to better brag about their number of “friends”. 

I enjoy writing posts to this blog, and sending it to a relatively small number of people by way of twitter and facebook, because it keeps me thinking about issues in which I am interested.  But I do an embarrassingly poor job of responding to comments, adding information to my sites,  accepting new “friends” and “contacts”, or otherwise following the etiquette of being linked to hundreds of thousands of people.  I am impressed with people who do so, although at some point it seems to require an assistant, if not a staff to keep up with all of this communication.  But I have more rewarding projects to do than I will ever finish, am constantly finding new activities that are rewarding, and I certainly don’t want an assistant or staff. Social networking, although seductive, I consider to be an attention pirate. And even e-mail has joined the list.  I seem to be spending more time making filters to trash information I don’t want than I do dealing with messages of value to me.

 Advertising is another evil.  There are of course the ads that interrupt TV programs, and the pop-up ads on the internet.  And I should apologize to the New York Times, because a couple of weeks ago I wrote a gentle rant against their “new” format for the Sunday magazine.  I could not stand it.  It was mostly advertisements for the usual luxury goods, and almost impossible to read because of out of control graphics —distractions.  To my amazement and delight, the very next issue had moved back toward its traditional format —back to a reasonable weight, articles whose continuation could be reasonably easy to find, graphics that did not disrupt the flow, and a reasonable amount of advertisement.  Perhaps the New York Times was simply making a quick chunk of money by selling ad space to the people who usually advertise in their ridiculously thick supplements on such things as Fashion and Travel, which consist most of ads.  Hopefully they were influenced by a large number of readers like my wife and I (and friends) who were thinking of canceling their subscription because of the issue that contained their “new” magazine format. 

 And what’s with grocery stores?  Next time you enter a “super market” pay careful attention to the advertisements.  The good news, is that your mind will soon refuse to do so.  The bad news is that if it did not, you would undoubtedly run into a shopping cart containing a couple of babies and being pushed by a shopper on their smart phone, either communicating with their spouse on what to buy or texting their friends, and end up in a hassle. 

 I am eagerly waiting for Matthew Crawford’s new book. Meanwhile I will re-think my interaction with social networking.

Posted at 02:17 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Global Constraints, Internet, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, The nature of technology, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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02/09/2015

Quality for Free

In my book, Good Products, Bad Products, I briefly discuss cost (to maker) and price (to customer).  These often relate to overall product quality, but not necessarily in a logical or linear manner.  But it is definitely the case that we are all sensitive to price when acquiring products.  But how about products, even reasonably high quality ones, that can be obtained for free? To many of us, especially those of us who do not have the benefit (?) of great wealth, these have a particular cachet.

 I used to like to read Wired magazine, but it has over time become such a promo-piece for expensive products (full page add for Gucci on the back of the Feb 1,2015 issue) and the digital industry that I no longer subscribe to it.  But like many Conde Naste publications, it still comes to my house, probably either because they think I will subscribe again, or because they can keep me in their circulation count (attractive to advertisers).

 This issue has an interesting editorial by Scott Dadich, the editor in chief, which starts out with a mea- culpa on his addiction to “shiny new gadgets”, followed by raves about Microsoft’s Project HoloLens .  But then he brings up the fact that the rapid turnover in new gadgets results in great numbers of still usable devices ending up in landfills.  He then mentions an article in the issue by Randall Sullivan about a person named Matt Malone, an expert in corporate security and a professional dumpster diver, in that he finds products (often new) that have been discarded and resells them at a lower cost.  In fact, he states that if he was to do this full time, he could make at least $250,000 in the Austin. Texas area alone.  The editorial is here, and the article is here.

 I resonate with Matt Malone, even though I have never met him.  First of all, he is adding to the world’s recycling effort, and secondly, I am an amateur dumpster diver and finder of fine objects in trash piles.  I don’t sell them for profit, but rather I either give them away, or keep them because I love them— they appeal to me and they are FREE.

  IMG_0204The photo at the left shows a “free swap” book box I built for my wife for Christmas.  She loves books, and since the area in which we live is full of academics, who in turn have and read lots of books, it gets a heavy trade.  But it is a miracle to my wife and I, because it is an ever-changing source of free books right next to our house (sorry Amazon). 

When I first arrived at Stanford it was "upgrading" and discarding many "old" items.  As an example, they were re-doing teaching spaces and filling dumpster boxes with captains chairs that had been used in the old rooms.  I snagged a half dozen of them for my house, because they were comfortable and showed the patina of history.  Ironically enough, some years later, Stanford was putting brass plaques on the few that were left. and awarding them to major gift donors. And people were so eager to acquire new and "modern" equipment that they did not value the beauty and historical value of some of the old.

 The two photos below show  an old medical instrument that was used for examining tissue sections, and a few rescued objects that are in my office.  The adding machine is of great value because none of our present students have the faintest idea of what it is.  The two instruments are there because I like them.  And I’ll bet you don’t have as good a whiffle ball container as the one in the photo below them.

IMG_0240  IMG_0230

IMG_0233And I do not restrict myself to dumpsters.  My wife is a compulsive gardener, and  has a constant need for pots. The photo below  shows her pot supply. IMG_0234  We never have to buy them, because Stanford has a free trash pickup for all campus homeowners twice a year, and I have a pickup, with which I can easily keep her in pots, as well as miscellaneous yard furniture, shelves, garden tools, and other goodies.

 I must admit that she is somewhat embarrassed that we will be seen by the neighbors as we go through their trash, but I am proud to be helping the ecosphere and our budget, as we acquire objects of high quality that are no longer appreciated by their former owners. 

 

Posted at 01:00 PM in Books, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/19/2015

Go Economist

The cover of the Jan 17th-23rd 2015 issue of The Economist magazine blares “Seize the Day: How Falling Oil Prices and New Technology Offer a Chance to Transform Energy Policy”.  The Leader (here) speaks to the energy issue, as do several articles and a Special Report on energy technology.  For a consistently capitalist magazine, their treatment of energy is surprisingly green.  Their suggestions for improvement, of course include more freeing all energy markets and making them internationally seamless  removing all subsidies for producing and consuming fossil fuels world-wide, and ensuring seamless global energy markets}.  But it also backs up such things as carbon taxes and decreasing waste, smarter grids, and research on better storage for solar/electrical energy.

The Special Report points out advances in technology that are making alternate energy sources more economic (as one article points out, fossil fuels have historically gone up and down down in price, but solar keeps getting cheaper).  It also underlines the need for new business models and the need for cutting energy waste. Nothing  radical if  you follow the energy situation, but the Economist may receive more attention from deniers in business and government than pioneers such as the Rocky Mountain Institute.

 The Economist has consistently promoted cleaning up and modernizing energy production and usages, since such activities obviously open up great economic opportunities.  It is a stand that may seem to run counter to the vested interests of traditional energy producers and consumers – big oil, coal, etc.  But it is the future.  After all, our steady state energy source is the sun.  A couple of  billion years ago or so there was a extinction event, sometimes called the Great Oxygenation Event (here). Cyanobacteria, the dominant life form upon this time, began producing oxygen by photosynthesis, and in the process killed themselves off, leaving an atmosphere containing free oxygen.  And here, a long time later, we are.  Are we going to kill ourselves off and yield the scene to life forms that live on carbon dioxide and methane?

 The battle will be long and nasty, and will be fought in time periods consistent with our life spans rather than in billions of  years.   It will be a difficult one since oil, gas, and coal are such efficient sources of energy, so affordable, so integral to our society and so dominant a part of our economies, but we will be forced to clean up our act and our economy and we will adapt.  As a tiny personal example, I used to swear that I would leave the location in which I live (which I love) if burning wood in fireplaces was ever outlawed.  We’re close.  Our area has outlawed the inclusion of wood burning fireplaces in new houses, and we now have “no burn” days so often that my wife and I switched to gas logs a year ago.  We are not leaving.

 The age of fire must assume a much less destructive character.  Late developments (fracking, tar sands), might cause us to think we  have a long supply of fossil fuel (several  generations) which we can simply burn, but producing, refining, and moving it will continue to be more costly, we will continue to fight over it and play economic games with it,  damage to the ecosphere will continue, and we will have to continue to admit that we are dependent on long dead plants and animals.   Being humans, things will probably get worse before they get better.  It will take us some bitter arguments, more costly incidents (BP and OPEC) and require thinking and learning a lot, but we will change.  We will learn to use our fossil fuels more thoughtfully and we will end up with unused fossil fuels in the ground, just as we ended up with unused oil in the whales. 

 Now is a good time to get much more serious on this transition.  The warning signals have been increasing over many years, and we have heeded them to some extent, but  we “developed” countries have been building our dependence on simply burning fossil fuels sharply over the past 150 years, and now we are facing large populations doing the same.  It will take at least that long to become more sophisticated in generating and using energy.  I remember the years it took in denial and then in technical development to cut the emissions from automobiles.  This is a much larger challenge. And we in the U.S. seem to consider ourselves leaders of the world — why aren’t we leading it?

 I admire the role the Economist is playing in the change, especially since they may be losing a bit of support from the petroleum and coal industries,  so-called energy policy experts,  and all those who are dominated by them.  I notice in the letters and internet responses, some Economist readers are accusing them of “liberal” thinking, obviously an obscene activity to said readers.  But hey, by now oil and coal companies should be acting like energy industries, in deed as well as in their advertising.  And if oil prices stay down, we can raise taxes enough to fund our breaking-down infrastructure and accomplish the  technology development necessarily to help them use our fossil fuels in a more intelligent way.  They are too valuable to simply burn, and we need to quit using our fragile ecosphere as a free dump .  We definitely should  seize the day.

Posted at 03:03 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/13/2015

Technology, Longevity, and Hubris

I have been off the web for a few days, so yesterday I was catching up on my reading.  Three articles I read that had to do with potential “improvements” in the human condition caught my eye.  Two of them were in the January 11th New York Times Magazine section: the cover story by Gareth Cook, entitled Mind Games (here), and an article by Robin Henig, entitled Death by Robot (here). The third article was the cover story in the January 9th issue of the Palo Alto Weekly, written by Joshua Alvarez and entitled After the Last Death (it is here).  The first describes a heroic and clever attempt to produce a complete map of the connections between the neurons in a human mind.  The second deals with the extent that robots built to do such tasks as fight in wars and take care of the sick can and should make moral choices.  The third is concerned with aging and the length of the human life span — if  you would, engineering humans.

 We are on a major run on technological sophistication and application due to the rapid increase in the power of digital software and hardware, with its attendant ability to gather and reduce huge amounts of data, combined with the resources put into research, development, and company start ups because of the potential to make money.  This has resulted in great optimism about the future, especially on the part of people who have become wealthy and famous by riding this wave.  But contrary to the wishes of technological determinists, the outputs of technology are not always good for society.

 I have always been a believer in a long ago book entitled Normal Accidents, by Charles Perrow, that claims that there will always be accidents in complex systems, and that if we can tolerate the cost of them (airplane crashes) we should go ahead with the system, but if we cannot tolerate the cost (nuclear warheads on intercontinental missiles) we should not build the system—or at least build it very cautiously, and think  hard about possible failures as we do so.  We humans are a complex system we should think hard about playing God with our species, at least until we prove that we can cure such  trivial problems as automobile traffic jams.

 The Gareth Cook article mentioned above is about an obviously brilliant scientist named Sebastian Seung, who is one of a group of people who believe that our memory is made up of interconnections between neurons, and if we could understand the process and the result, we would have the contents in the mind (information, emotions, values, etc.) in the form of data.  In other words we would know everything there.  Granted this is a huge project, but Seung believes it can be done over a few lifetimes, and has clever ways of using games to encourage massive numbers of people to be involved in the process.  But shouldn’t we be thinking about what that might mean, and what we might use it for?  How would we “read” this map.  Who would do so?  It is great science, and would give us great insight into the mind, providing we could figure out how to read it.  And this insight would  probably lead to major new insights on treatments for unacceptable behavior and brain diseases, and human brainpower,   But probably people would also consider it a road to a new form of mind control,  surveillance, or building a super-human species (silicon life?).  Good?  Bad? 

 As to moral choices by robots, should they make them?  Some people might like their “care robot” to shut off life support at a certain point.  Some would definitely not.  Should military robots make decisions about how much “collateral damage” to cause?

And then there is the question of life span.  The Palo Alto Weekly article contains comments by people involved in improving the health and happiness of aging people, obviously a topic that will become even hotter as the hordes of outspoken Boomers continue to become older (interesting that this is the “Don’t trust anyone over 30” generation, who resented being dominated by people in the age group they now populate).  Some of the people interviewed in this last article feel that the present life span will continue to slowly increase because of better knowledge about living and eating well, but this is good providing  that medical care is accessible by all, and that treatments for age-related diseases such as dementia, diabetes, and cancer continue to improve.

 But a couple of the people interviewed are firmly convinced that we willand should  learn to radically increase our life span.  One of them, Joon Yun, a physician who is  now president of Palo Alto Investors, a Venture Capital firm.is behind the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, a $1 million science competition aimed at ending aging by improving the body’s ability to restore itself as it becomes older.  He speaks of a 150 year life span.  But according to the article, he believes that it is theoretically possibly to attain a 1,000 year life span, or even more, by eliminating natural aging and death from internal causes biy learning to maintin the ability of the body to repair itself that it has in the early years. As he states, “We’ve got the technology to hack the aging code and end aging.  Question  is not “if” but “when” we want it to happen”.  

 In fact, there is an increasing amount of activity in the San Francisco Bay area in longevity (Ellison Medical Foundation, Calico (Google), AbbVie, Buck Institute). But drastically increasing life span is an incredibly disruptive concept, socially,  and should receive quite a bit of thought as well as research money.  There are many downsides.  What would happen to populations, motivations, economies?  Would you have liked to be under the thumb of your parents more years?  Would you like the wealthy to have time to accumulate even more money to influence politics?  Would you really like to put in the work  to build a completely new or several careers (since you would be pretty bored with your present one)?  Would you like even more years to “keep up with the kids”?

 Many of my friends are dying these days from what used to be called old age.  Their last years are not often wonderful. In comparison, my father and grandfather’s instant deaths from massive heart attacks while still wellequipped with their mental and physical facilities have a certain attraction.  If life span is radically lengthened, such aging factors as  dementia and frailty need to be dealt with— perhaps first.

 I personally vote with the people in the Palo Alto Weekly article who went with the “work-hard, exercise, have fun, eat right, and don’t try to live forever, because you won’t” philosophies. We are wired not to want to die, but we all will, and the length of life is more a matter of what is in our memories than how many days have passed. 

I differ from some of my friends, in that I don’t exercise enough and probably eat and drink too much to live as long as I might.  But as one of my physician friends (who does not like repetitive exercise, but is in his 90’s and is in great mental and physical shape) calculated, an hour a day exercise every other day in a gym for 50 years is 9,125 hours, or 1,140 eight- hour days, 0r 228 forty- hour weeks, or the equivalent of  4-1/2 years of digging ditches as a union member, which is a lot of potential play time and doesn’t guarantee one would live 4-1/2 years longer.  And eating and drinking is fun.

 And finally, I think it will be a while before we “hack the code”.  Decoding the human genome has proven to be only the tip of the iceberg.

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Posted at 11:27 AM in Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/04/2015

The Ecosphere and Products

I am happily reading away at my Christmas books, and two of them are very readable and are concerned with the environment, and the technology and products that harm it. More details are in the recommended books section of this blog.

 One is Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and focuses on the species extinctions now underway due to human activities.  As you perhaps know, there is presently a movement to declare the end of the Holocene (wholly recent) epoch, which began some 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and declare that we are in a new epoch (the leading proposed name seems to be the Anthropocene), due to the fact that we humans are causing changes that will clearly show up in the fossil records of the future. One of most disturbing signs that will be visible is the damage we are causing to other living species.  Five major extinctions of species have occurred in the past due to catastrophic events in the Earth’s environment.  Now we seem to be entering a sixth, but guess what, this one seems to be caused by one of the species — us.  And the extinction not only is decreasing the wonderful variety of life, but is bound to cause us problems, since we have evolved in the context of it.

 The author of the other one, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, is Naomi Klein.  She is a Canadian woman who describes herself as an activist, a socialist, and a feminist.  Her first book, No Logo, was a blast at large, international, companies that acquire such a strong brand through marketing that they can sell people products they don’t really need.  The second, The Shock Doctrine, attacked unregulated capitalism, the Chicago School of Economics, and the tendency of the U.S. to support people attempting to enforce pure capitalism through political power or force (Pinochet).  Her latest argues for fighting climate change as an activity to not only preserve our cultures, but to help us create more humane and supportive societies. 

 Kolbert is a staff writer at New Yorker magazine, and Klein is an award winning journalist, and a syndicated columnist, and I can’t help  but think that such backgrounds are good training for the production of readable prose.  Neither of these books is a shallow rant. Kolbert’s book has over 30 pages of notes at the end, and Klein’s almost 60, (in small print, yet).  I have two more reasons for liking Klein.  The first is that a few years ago she was rated 11th in a major poll run to choose the world’s top 100 intellectuals—and she never finished college.  The second is that her books are a breath of fresh air to me, since I have spent most of my life living in Silicon Valley, and teaching at Stanford —both becoming more and more fond of unbridled capitalism, which certainly has resulted in wealth, but to me a certain loss in the quality of life in the area.

 Kolbert’s book is a story of what is occurring.  Klein’s is a call to arms.  She obviously has little faith in either business or government willingness or ability to do anything about climate change  in the rapidly shrinking time between now and when we fail to meet the present goals  She believes that the force to do something about it must come through active protests of large numbers of people who oppose the lack of action on this issue in order to achieve the widespread awareness of the problems that will be caused by atmospheric change, and to accomplish the radical changes necessary to re-balance our lives with the resources we have.  And I think she makes good arguments for some of the benefits of such changes.

 Climate change can be ameliorated by a life style that minimizes the pollutants that drive it. My worry is that among the many things that we have not evolved to do well, is solving problems with long time scales (hundreds of years) and great complexity.  We have a tendency to ignore slowly developing bad news, especially if the bad effects will occur after our deaths, and to try for simple answers in situations where there are none that will please every one (health care).  So we try to ignore, deny, or side step the problems.  As an example, we now we hear more and more about geo-engineering.  Dumping more pollutants into the atmosphere to decrease solar radiation to the planetary surface?  Give me a break!

 I recommend the books.  They probably won’t change your basic beliefs concerning things such as the amount of effort we should put into trying to minimize climate change, but they are full of interesting information and should cause more thinking on the topic.  And if you think we should focus more clearly on the problem, you will like them a lot.

 

 

 

    

Posted at 07:35 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/20/2014

Quality, Economics, and Jeff Marrick

A book I recently read—Jeff Madrick’s book entitled Seven Bad Ideas, subtitled “How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World” (see suggested readings)—  along with the excellent Ken Burns TV series on the Roosevelts,  have gotten me again thinking about economic theory and its effect on products.  Mainstream economists disagree, of course, but there is wide acceptance of theories that conclude that economics alone can result in good societies.  One is Adam Smith’s theory of the Invisible Hand – that buyers and sellers will converge on the ideal price for a good or service with no input from outside agencies such as governments.  Another is Says Law, which states that supply creates its own demand and has been around for two hundred years, even though major economists, such as Keynes, have put major effort into demonstrating that it does not work in modern society.

 A more contemporary figure that was extremely influential, and who subscribed heavily to pure capitalism with minimum intervention from government, was Milton Friedman, who Madrick vilifies repeatedly in his book.  He also emphasizes the many positive effects of government funding (massive support of research and development) as does the Roosevelt series vis-à-vis such programs as the Works  Progress Administration (WPA), which produced major infrastructure works as well as supporting artists, environmental work, and other socially valuable projects and products that would not have happened if dependent on pure capitalism itself. 

 From my position at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, it seems as though a great number of students and people are captivated with entrepreneurship and start-up companies.  That is good, but most of the start up companies I hear about and see are focused on making money for the founders and investors, and may or may not add a great deal to society.  The sale of WhatsApp, a then small software company, to Face Book for $19 billion certainly had economic ramifications, but what does it add to the quality of life in the U.S.?  On the other hand, many highways and other roads in California seem to be falling apart, and I meet few people who talk about starting a company to repair roads.  Neither does pure capitalism seem to care much about preserving the environment, global warming, or aid for the poor. 

 Faith in the market and such things as supply and demand curves simplify thinking about money and perhaps national economies, but modern economies are not simple.  Madrick points out that perhaps different cultures and countries in various stages of development may need devices that bias the market—tariffs, local incentives, and other such things  that are anathema to those who believe in the “free” market .  And products may be economically successful, but perhaps not important.  I was reading this weekend about two apps that tell the owner how often she/he use their smart phones each day. Economically successful, and  perhaps an aid to breaking overly time-consuming habits, but ????????

 

Posted at 09:55 AM in Books, Design, Education, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/24/2014

Bad Guys (?) and Good Guys (?) on the Internet

I have just finished an amusing and to me enlightening book entitled Internet (how crime went online and the cops followed) Police, by Nate Anderson, deputy editor at Ars Technica—see recommended books list on the left.  It is a series of cases of abuse of the internet and the attempt by various people to stop it.  Among other things, it highlights the disagreement between those who think the internet should be free and uncontrolled, and those who think it should at least follow the laws that pertain to written material and intellectual property.  Unfortunately, it is a very different media than paper, and easier to abuse than control, even if you believe it needs more control.  I have no doubt that it will be controlled more tightly as it grows, because that seems to be what happens when populations increase, and when anonymity is easy, money is to be made, and billions of people are involved, many of whom do not particularly revere the internet and view it as a source of quick money rather than something to cherish.

 Since I do not follow this topic in detail I found the cases quite extraordinary.  One of them, for instance, concerns a man named Nikolaenko, a Russian citizen, who quietly over time built a spambot network based on a virus he designed that infected more than 500,000 computers that would send out spam at his command.  It is estimated that at one time his network was producing over 30% of the spam in the world, and Nikolaenko was making millions from his clients.  He was finally identified, and apprehended during a visit to the U.S. (Russia does not punish its own citizens for such antics).  But U.S. courts could not do much with him, because spam, although very annoying, is difficult to prosecute, because those who do it claim freedom of speech, and old laws don’t seem to have much effect. 

 Notice that despite the “no call” attempt on the part of the government, telephone marketing is back in full force and even more annoying because it does not now involve real people.  We are thinking of dropping our land line, but marketing ads are now showing up on cell phones.  The trash quotient for our phone is on a par with the trash quotient in our surface mail (lots).  But the trash quotient in my e-mail is worse, and still growing rapidly.  And to make it even more insulting,  phishers are not even bothering to correct their spelling any more.

 A similar case involved a man named Steven Warshak, who founded a company that eventually was selling thirteen different medicines over the internet that supposedly increased penis size. He too was making millions, although the medicines not only didn’t work, they really didn’t exist.  He too was identified, but also escaped the punishment he would have received for fraud in the days of written documents.

 I knew there were problems in the internet, but not the extent of them, and how difficult it is to prosecute what many of us call “computer crime”, or “internet crime”.

 The book is well written, easy to read, and gives a good picture of the problems people have who are trying to police the internet. You will be biased as to how bad the problem is, but having recently gone through the exercise of sending an invoice overseas for some consulting I did, it seems to me that things are getting worse.  Sniffers love to find the word invoice, especially on overseas messages, because there is usually lots of valuable information on such things.  And I am also enduring Stanford University’s frantic attempts to escape hacking through two layers of passwords, one designed to foil sniffers,and therefore un-memorizable by humans,  and the other a constantly changing set of random numbers (encryption is coming), It seems to me that the usefulness of the internet is radically decreasing as a result of lack of control, and lack of laws that fit the media and its international nature.

Posted at 08:55 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Current Affairs, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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07/13/2014

Drought, Leaves, Noise, and Energy

In California’s present drought, trees are dropping leaves in record quanities.  We have always hated leaf blowers, because of the noise they make, because trees are supposed to have leaves around them, and because of the fuel they burn to perform work that is kind of fun to do by hand.

I must admit that there are places we care for where the leaf buildup can become not only inconvenient, but an invitation for fire. An example is my escape barn in the Sacramento Valley, which is crammed with machinery and is surrounded by oak trees providing leaves to be blown into the barn in great heaps. In order to clean the leaves out it is necessary to remove all of the contents of the barn, which is a major job.  Another is our driveway and yard walks, which are covered with gravel, and challenge one to rake up the leaves without the gravel accompanying them.  So  we finally invested in a small, hand-held four-cycle blower (quiet) to loosen up the worst and most difficult to reach areas of dead-leaf accumulation.

 But the device turned out to be both tempermental and difficult to maintain.  And even it made too much noise, so I decided to permanently take it up to my barn.  A couple of days ago I decided to take it apart and find out what its troubles were, and found that it was clearly designed to make it so impossible to repair that the owner would buy a new one.  One obvious problem had to do with the pull-rope starting mechanism. To begin with, the first step required removing a large number of Torx screws (fortunately I had the proper tools) and unsnapping a couple of stubborn plastic latches in order to remove a cover which seemed like it was covering the starting mechanism.  Upon doing so I found I still had not reached the starting mechanism (and also that the blower fan was loose, but tightening it was rather easy).  I then set about to remove the next layer, and naturally a different size of Torx wrench was needed.  I then decided to get onto the internet and find a shop manual for the thing, since there must have been an easier way to reach the starting mechanism, but of course I failed.  But while looking through the internet I came across a page advertising a leaf blower I had not heard of. It is here.  

The Ego Leaf Blower! It sounded interesting. It cost quite a bit, but I am a believer that within a couple  of hundred years we will be looking back in disbelief at how dependent on fire we were for energy.  And I think the change will be traumatic for some of us. so we had better be starting now.  Electricity seems to be the best way we  have of distributing energy, so we had better learn how to generate enough of it cleanly and develop the storage necessary to take better advantage of the sun.    And after all, one of my sons who is devoting his life to Tesla Motors and the environment had successfully brain washed me, and here was a blower with a decent sized Lithium ion battery.  It would not make nearly as much noise as a two cycle (or even four cycle) gasoline engine, and it seemed like it would move some serious leaf piles.

 So we went off to Home Depot to look at one, and everything seemed as described on the internet. Unfortunately the store policy prohibited fully charged batteries in the store, so we could not test it. But the  Home Depot folk told me to take it home and try it, and I could bring it back if not satisfied—clearly they were sure I would be.  So I took it home, charged it up, and asked my wife to give it a short late evening trial.  Wow!  There are three speeds, low, high, and more than needed, an easy trigger system, and no on-off switch.  Just pick it up and squeeze the trigger.  And of course no gas and oil to mix and check, no chøke, no warming up, etc.  Allegedly a full charge will last an hour, which is more than we need. And it certainly does blow.  Tomorrow my wife will check it out at greater length.

I very seldom vouch for a product without using it a year or so, but this one just seems to be nicely timed, since most people I know are fed up with the sound of two cycle gas engines, and present battery-operated blowers are fairly weak.  As soon as we use it long enough to discover its shortcomings (there will undoubtedly be some) I will apologize for this post, and give you a more measured impression of the Ego Blower (I do like the name). But I doubt that we will take it back tomorrow.

Posted at 10:30 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Internet, Management, People, Problem Solving, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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06/02/2014

Fire: Good Product or Bad Product

When I was growing up I loved fire.  I am afraid I still do. I certainly know the downside of fire.  It has always been dangerous to life, limb and property. As a child, while playing with my home-made match shooter (an exciting device constructed from two spring clothes-pins), I once accidentally set fire to a wind-brake full of dead and oily Eucalyptus leaves and stored oil-filed smudge pots, and still remember my terror at the result.  A couple of years ago the house in Southern California my grandparents lived in and in which my mother and I were born burned down. Southern California, where I lived for many years, is famous for combining “wild” fires with homes (fire is necessary for some of the local plants to release their seeds).  And one of the main reasons I left the area in the 1960’s was the air pollution, then caused mainly from non-regulated cars and trucks.

 But fire was both comforting and exciting.  Our house was heated by a fireplace.  My father fortunately arose before the rest of us, and when I awoke in my frigid room, my first act of the day was to grab my clothes and sprint through the house to the fireplace, where I could don them in the warmth of the flames.  My grandparents cooked their food on a wood stove, and on cold days my grandmother would happily sit with her feet in the oven and read. And we kids would rake the above-mentioned Eucalyptus leaves into large piles and burn them, breathing in the exotic smell of their smoke and seeing how long we could stand dangerously close to the flames. 

 On weekends the owner of the local food and hardware store would take us up to the foothills in his truck and we would build a fire and bake weenies and other food.  As I grew older I was trusted with the forge and blowtorch and learned the magic of soldering. welding,  and working hot metal.  When World War II started, a large steel mill was built near to our house, and I was able to go watch the coke being pushed out of the ovens, the blast furnaces tapped, and the molten metal poured into ingots and then rolled into sheets and structural forms. And even smudging the oranges, a necessary Dad-smudgebut expensive and difficult job, was exciting to me (the photo is of my father in the light of the burning pots). Later I was to become a fanatic back-packer and grew to love open camp fires. While in the Air Force I had the opportunity to experience the fury of afterburners and the majesty of rocket engines.  While working in aerospace, I had an opportunity to witness one of the Apollo launches from close-up, certainly one of the largert and most concentrated fires of all time.

 But, the age of "open" fire may have peaked after somewhere between 500,000 and a million years of use by us and our predecessors.  This is due to vastly increased populations and population density; appreciation of the finite supply of fuels and their value for usages other than burning; increased sensitivity to damage to our environment, and the development of alternate sources of energy.

 And our perceived need for safety and controlling fire seems to grow.  The county in which I live has increasingly discouraged wood fires because of particulate emissions, beginning with burning leaves, and now neither allowing fireplaces to be built into new houses, nor allowing existing fireplaces to be lit on an increasing number of days.  In fact, after a large number of “spare the air” days last winter, I gave up and succumbed to a gas log, even though I once vowed to leave the area if wood fires were outlawed.  Gas logs are convenient, and are somewhat reminiscent of a wood fire, but to me not nearly as satisfying.  Leaves and trimmings are hauled away to be mulched, and my farmer friends in the valley are sharply constrained by no-burn days and restrictions on such things as stubble burning in the fields, since the air in the California central valley is fast losing its purity.  And industry is certainly feeling the need to further control processes involving fire.

 Oh well, I do like clean air. And there are always fireworks (for a while), and I still  have my oxy-acetylene welding rig. 

 

 

 

  

 

Posted at 10:05 AM in Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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02/23/2014

Stanford Good Products, Bad Products course, ME314, 2014

Winter quarter is almost done, but it does not seem like winter here in California, because the sun continues to shine, and the farmers (including my older son) continue to become depressed.  Perhaps it will never rain again and we will return to desert, where we began before building our immense snow-dependent water system.

 The course good Products Bad Products is also almost done.  The Course outline for this year is here.  But since I discussed the course in previous posts, I won’t go into detail again. If you go to the Categories section on the left of the blog below the Recommended books section, and click on "ME 314 Stanford course 2013, you will get some of it. But the web-site for the students “choose a good product and a bad one” assignments is no longer accessible from outside Stanford. Ashish Goel, who was one of the highly competent Teaching Assistants last year, and was in charge of all things having to do with the internet, was kind enough to put it back on an publicly accessible web site.  The URL is here. If you would like to look at some of the student choices and short discussions, open the URL and have a good time.  If you click on the title of the entries, photographs will appear as well as the complete short description by the student choosing the the products as an example of good or bad.                                      

 The course ends with amazingly well designed media-rich presentations of good products and bad ones based on each of the chapter areas of my books. Stanford students are good at media, and Dave Beach pushes it in the course, as you can see from the outline.

I wrote the book because the issue of product quality is extremely complex, subject to personal tastes and judgements, and in general difficult to define in a sound byte.  But by spending effort judging products and arguing about them, it is possible to become much more sophisticated when dealing with the topic. Try it.

 

Posted at 08:44 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Books, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Education, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Internet, Management, ME314 Stanford Course 2014, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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08/04/2013

Product Quality—Tesla Motors and How to Make an Impact

Tesla Motors was incorporated in 2003.  One of my sons. a green engineer who loves small companies and working on exciting things, but who had not worked in the automotive industry, joined them in 2005.  I have therefore been following the company, I must say with increasing pleasure.  When my son joined the company, it consisted of people who were highly motivated to convince the world that electricity was a feasible and in fact very attractive way to power automobiles.  In fact, electrically powered automobiles had been a long ambition of Elon Musk, one of its founders, its leading investor, and now its CEO.

 Due to the dismal performance of attempts to start car companies (Fisker, DeLorean), I suspect many people thought they would not succeed, especially because the employees were more Silicon Valley than Detroit.  Even I thought they had picked a very large challenge, although certainly a worthy one. But the company is succeeding beautifully, and in the process changing opinions and values in a very conservative industry with very conservative customers.  Even now, there are rumors of troubles and problems with the cars and the company running around, but these are founded on love of large V-8 engines. the smell of gasoline, and on nostalgia, not on reality. Reality can better be seen by the awards and enthusiasm the model S is getting, by its sales and back orders, and better yet, by driving one.

Tesla-Model-sLast Sunday my son took my wife and I out riding in a model S that he was acquiring some data on, and it is very difficult to criticize.  It is beautiful, luxurious, handles magnificently, reaches 60 mph in slightly over 4 seconds, and has a range of over 200 miles.  If you are not familiar with the car, here is its Wikipedia write-up.

 The only concern I would have if I owned one is that the digital opportunities are so lavish that one might worry about driver distraction.  The company is building rapid charging stations and battery swapping stations as fast as it can to augment the basic process of charging the battery through 220 volt house current. And it is exporting to Europe and about to start exporting to Asia (but built in California).

 The Model S is pricey.  But that is reasonable to expect from a radically new product.  The first Tesla product, the roadster, was relatively more expensive, since it was a simpler and a less luxuriously finished machine.  It received a great deal of attention, not only because of its energy saving, but also because if its performance, its striking appearance, and perhaps because only 1000 of them were made.  The model S will be followed by the model X, which will be a crossover (a combination of a sports sedan and a minivan) built on the same platform with the same performance. Following that the company plans to release what they call Generation 3, which is targeted to cost approximately half of the price of the Model S, and be aimed for mass market sales—one of Tesla’s original goals.  Musk promises that it will be consistent with the Model S —a unique, advanced, and exciting machine with no desire for gasoline.

 Say what you will, but in only ten years, Tesla has produced two sensational automobiles, is producing electric drive trains for other manufacturers (Daimler and Toyota), and has changed the attitude of many doubters of the attractiveness and desirability of electrically powered cars.  And it has done so through undeniably high quality products.

 

 

 

Posted at 10:12 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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06/25/2013

More Changes in Creativity/Innovation in the last 50 years

In my last post I mentioned the recent talk I gave concerning changes in  creativity/innovation  over the last 50 years.  In particular I talked a bit about the increasing knowledge about brain chemistry and brain activity that shed light on the process .  But I discussed several other factors that have changed the nature of creativity and innovation in my talk, and I mention them here.

 Improved knowledge of creativity and innovation in groups and organizations — a great deal of research and writing has been done in this area partly spurred by the success of the Japanese in the 1970’s, and 80’s and partly by increased specialization requiring more emphasis on team work.

 Recognition of the cyclical nature of interest in creativity and innovation as a function of the economy (it rises when the economy is down), national goals (go to the moon), and breakthroughs in science and technology (digital electronics and genetic engineering)—It is so high now it resembles a management fad.  What will the future look like?

 The computer/internet explosion— An obvious aid in access to information, solving problems, communicating, providing new tools (CAD/CAM), and a source of new business opportunities.  But it is a work in progress, demands much time and energy, and may seduce people away from complex ventures and the type of  innovation involved in major projects—upgrading the infrastructure in the U.S. is a larger and more important venture and requires much more investment and effort than that required to come up with an internet startup that can make a few people some money.

 Globalization—A positive factor.  Provides increased competition and markets, demolishes stereotypes, results in more attention paid to intellectual property, and requires more knowledge of other cultures.

 Increasing population — approaches to solving problems that used to work  (automobiles in cities —disposable items) become less effective  and desirable as population increases and resources become more scarce, requiring increased and larger scale creativity/innovation and recognition of the increasing role of politics in the process.

 Dawning realization that ever increasing pressure for short term profits and fast growth can be detrimental to creativity and innovation, and in particular to product quality.

Posted at 04:22 PM in Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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05/16/2013

Product Quality - Bicycles

My wife and I recently had dinner with a couple of friends who are in their late 80’s, and move slowly in their walkers, but still ride their bicycles.  In fact one of them still has an office at Stanford and and regularly commutes there to work on his bicycle.  I was talking with him about good products and bad products, and he stoutly maintained that the common bicycle is one of the all-time great products – that people had gotten it right many years ago, and give or take new versions, new materials, new approaches to such things as brakes, gears, saddles, and pedals, and challenges from such things as recumbents, the bicycle has not changed significantly in his memory.

 This made me think, and I realized that I have ridden bicycles ever since I can remember, and probably now take them for granted.   I Started with a balloon tired, single speed, typically heavy version, which took me to school and back, and let me ride with my friends until it was eclipsed by a car (although the bike still hangs in my basement).  I then left bicycles until after college and the Air Force, but rediscovered them when a friend and I spent a few months  touring Europe on duplicates of a bicycle that had done well in the Tour de France the year before.  After I became use to riding a bicycle again, to say nothing of ten speeds, very light weight, an initially  painful seat, dropped handlebars, and an entirely new bodily position, I fell madly in love it (it hangs in my older son’s garage).  I have ridden bicycles consistently ever since, and am now dependent on them for getting around the local area, riding in the hills for exercise, and especially getting around the Stanford campus.  And I must admit I find it satisfying to ride past automobiles that are fighting their way through local traffic.

 Without bicycles, Stanford would not work nearly as well.  The campus is large and continues to expand, administrative offices are far apart, dormitories are far from classrooms, and although classrooms are far apart, the University still clings to ten minute class breaks.  Although retired, I maintain an office on campus and still attend various meetings and functions.  Walking everywhere might be good for me, but life is short.  Bicycle traffic on campus is heavy and seems disorganized and perhaps hazardous to those not riding, but actually is surprisingly free of accidents and fun to be part of.  The bicycles cover the spectrum from high performance to low and expensive to junk, and from single speed to many.

Jim Bike CroppedThis photo is me on my present bicycle returning home from my office (a short trip).  I realize I am not wearing a helmet, which is stupid and dangerous, but unfortunately I take many short trips while on campus, am not used to wearing a hat, and therefore tend to lose helmets and generally spend too much time putting them on and taking them off. I wear them when riding longer distances fast on roads full of cars, and endure the censure (especially from grand children and my wife) of not wearing one all of the time.  The only person I have ever known who wore  his helmet all of the time (including while lecturing and in meetings) is a Nobel Laureate.

 The ideal campus bicycle is rugged, performs well, and shows enough wear not to be considered worth stealing.  Mine qualifies.  It needs to be a bit more beat up, but will get there.  It is a mountain bike, even though I do not ride it in mountains, but it has the advantages of outstanding brakes (very important), does not mind jumping curbs (convenient), and is highly maneuverable.   It has more gears than I need, but that was part of the package.  I bought it new for a very reasonable price because it was painted green, and apparently the dealer had difficulty selling it, because green was not cool that  year.

 And I agree with my friend.  Granted that they vary over many parameters, bicycles in general are an outstanding product.  Traffic and air pollution were much more reasonable in Beijing before cars began replacing bicycles.  And people probably got more exercise and reached their destinations more quickly.

Posted at 11:35 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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05/13/2013

Electrical Storage Batteries —An Improving Product

Electrical batteries, attributed to Alessandro Volta, have been around since 1800  (although Benjamin Franklin apparently applied the term to a pile of charged glass plates before then). When I first became aware of them as a kid, it was mostly in the form of flashlight batteries (then carbon-zinc), and automobile batteries (lead –acid).  It is a testimony to their advantages that they are still being used in pretty much the same  form, although we are becoming a bit more careful about throwing them away.  There was a shelf in my grandfather’s shop, which contained a few automobile batteries in various stages of health, some distilled water, a battery hydrometer, some baking soda for cleaning, and a charger.  There is a very similar shelf in the modern farm to which I escape, except the hydrometer has been replaced by electronic testing equipment and the charger has become “smart”.   But being in California, the dead batteries no longer not end up in land fills (although one still sees occasional piles of them, hopefully waiting to be re-cycled).

 It was not until my Jet Propulsion Days in the late 1950’s and 1960’s that I was first exposed to other types of batteries.  The Ranger and Mariner spacecraft were powered by solar panels and rechargeable sealed silver-zinc batteries (spacecraft definitely like sealed batteries).  But I remember one time when my group was developing a Mars hard lander capable of handling a 10,000 g impact from a speed of 500 miles per hour (the payload was shrouded in crushable material – the program was later cancelled).  I tried to find a battery capable of handling that level of shock, and failed.  But even more interesting, I found that only a few battery companies existed, and there were few, if any, university programs or research efforts in advanced battery technology. 

 But now we seem to have gotten the message, not only because of the demand for small rechargeable batteries for our electronic devices, but also because we are finally  understanding the advantages of electric cars and alternate forms of energy which require the storage of electricity.  JPL, like Tesla, is using lithium ion batteries, and there is a large amount of work going on in both universities and industry in new approaches to batteries, both primary (single use), and secondary (re-chargeable.).  An interesting comparison of energy storage is here, and more details on an early Tesla battery here.

 It is about time that we get more serious about electrical storage.  Assuming that electrical generation continues to become cleaner, we will continue to change from petroleum-powered devices to electrical and we will need improved ability to store electricity not only in these devices, but also for “alternate” energy generation approaches.  Although new technologies are sometimes more challenging (note Boeing 787 and Sony past lithium ion battery problems), times are changing. I certainly am now hooked on battery-powered tools, which would be much less fun if powered by lead-acid or primary batteries. I am looking forward to breakthroughs that are bound to come from present research.  Biological batteries?

Posted at 07:59 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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03/21/2013

Stanford Good Products Bad Products course final presentations

During the final class meeting, there were four presentations on companies that made products that the students found noteworthy in the context of my book.  One of these was on cultural fit, one on aesthetics, and two on the topic of global fit.

 The product having to do with cultural fit was Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. It was once a very popular U.S. beer, went into decline, and has come back as a counter-cultural beer, being “discovered” by urban hipsters.  It does not do conventional beer promotion, rather having become visible in its counter-culture role through alternate and sometimes outrageous means (such as being included in "South Park").  A good blurb on it is on Wikipedia here.

 The aesthetic topic was Coolbeams spectracles glasses (here), yet another Kickstarter start-up.  I have to give Kickstarter (here) credit for having a major influence on at-least Stanford students. It does seem to fill the gap for many people between reasonably thought-out ideas and market feasibility test.

 One of the the global fit products was Blue Bottle Coffee, a high-end coffee company that stresses dealing directly with the producers and stressing sustainable and organic farming and paying reasonable wages. Again we learned to taste in a different way.  We prepared the coffee provided by the group in the proper way, and tasted it by slurping it from a spoon, apparently a process making one more sensitive to the odor.  Newly sophisticated, I drank my morning coffee at home by slurping it from the cup, acquiring worried looks from my wife—perhaps there is a social factor involved.

 The other had to do with the tremendous (and unsustainable?) use of resources by agriculture, and featured a substitute egg powder for cooking use named Beyond Eggs,  made entirely from chemicals (no chickens).  Apparently 30% of all eggs go into cooking, and as you are undoubtedly aware, there is some controversy about commercial chicken farming. We were given chocolate chip cookies to compare baked by the group with regulare eggs and Beyond Eggs, and the class generally could not tell the difference. Beyond Eggs is due to hit the market about now.

The course ended with an open ended discussion between the instructors and the students.  The instructors were highly pleased with the course, as was I, since my Good Products Bad Products book does its intended job very well.  For the final time, I encourage you, if you have not done so, to check out the individual student "good products bad products" choices here (click on the title to get the complete essay on any one). 

And if you have any questions about this  splendid course contact Professor Dave Beach, (dbeach@stanford.edu).  

Posted at 08:16 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, ME 314 Stanford Course 2013, People, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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03/18/2013

More Stanford Good Products Bad Products course presentations

This post covers four more presentations in the course on companies/products that students consider to produce good products, or at least provocative ones.  They were on the Symbolism and Cultural fit, Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, and Global Fit chapters of my book.  Once again the presentations were excellent.  I never cease to be impressed by Stanford students.

 The first presentation was on the cultural significance of the “fixie”, or fixed gear bike – light weight, one speed, no free wheel (pedals cannot be stopped while bike is moving), often only one or no brakes. (see the Wikipedia page here).  The pure form is used in track racing, less exotic ones (originally hand assembled from available parts) became symbolic of New York messengers, then hipsters, and now of a more widely spread culture, including quite a few Stanford students. “Fixies”can now be purchased in all formats from “pure” to including brakes, and even gears concealed in the rear hub (if you are in the culture, you may hiss).

 The second was on a startup named Radian (description here), which produces a nifty camera addition that allows time-lapse and scanned photography.  The culture is of course people who like photography. Each year this course costs me money since I discover a product I need, and this is my 2013 investment.

 The third was Cloud Nine olive oil (Elegance and Sophistication).  This is a small family owned and run business in Monterey county California, that produces very high grade olive oil. The presentation included not only samples to taste, but detailed instructions on how to properly taste olive oil. Website here.

 The fourth was on the Brompton folding bicycle (here) and concerned with the environmental advantages of such transportation.  This is an expensive, but extremely high grade machine that easily folds and unfolds to an amazingly small and easily carried package.  It was demonstrated by a person from a bicycle store, who claims that at one time he felt a bit uncomfortable riding it in public (small wheels and frame, etc), but now loves it so much he doesn’t care what other bikers think about him—he feels sorry for them because they don’t have one.

 

Another good day!

 

Posted at 06:30 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, ME 314 Stanford Course 2013, People, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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02/27/2013

A Product I Hate

Bag roll in display table One of the reasons I hate to shop for groceries, aside from the ever-increasing size of grocery stores which makes it increasingly difficult to find what I want, and the profusion of marketing, “deals”, and other would-be enticements to buy things I don’t want, are the toilet paper style produce bags, available in either  low mount or high mount as seen in the photographs.  They are shown in their at-rest position, just waiting to anger the innocent.

  Bag high mountLike old toilet paper rollers, these devices are capable, (especially if low on bags), of not only unrolling more bags than desired, but of actually leaving their housing to festoon the bags across the floor.  The bags themselves are difficult to properly tear off the roll, confusing as to which way is “up”, and challenging indeed to open so that the payload can be inserted.

The photographs below give a hint of this, but you have probably experienced the frustration of trying to use them many times yourself.  If not, I would appreciate knowing where you shop. 

The first photo shows the bags lying flat (notice lack of marking where you tear them apart).The bags are folded in a strange  manner, and the next photo shows what you see as you try to figure out how to open one.  The photo after that is an indication of the opening when/if you succeed.  How about trying to put a head of lettuce into that confusion of thinner than tissue plastic.  And even if you do succeed in opening it, the next photo of the bottom of the fully open bag shows that they are diabolically designed so that the bottom is not obvious.

Flat prod Unfold bagThey are not only functionally a nightmare, they have a sleazy feel, an ugly look, and despite the optimistic note encouraging returning them to the store, probably are not very favorable to the ecology.  Also they are so thin that I have a few times succeeded in dropping a purchase through the bottom, which is non-relaxing to other shoppers.

 As a positive, they result in the opportunity to meet nice people.  I usually shop during the day, when many of the other shoppers seem to be mothers with children who would rather be somewhere else.  Today, I got to know a nice lady who had an unhappy child in a stroller and was carrying a baby who was having a temporary meltdown.  How about trying to open one of these bags and put produce in it with one hand while trying to calm down a couple of unhappy kids?  I  helped her with the bags (not the kids) and she was so obviously grateful that it alleviated the anger I had accrued from my own previous bag experience.

Bag openAnother good piece of news is shown in the last photograph (apple by mirror).  Upon reaching home and emptying one of said bags I found that I had won an apple with three of the pesky little labels that you have to either swallow, spit out,  or peel off.  Wow!  Must have been because I am a member of the Safeway club.

Bottom of open bag Three label apple




 

Posted at 09:03 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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02/25/2013

Tegu, Honduras, and a quality product

Tegu-Toys-560x349Chris Haughey, the founder and head of Tegu Toys was the speaker in the course last Thursday, and did a remarkable job of not only telling a compelling story, but discussing the interaction of product quality and economics.  Tegu toys is located in Honduras, but sells its products mostly in the U.S. and other developed countries.  The website for Tegu Toys is here, and it not only describes their products, but also gives information on the story and goals of the company.  There are other websites about Tegu, because it has caught the attention of many people because of its idealistic goals and determination to produce high quality products. An article about Chris is here.

 In brief, Chris graduated with an engineering degree from Stanford and went to work for the Boston Consulting Group.  A business trip to Hondurus along with a deep interest in helping the economy of a poor country made him decide to quit his job, move to Honduras, and attempt to do something about their extremely high unemployment rate by starting a company to make jobs. After some thinking he decided that since excellent hardwood was available, and since there seemed to be a demand for high quality wooden toys in places such as the U.S., high quality wooden toys would be an excellent product, so with some help from his friends and his brother, he started Tegu.Their products are kits of beautifully finished wooden building blocks that contain internal magnets, allowing  them to be combined as desired.

 Chris did an excellent job of telling the story of not only starting a toy company, but doing so by employing people who had little education and few skills, and trying to keep the product both extremely high in quality and also affordable.  Like many company founders, he consistently discovered expenses and  problems he had underestimated, and had to cut costs over time,  but as of now, the company is in good shape and gaining visibility.  And the product, although expensive by many standards, is very effective.  Chris passed out a number of samples to the students, which resulted in an appreciable noise level of clicks and clacks as they happily played with them, even though they were intended for people fifteen years younger.

Tegu is a fascinating combination of idealism and economics, and experiences both the benefits and advantages of operating a factory in a poor country.  It is taking advantage of low labor costs, but bearing the weight of slow government responses and the complexity of international business.  The class was very positive about his presentation, but afterwards, I overheard several of them discussing the differences and similarities between operating a factory in Hondurus for products to be sold in countries such as the U.S., and outsourcing products to China.  Neither helps unemployment in the U.S.  but they tended to think that building products in Hondurus is better than building products in China — complicated, these international issues.  My reaction was one of being impressed.  I think I need to go visit them.

Posted at 09:26 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, ME 314 Stanford Course 2013, People, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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02/20/2013

Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course Update Again

Since my post of  February 11, the students in Professor Beach’s ME 314 course have done many things.  They have read and discussed Chapters 8 and 9 of my book.  The title of chapter 8 is "Symbolism and cultural Values: Who Are We?"  The subtitles are Products, Symbolism, and Cultures, Products and National cultures, Products and subcultures, and Globalism and cultures.  Chapter 9 is "Global Contraints: Does the Product Fit a Finite Earth and Its Inhabitants?"   Subtitles are Big Problems, The Role of Industrially Produced Products, Why These Problems, Response to change, Revolutionary Approaches, The Iceberg, Regulation and Laws, and Now what?

The students have continued to put examples of good and bad products on the class blog (see Feb. 11 post), and student groups have continued to review them, report on their favorites, and bring up further questions for class discussion.  Dave Beach has also begun showing some examples of the student’s story videos, which are extensions of the discovery videos  made early in the quarter..

 The class has also interacted with two more guest speakers, Peter Mondavi, the co-Proprietor of Charles Krug Winery, and Nancy Gioia, Director of Ford Motor Company’s Electrification Program, and also presently of the integration of information hardware and software into its vehicles. An article on Mondavi is here, and information on Gioia is here.  Both of them have positions where product quality, both real and perceived, is of great importance.  They have spent their careers worrying about issues of product quality in two areas where it has received a great deal of attention (wine and motor vehicles).

 Gioia’s problem with integrating information equipment into vehicles is particularly difficult.  The number one goal of vehicles has to remain safety.  But the builders of automobiles are under tremendous pressure to include digital devices ranging from smart phones to increasingly complex navigation and television systems to internet access, and vehicle features ranging from increasing reporting on vehicle components to driving aids.  The problem is that of both including these kind of features and not distracting the driver to the point where driving becomes more dangerous—a  case where a perceived increase in the quality of vehicles could result in a dramatic increase in  automotive accidents. Autonomous vehicles? Gioia guessed maybe iin 40 years.

There will be  two more speakers from outside of Stanford, I will give a talk on achieving higher quality, and the last two and a half sessions will be devoted to student presentations on companies they have researched who do a particularly good job in producing high quality products.  I will be writing two or three more posts recapping the remainder of the course.  It is going very well.  Should you want more details on the course than I have been able to  put in these posts, you should contact Professor Dave Beach in the Stanford Engineering School.  His e-mail address is dbeach@stanford.edu.

Posted at 09:34 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, ME 314 Stanford Course 2013, People, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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02/07/2013

Product Quality and Population

Some day there will be a gravestone some place that will read  “here lies James L. Adams, a kind and caring man, who died from a heart attack in stalled traffic”.  I hate being trapped in such things, aware of my life ticking away and helpless to do anything about it. One of the blessings of being retired, is the ability to choose driving times when crowds are at a minimum.  But this takes some thinking, because where I live the commuting periods are long (flex time and lots of people commuting to work in Silicon Valley ), and many people are on the road shopping and going to restaurants around lunch time.  At times like these, the traffic is terrible.

 But the other day I needed to be in the Sacramento Valley in the morning and back at Stanford by 5:00 p.m., with a few interim stops thrown in.  The trip was only possible by car.  I left at 5:30 a.m., which let me beat the commuting traffic pretty well, although the incoming traffic was already bumper to bumper and moving slowly because of people living far away in more affordable housing but working in the valley.  But coming back I could not beat the traffic, ran out of back roads, and got caught.

Freeway533I escaped my heart attack by musing about once good products that were no longer compatible with increased population density.  The automobile is a truly sophisticated product in many ways —capable of carrying one long distances at high speeds in comfort. Still great if one drives around Eastern Oregon or West Texas—less great shopping in New York City or commuting in Los Angeles (photo by Monica Almeida/The New York Times). If too many of them are put together it becomes a terrible product – a small cell enclosing one and barely moving, if at all, while it pollutes the ecosphere, devours petroleum, and causes one to endure unhealthy changes in one’s vital signs and exhibit sometimes violently anti-social behavior.  The present move toward “autonomous” vehicles is probably partly motivated by the fantasy that traffic will move more rapidly and one can entertain oneself by drinking, texting, watching TV, and sleeping as one is transported to work and back.  But it may also have the effect of depriving the traveler of diversion and allow him/her more free time to curse and extend one’s middle finger toward others.

 There are many products that work well in less populated areas (firearms, un-muffled engines, weed burners,) but not well in cities.  Can you think of a few? This probably explains some of the differences in attitudes of people (and our good congressional representatives) toward such issues as high speed railroads and the environment. I would guess that people drilling for oil and gas in North Dakota experience less criticism than those who built platforms off of the shore of Santa Barbara California. And shooting game birds in Wyoming farmland is more acceptable than shooting pigeons in San Francisco’s  Union Square.

 I would also guess that some of the resistance people have to ever tightening regulations might result from having grown up in more sparsely populated areas and who remember freedoms that are no longer acceptable in densely populated ones.   Even I am sometimes guilty of such behavior.  I could better get away with throwing the garbage out of the back door in my youth (when there were chickens and orange trees there rather than neighbors) than in my present yard in an upscale community, even though garbage is good compost. And how can people have the nerve to prevent me from using my fireplace?  Fireplaces were wonderful products when I grew up in an agricultural area – family and social centers and cheery winter heating.  Apparently not so good in suburban Santa Clara Valley, California these days.

 

 

 

 

Posted at 07:31 AM in Current Affairs, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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01/07/2013

The Stanford University 2013 Good Products Bad Products Course

January 8th, 2013, is the first day of the winter quarter Good Products, Bad Products course (ME 214, 314) at Stanford University.  I began this course in the 1980’s, and it has gone through several changes in name, course number, and department base since then.   David Beach has been teaching it since I retired in 1999, and has changed it in many ways, although he has kept the intent of the course the same.  He has continued to use my notes, and now that they have been published as a book, he is using it as a text in the course.  Although it is listed as a graduate course in the school of engineering, it will include students from other parts of the campus as well.  The majority of the class will consist of regular Stanford students, although there will be some part-time students who will be taking it remotely over the internet. 

 Classes will include a number of guest speakers representing companies and individuals concerned with and producing high quality products, lectures from David Beach, and discussions of the reading material, the speakers, and whatever other product-quality related concerns arise during the quarter. They will not only be reading and discussing my book, but will be  doing exercises similar to the ones listed at the end of the chapters.  They will write short papers on each, and I will talk about them and include some of the more interesting ones on this blog. I will attach a rough schedule to my next post to give  you an idea of what occurs in each class meeting.

The course concludes with a series of consistently impressive presentations on the material in my book.  Groups of students select the topic areas, do appropriate research, and being a bright and talented bunch with a love of media, come up with presentations that are entertaining as well as educational.  I obviously cannot deliver the entire course in a  blog to those of you reading my posts, but not taking the course.  But I will keep you in touch with the course, forward student work when appropriate and interesting to you, and in doing so hopefully expose you a bit to the thinking of present day Stanford students.  I will also continue to write posts on aspects of product quality design and manufacturing, and other topics not covered in the course.  Please comment  on my course-related posts, and I will forward the comments to the class, should they fit the activities that are under way.  The more diversity in input to the students, the better, and any comments you make should result in lively discussions.

Although I have been retired from active teaching for many years, I continue to occupy an office on campus, drink the coffee,  and heckle the people who continue to do the work.  I still find the opening of winter quarter to be exciting.  Although California weather is hard to complain about, it becomes a bit wetter in the San Francisco area, and the general energy level of the academic enterprise picks up a bit because it is not as much fun to go out and play. Hopefully I can convey a bit of this to you.

Welcome aboard!

Posted at 05:16 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, ME 314 Stanford Course 2013, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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01/03/2013

New Year's Resolution for People Making Industrial Products

I resolve to do what I can to improve the product I am working on —in fact to strive to help it become the best of its kind in the world—or if I think it is already is the best of its kind in the world, to work on improving it anyway, because someone is close behind.

 In doing so, I resolve to consider not only the more easily measurable aspects of quality discussed by David Garvin in his now classic November 1987 HBR article (performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability) but also the more qualitative aspects covered in the Adams Good Products Bad Products book (perceived performance, performance/cost ratio, craftsmanship, consistency with human users and cultural values, aesthetic issues,  sensitivity to finite resources and the environment, and finally emotional appeal. (Garvin did mention aesthetics and perceived quality in his article, which was entitled Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality, but brushed over them as being functions of individual judgment—Adams says hooray for individual judgment).

 Finally I resolve to remain aware of the two cultures (the scientific and humanistic) mentioned in the Adams People and Products post of  Nov 1, 2012, and to the extent that I have a bias, for instance, toward quantitative reasoning and logic (which are good)  and away from aesthetics and feelings (which are not only good but powerfully affect people’s judgment of quality), or vice versa,  I will do my best to get over it.

Posted at 08:10 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Books, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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12/17/2012

Product Quality and Balance

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem entitled “The One Hoss Shay”, that still is referenced by people associated with product design and development.  It is about a mythical vehicle that is so well designed and crafted that it lasts 100 years without failing in any way, and then completely collapses as all of the parts simultaneously reach the end of their life span.  If you want to read it, look here.

 More of such balance in reliability and durability would be nice in modern products.  Many products are annoying because some parts fail much earlier and more often than others, until finally these parts are no longer available and the whole product is junked.

  Marian TSX 2But there is another type of balance, having more to do with quality.  The photo is of my wife Marian in her 2004 Acura TSX, leaving early in the morning to control the world.  We bought the car new to make up for a beloved Honda CRX that she drove for 18 years, until an evil person roared out of a driveway and destroyed it. She didn’t want a big car, needed to drive grand-kids and friends around, likes nimble and responsive cars, and at times can be a mild hot-rodder.  The TSX is neither the fastest, the most beautiful, the most luxurious, the roomiest, or the best handling automobile available, but it is pretty good on all fronts. She has loved it absolutely for eight years. For her (and actually for me) it is an extraordinary blend. It is based on the so-called European Accord body (a bit smaller than the Accord sold in the U.S.)  It has front wheel drive and the engine produces about 200 horsepower and is easy on fuel.  It goes faster than either of us needs it to and is fitted with plenty of digital gadgets—Navigation system, climate control, sound system— but not so many that we will die messing with them while driving (a friend of mine has ceded the driving to his wife while he attends to the much more elaborate navigation system, the cell phones, the doors and windows, the TV, the climate control and sound system, and so on.) The TSX is also clearly a product of Honda, and we have always liked such things.

 I spoke of David Garvin’s now classic article in the Nov 1, 1987 Harvard Business Review, entitled “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality” in my post of  Nov. 1, 2012. The dimensions he discusses are performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality. The TSX gets high grades on all of them.  In my book Good Products, Bad Products, I discuss performance and cost, human fit, craftsmanship, emotional response, aesthetics, cultural fit, and global fit.  The TSX also gets high grades on all of them.

 In the design, development, and marketing of many products, we often tend to emphasize only a few components of quality.  These days we are excited about digital control.  I just bought a new dishwasher.  Since the old one failed in its rather complicated control circuitry, and since I couldn’t find replacement parts that I considered reasonably priced, I bought a new one with the fewest cycles and options I could find.  I finally found one with only(?) five possible cycles, three options, a delay, and a large row of warning lights.  Of course, we only use the “normal” button.  The dishwasher will probably fail because of the circuitry necessary to allow it to do something we don’t ever use.  As people used to say when I worked at the Jet Propulstion Lab, “Reliability is fewer parts”—that's electrical as well as mechanical.

 Good Products should rate high in all components of quality—just like the One Hoss Shay did in reliability and durability.

 

 

Posted at 09:25 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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11/01/2012

C.P. Snow, the Two Cultures, and Product Quality

C.P.SnowC.P. Snow, a scientist turned novelist, is remembered partly for a talk he gave (the Rede Lecture of 1959 ) entititled "The Two Cultures", in which he made the point that the intellectual life of western society was split into two cultures, the humanistic and the scientific, and that this hindered our ability to solve many problems. This was followed  by a widely read book of the same title. I talked about this in my post of 07/29/2012.

 From my experience in industry and in academia, the issue is very much alive.  The illustration by Matt Collins is from a column by Lawrence Kraus in the 07/29/2009 Scientific American, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Snow’s Rede Lecture. His column can easily be applied to the present election campaigns. I am personally a believer in Snow's thesis, and since I enjoy both of these cultures, I have been often frustrated by people’s tendency to join one and criticize the other.

 The outlooks of both cultures are necessary to secure high product quality.  In a classic article entitled Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality in the November 1987 Harvard Business Review, David Garvin discussed the topic of product quality, and then listed the following necessary elements— Performance, Features, Reliability, Conformance, Durability, Serviceability, Aesthetics, and Perceived Quality.  This was a time when U.S. industry had spent great effort on, and achieved great success in radically improving the quality of its products, spurred on by Japanese competition and the realization that improved quality led not only to added value, but decreased costs.

 But although recognizing the importance of the final two elements, Garver did not emphasize them as hard as the others, because as he explained, he felt that judgment was not as universal in the case of aesthetics, and intangibles, such as advertising and brand names, influenced the customer"s perception of quality. The first six of his topics are  easier to quantify, and be handled in a more scientific way (measured), but aesthetics and perceived quality certainly play a large role in the decision process of the consumer. 

 When I wrote my Good Products Bad Products Book I suggested a number of elements that were perhaps more on the humanistic side than the scientific—perception of performance and cost, human fit, craftsmanship, overall emotional impact, aesthetics, elegance and sophistication, symbolism and cultural fit, and finally consistency with global limits ( a topic both scientific and humanistic).  I did so because I felt that they received less attention than they deserved in Industry, compared with the first six listed by David Garvin.

 Although both scientific (if you would technical and quantitative) thinking and humanistic thinking are required for high product quality, continual effort is necessary to cause such a thing to happen.  Even in the relatively large design activity in the Stanford Engineering school, where my office is located and where everyone would probably claim they support the merging of Snow’s two cultures, a walk around shows local areas where the  white boards are covered with equations, and others where they are covered with sketches and post-it notes—not many with both.  Much of the university, like much of the world, seems to tend to divide over mathematics.  A few years ago, the  Stanford Anthropology Department actually formally split into those who worshipped such things as probability and statistics, and those who did not.  Fortunately, it has now been put back together, and can resume arguing about which of two equally necessary approaches is more important.

 In many companies with which I am familiar, the split is even more apparent.

 

Posted at 07:11 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, Symbolism and Cultural Values, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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10/29/2012

The End of Discovery?

  Edwards patchI was once a member of the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Edwards Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force Flight Test Center.  The AFFTC motto was Ad Inexplorata— Toward the Unknown.  I thought that was pretty wonderful.  I still have a left over patch with the motto on my wall.

 I have always loved discovering interesting things and information that I have not known about, wandering through areas I have never visited, and experiencing things I have never done.  I do not particularly like guided tours, group travel, or guide books, even though I know that I miss seeing and learning about world-famous sites and data.  But that’s me.

 But now the internet is exploding upon us.  The special report in the October 27, 2012 issue of The Ecconomist magazine is on the juxtaposition of technology and geology, and among other topics, goes into three dimensional mapping, in which increasing amounts of information is correlated with geographical location, so that your mobile phone, knowing exactly where you are, can give you amazing amounts of information about that spot — historical, visual, statistical, and of course commercial (Groupon offers from stores that are near, Yelp ratings on nearby businesses, etc.). 

I used to enjoy trying to figure things out with help from my very bright wife.  Between us, we could usually do pretty well.  Now her kind retort to my questions is “It’s probably on Google”.  We used to like to drive around, visit wineries, and find wines we liked.  Now I notice a full page ad in the Sunday October 28 New York Times for Wine Spectator’s new app Wine Ratings +, which offers over 270,000 ratings and is updated with 1,000 new reviews each month (over 30 a day).  In fact, speaking of driving, I love to drive, whether it is driving to Los Angeles on Highway 5, or being lost in the Sierra foothills.  I also notice an article in the same NY Times about the imminent self-driven car, which probably won’t ever get lost, and certainly won't put you in the meditative state that comes from driving long distances (no I don't get into accidents).

We evolved to explore, or at least I did.  I must admit I have never chosen to live in a big city, although I enjoy exploring ones I have never visited.  But to me, living in one I knew, with a extraordinarily complete three dimensional map in my smart phone, bing constantly plugged into the internet and my job, and actively engaged in several social networking sites would be like living in hell. I need lots of unknowns in life and time to think about them, because to me trying to figure out such things is hugely rewarding. 

Ad Inexplorata.

Posted at 08:00 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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09/23/2012

U.S. Response Speed, the Metric System, and Product Quality

Steamboat-springs2 smI hear constantly about the rapid change taking place in the U.S., and how our worries about the future will be taken care of by technical advances.  But let me tell you a story about how fast the U.S. moves.

When I was growing up in a small citrus town in Southern California, we heard nothing about the metric system, and hardly anyone I knew had ever been across an ocean.  And since we obviously were the supreme industrial power in the world, as had been demonstrated by World War II, there was certainly no thought of changing our good old system of inches, feet, pounds, and British Thermal Units (B.T.U.s).  Certainly the metric system was out there, and there was some pressure to adopt it in the  U.S., as can be seen in the chronology here.

It wasn’t until I took chemistry and physics in high school that I was introduced to the metric system, and then only fleetingly.  At Caltech, we finally began using it, although only in science courses.  Engineering courses held on to what was then called the “English” system.  There was some discussion about this, since the metric system is more logical, more elegant, and easier to use.  In fact, if you think about it, the English system is very weird.

 When I started working as an engineer and began traveling abroad, I realized that we were in the minority—most of the world seemed to be metric.  And still later, the U.S., or at least those involved in world trade, began to be aware of the cost of using a measuring system that was at odds with so many other people.  I remember that my 1956 Austin Healey, a British car, used Whitworth, metric, and SAE (U.S.) nuts and bolts.  A major inconvenience, which probably did not help sales in the U.S.  Image what people in Europe thought of a car that used only S.A.E. threads.

 But as more and more nations mandated the metric system (including England), we became more aware of the cost of not complying. In a sense we were manufacturing products that did not “fit” much of the rest of the world.   In the 1960’s I was doing some consulting for the Department of Commerce, which was then actively pushing the metric system in the U.S.  If you look at the Chronology again, you will see that a lot was going on at this time.  One of my friends coordinated the 3 year U.S. Metric Study, which produced a 13 volume report measuring the cost of being non-metric, and recommending the U.S. should “go metric” through a national ten year program.  It was accepted by Congress.

 As can be seen in the Chronology, there has been progress since the 1960’s, especially in government agencies and in industries and other businesses that operate globally.  But by the time my children went through school, the English system still was predominantly used in schools, but with quite a bit more attention paid to the metric system. And U.S. citizens were traveling more and becoming aware that we were in the minority.  I remember metric speed limit signs appearing in Arizona and other areas close to metric Mexico.  But metric speed limits are more commonly shown in a secondary role, as in the  photograph above, and we tend to ignore them. There has been a greater push in industry to change from merely converting English dimensions to metric (one inch to 2.54 centimeters), to using more tractable metric dimensions (2.50 centimeters). But undoubtedly, many kids are still growing up in families who rely on the old English system, and learning the metric system as a somewhat unfamiliar second language

 I ate breakfast today with the family of one of my sons, and my grandkids are being introduced to the metric system in the fourth grade, and my son works at Tesla Motors, which is pretty much all metric.  So we are getting there.  But It has taken us well over 100 years, and now we have the honor of being one of only three countries in the world who have not mandated the metric system—the other two are Liberia and Myanmar (and they are using it, although they have not mandated it).  Perhaps we are indeed believers in U.S. exceptionalism (or maybe just slow) when it comes to weights and measures.

 

 

Posted at 04:34 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/20/2012

Standardization and Product Qualtiy

I’ve just ordered The New Industrial Revolution, by Peter Marsh, subtitled Consumers, Globalization, and the end of Mass Production, a book that received good reviews in The Economist .  I will report on it when I read it, but I think I can predict its message — increased diversity in products allowing increasing customization is coming.  I do not disagree with this, and in fact am all for it.

But what about standardization.  Does this mean that it will be increasingly difficult to use “other people’s” products?  Will manufacturers agree that certain products should offer the user controls and displays that are standardized across variations of the same product (automobiles, computers, mobile phones, dishwashers)?  Or will we be increasingly annoyed by such things as the nagging small and meaningless differences between Apple and PC desktops?

Industrial products are to make our lives easier, not more difficult.  Our brains remain the same size as options in life increase.  We are beyond feature creep.  And not only do we have to use these products, but are having to continually invest in the care and feeding of them, a task that becomes more difficult as the diversity increases.  Probably a continual trend, but one that should be kept in mind by the designers and manufacturers of products.

  Screws smThink of fasteners.  Small items, but different fasteners require different tools.  Fortunately, nuts and bolts seem to cling to hexagonal and square external shapes, with some exceptions such as wingnuts, and five sided ones.  But internally, Wikipedia now lists 32 shapes.  They are shown here.  Each, of course, comes in several sizes.  Does this mean that the well-equipped mechanic (or owner) should have 32 sets of screwdrivers in six or eight sizes each?  Unlikely.  But I work a lot with mechanical things, have several sets of screwdrivers (slotted, Phillips, Torx, etc) and am constantly being caught short, and I am an amateur.  I do not love manufacturers who develop special fasteners, because I cannot help but think that they want me to buy a new product if something goes wrong, or take it to one of their “service” centers to be repaired. 

 And of course we do have to wrestle with the U.S. not having mandated the metric system (we are one of the three countries in the world , the others being Myanmar and Liberia, that have not done so).  We have been trying to do this for many years, but still are caught in the past.  A costly mistake, stemming from our unwillingness to move from our traditional system of measurement (even though it is a terrible one), and our strange tendency to think that even though we are only 1/20th of the world’s population, everyone should be like us.  More about our attempts to join the world in mandating the metric system in my next post.

 

Posted at 05:00 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society, The nature of technology | | Comments (0)

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09/13/2012

Spacecraft and Cars

Curiosity chute smallAs the publicity says, the Curiosity Rover now on Mars (seen here from a Martian orbiter while descending under its parachute) is the size of a small car, about one ton, roughly comparable to a Mini Cooper.  (2,500 lbs).  But it is vastly more complicated, able to withstand the environment of launch from earth, and the entry and landing environments of Mars, as well as to operate with no maintenance through the three year or so lifetime of the flight (35 million miles) and surface operation.

Granted that although the environment of space used to frighten  designers of spacecraft, it is now seen as fairly benign, since we have learned to control temperatures, orient ourselves, and correct trajectories on route.  But the launch, entry, and landing present formidable problems in temperature control, structural design, communications, propulsion, and other areas to the designers of space craft, and the reliabily requirements are off the chart.  Also, there is intense competition for being able to fly an instrument on such spacecraft, and launch vehicles are limited, so weight is of extreme importance.  The Curiosity includes ten extremely complex scientific experiments in its weight, as well as the ability to move over unknown terrain, generate the necessar power,  and communicate with earth.

When  I worked at JPL, spacecraft were not nearly as complex, and often failed because we were just learning the game.  But even then, we used to wonder about what was with cars.  Why did they weigh 2 tons, when all they had to do was move down roads under human control?  Why all the structure?  It was certainly possible to make sufficiently stiff structure for much less weight  Why did they only last for 200,000 miles or so?  At 25  miles per hour,  that was only 8,000 hours.  The Voyager I. shown at the right , was launched 35 years ago (over 300,000 hours) has now traveled over 11 billion miles and is Voyager small about to be the first object we have made to leave the solar system entirely.

Admittedly, once the Voyager left we humans, with  our ability to damage things, it has had a pretty easy ride, and electronics seem to be more reliable than mechanical device, but still……

In the Sept 9 2012 issue of the New York Times, there was a review by Lawrence Ulrich of the Chevrolet Spark, a small car designed, engineered, and built in Korea, which will be sold in the U .S. The reviewer heroically tried to be positive about the car, although he could not help calling it such things as a “demented toaster”, and describing it as a “squashed face carnival buggy”. But right after the review was an article entitled “Taking the ‘Cheap’ Out of the Small Car”.  Although the bias toward “big” (read heavy, “luxurious, ”over-powered, and canceling out the feel of the road) still showed, there were indications that car designers are finally closing with the problem of making more efficient and better designed transportation machines.  But it did make me wonder.  Where did we get this idea of and desire for “luxury” as it is defined in automobiles (and often expensive bordellos)?  Why did we decide we didn’t want to hear any noise or feel the road?  Why did we decide that we wanted driving to be as automatic as possible, rather than requiring more involvement of we drivers?  And finally, how did we get caught in our strange expectations about what transportation machines should be?

I am still hanging on to a  1975 Alfa Romeo and a !970 Jaguar E-Type that have been in the family a long time and which I am in the process of restoring.  They are not all that reliable by modern standards.  I certainly don’t drive them between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  And my wife’s Acura beats them as far as handling, speed, and yes, luxury, are concerned.  But  for most of my driving, they will be much more fun.  And as for weight, it has become increasingly critical as fuel becomes more expensive and materials become more scarce (do you really think fuel prices will decrease with our new Frac gas?  Wait until we add enough tax to repair our failing roads—hello European prices).

Indianapolis race cars weigh about 1500 pounds, are capable of well over 200 miles per hour, and seem to allow drivers to survive horrendous crashes.  Can’t we at least make automobiles to go to the grocery store that weigh under a ton and also please Mr Ulrich?

 

 

 

Posted at 06:00 AM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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09/06/2012

Classic Products and Product Quality

My wife brought not only her wonderful self to our marriage, but also a classic Kitchenaid mixer.  They both become even more wonderful as the years pass.  But let’s talk about the mixer here.  This is a photograph of it.  Kitchen Aid Mix sm.It was originally light green, but at one time she was so in love with her Honda CRX, that I painted the mixer to match, even though it did not go around corners as fast. It is a product that is often called iconic, and after its birth in 1919, it arrived in pretty much its present form in the mid 1950’s.  Its Wikipedia based history is here. It will undoubtedly outlive both my wife and me.

 We both cook, and from time to time I try to perfect bread, so we do quite a bit of heavy-duty mixing.  The mixer never even breathes hard.  The top locks down, and the speed is variable.  No other controls—none needed. The mixing tools skim the bowl inner surface, and everything is easy to clean.  It is heavy enough that it does not move around the counter, the bowl secures to the base with a simple part-turn, its form screams  MIXER, and no instruction book is needed to operate it.  Also it  has never broken in its 50 years of life.

 It is easy to use, reliable and serviceable, beautifully made, elegant, makes one feel like a big-time chef, and does not involve disposable items.  I love it.  It gets high grades on all of the items in my Good Products, Bad Products book.  The present version is definitely relatively expensive compared to the lower mixer prices at Walmart or even Target, but to me well worth the money, since obviously this older model does its duty magnificently and will continue through at least one human lifetime.  Since we haven’t owned a new one for 50 years, I can’t vouch for their quality, but I am hoping Kitchenaid hasn’t succumbed to lowering the quality to reduce their costs.

 Of course, by producing a mixer like this, Kitchenaid gives up the opportunity to produce a cheaper new model with “advanced” features and a shorter lifetime every few years, thereby opening up marketing opportunities and a chance to hook customers into buying new ones more often.  Undoubtedly it would be easy to include a bit of digital memory that held all known recipes—and for all I know someone is doing that.  But come on……….

 I always think hard when I like something that I have grown up with or had a long time, to try make sure that I am not giving up a better option by giving too much credit to sentiment and what I am used to.  But I usually conclude that if products stay around in near to their original form for long enough to be called “classic”, or “iconic”, there is something going on there.  If you are a consumer, it is worth figuring out what it is, and demanding it from industrially produced products,  If  you are a producer, focus on making such products.  They are better for  your brand than all the advertising you can buy.

Posted at 12:28 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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06/14/2012

Social Networking, My Blog, and Product Quality

As some of you know, I am in the process of adding Twitter and Facebook, and perhaps LinkedIn to my blog.  I realize I can no longer escape social networking if I still want to communicate with much of the human race.  Given a few weeks I will probably have them all interacting reasonably well and have forgotten the difficulty of entering an activity that has been going on for some time.  To those of  you who have neither taken the Stanford Good Products Bad Products course, been following my blog, or otherwise heard me rant about product quality, a few words concerning my present interests are perhaps in order.  To  those of you following my neophyte attempts at social networking, any help is appreciated.

In the latter part of the 20th century, amazing gains were made in what was then called manufacturing quality.  These were stimulated by international competition appearing first in northern Europe, and then in Asia.  The results were impressive in product reliability, cost reduction, and customer appeal.  The campaign was based on sound economic and management principles, and motivated by metrics. 

But after these amazing gains, attention shifted to other aspects of industrial production, and even during the “manufacturing quality revolution”, many aspects of product quality that are not easily described by metrics were passed by.  I am interested in overall product quality, which includes such things as human, cultural and environmental fit, craftsmanship, emotional appeal, aesthetics, sophistication, and elegance.  It is much more difficult for people in business and engineering to consider love than performance.

But even with performance, we have a problem.  We use obsolete measures and tend to focus on product features which result in quick sales and immediate profits.  Do you often have the opportunity to fully use the 0 to 60 time of your car?  Should  you really need a new iPhone every year?

We accept present quality because of tradition and the values inculcated in economic systems, industry and in the professionals who work there.   If you think a bit about products you produce and/or use, you can come up with many valid insights as to how they could be improved, often with no increase, or even a decrease in cost.  Do we really need all of the bells and whistles on products, that when added together keep us confused and constantly referring to our products to see how to adjust and maintain them?  Are we perhaps becoming weary of the ever increasing choices we have among products that essentially do the same thing?  Finally, have we become innovation crazy?  Do we need more apps or better apps.  Do we need to use the entire capability of the integrated circuit, or just what we really need.  Do we need more and more of everything, or just what is compatible with our limited abilities and resources?  Technology is supposed to serve us, not the opposite.

I recently wrote the book Good Products Bad Products (McGraw Hill, New York, N.Y., 2011) about such things, and added the blog and now social networking to try to encourage more thought about this issue.  I believe that in this day and age, those making and buying the best products win—and in the process feel very good about themselves—why not you (and us)?

Posted at 01:22 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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06/11/2012

Hammers and Quality

Tools that have evolved over many years tend to be of high quality and often survive breakthroughs in technology.  Think of the common hammer, one of my favorite tools.  It has certainly benefited from many years of development, and still holds its own despite the presence of nail guns, which have captured a large piece of the “commercial” market because of their speed.

I was introduced to “hand” tools early in life, as my family used few power tools and did all of its own construction.  Here is a photo of me at 21 months of age, helping build the family house. 21 month hammer post 2

I had my own small hammer, and was attacking a nail that was a bit beyond my size, but I was definitely encouraged to learn to use tools.  And I did.  And the basic skills have served me very well indeed.

One advantage of the common hammer, is that not only does it perform its job well, but it has not changed a great deal over my life.  The two hammers in the photo below are one used by my grandfather, which I acquired upon his death 60 years ago and have used constantly since then, and one I acquired a few years ago because it is heavier and better suited for framing.  Hammers small

Evidence of maturity can be seen because there is not a lot of difference between the two, even though the one with the wooden handle may be pushing 100 years of age.  Having trained on my little childhood hammer, I seem to be able to pick up any hammer—new, old, mine, my neighbor’s, one in our student shop or belonging to anyone in my family— and use it equally well with no training, no short course, and no manual/video.  It is a hugely flexible tool, useful for everything from driving nails to demolishing unwanted structures, preventing pieces of paper from blowing around, and scratching my back. And it does not need time to boot, deliver spam to me, post advertisements, crash, or die.

Examining the hammer in the context of my Good Products, Bad Products book, it certainly delivers great value for its cost, fits me, is nicely made, is a beautiful, elegant, and sophisticated device, gives me membership in a culture I respect (those who work with hand tools), is very easy on the environment, and I obviously love it.  Happiness to me is building things, and nothing surpasses banging on things with my hammer.

Posted at 07:40 AM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Global Constraints, Human fit, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values, Working with the hands | | Comments (0)

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05/21/2012

Thomas Friedman —Please add product quality to your concerns

 

I have been politely requested to write my posts on the same day of the week, so I will be posting on Mondays.  For a while I will be writing only one post per week, since I am also responding to local pressure and adding Facebook and Twitter to my life, so I will be more acceptable to contemporary students.  I must admit to a bit of  ambivalence, since I am not looking for more ways to spend time, but by next week I will be drowning in links—and in two or three weeks I plan to be adding posts to my blog  twice a week.

 A week ago, I heard Tom Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist,  talk about That Used to be Us, the book he recently wrote with Michael Mandelbaum.  If you have never heard Friedman talk, you have missed a treat, because he talks as well as he writes (three Pulitzer prizes, six best selling books).  But Mandelbaum is certainly no slouch, having been author or coauthor of twelve books, and Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of advanced International studies. The two of them are friends and neighbors, and although both study and write on international topics, this book is definitely about the U.S.  I read the book this weekend and loved it.

Friedman describes himself as a frustrated optimist about the U.S.  The subtitle of the book is “How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back”  It is a combination of criticism and cheer-leading.  He thinks we have what it takes to come back, but doesn’t see it happening at present.  Come back from where? 

He thinks we have been falling behind in four major areas.  The first is understanding of the nature of the present world.  As you may know, he is the author of the book “The World is Flat”, which was focused on globalization. He is frustrated because he doesn’t think we understand what globalization has done to us.  His second worry is that even though we were the innovators of what we will call the digital revolution, we don’t seem to understand what that is doing to us either.  In fact, he thinks the juxtaposition of globalizaton and the digital revolution is one of the largest displacements Homo Sapiens has faced.  His other two worries are U.S. debt, at the national, state, and individual level, and our inability to deal properly with the environment.

He feels that we need to get moving fast to bring ourselves up to speed on these four areas.  In order to do this, we need to focus on the five areas that he thinks has traditionally made the U.S. great.  These are education, infrastructure, immigration, research and development, and regulation. The book gives education particular attention, because as he says, if we want to be what we were, average is not good enough. In order to do this, he believes that we will have to have a functioning and less polarized government and population, and that sacrifices will have to be made at all levels.

One reason I like Friedman, is that I tend to agree with him, and he lays out the arguments so clearly and does not shirk bad news.  He fills his book with reliable statistics and does not suggest that there is an easy way for us to recover from our present malaise, but he does think we can, and unlike our political representatives, discusses the problems involved in depth.

Although he is critical of some of the directions that business and finance have taken, he is definitely aware of the major role they play in the quality of life in the U.S.  He is all in favor of entrepreneurship, increasing exports, streamlining regulations that hamper business, and creating a tax scheme and government support programs that aid business.  But, for some reason, he doesn’t mention product quality.  He talks about the need to make jobs and the need to keep productivity high, but does not comment on the obvious benefits of making the best products in the world.  His talk was wonderful except for that glaring omission.  Hopefully, he will read this blog post and write another book.

The book is in the list to the right.  I have been neglecting this list for a while, but I will soon review several excellent books that have to do with product quality.  

Posted at 08:39 AM in Current Affairs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Management, People, Product Quality, Science, Technology, and Society | | Comments (0)

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05/10/2012

Two More Dave Beach Questions

In Dave Beach and my “conversation” described in my April 16 post, the next two questions from him, after “why is manufacturing important”, were “why is product quality important”t, and “how are the chapter concepts in your Good Products, Bad Products book related”.

Product Quality is  important for three reasons:

     1.  Competitiveness

     2.  The Quality of Life

     3.  Motivation and Self Image

For the foreseeable future, businesses will continue to compete, probably globally, and hopefully material well-being will rise, at least in poorer nations.  It is also probable that businesses in wealthier countries will have continuing problems competing with businesses in poorer countries in the production of  lower quality products,  Also higher quality products have a marketplace advantage and are both more attractive at the same cost (Toyota automobiles), and offer higher profitability at a higher cost (Apple iPhones),

Technology is hopefully for the purpose of benefiting us humans.  It should satisfy our needs, make our lives more interesting, keep us healthier,  maintain our environment,  and decrease hardship. If it does not do such things, it fails.  In a sense, overall product quality can be measured by how much a product improves the quality of life.

It is extremely rewarding to be involved in the production of use of an outstanding product.  Organizations producing such products and the people working in them are proud of their role.  People  associated with them become more involved in their work and more productive.  The United States used to be very proud of the label “Made in America”.  Wouldn’t it be nice to get there again – to feel that whatever we produced, it was the best in the world?

The Chapters in my book have to do with the performance, cost, and price of industrial products, compatibility of the products with the human user, craftsmanship in the production of them, emotional reaction to them, aesthetic appeal of them, the symbolism and cultural fit of them, and consistency of the products with global constraints (environment, etc.)  These factors are related in that they are all essential in the production of them and benefits to the user, and difficult to handle quantitatively.  At first glance such things as performance, cost, and price, seem easily measurable, but it is more difficult to do so over the lifetime of products and when the subtleties of perception are included.  As one proceeds through the chapters, metrics become more and more difficult to describe the quality of the product and the reaction of the user.  Love?  Beauty?  Elegance?  Symbolism? When it comes to global constraints, it becomes simpler to attach numbers to such things as supply of resources, severity of pollution, global warming, and loss of species, but for many (most?) people there seems to be a good bit of resistance to using these numbers and the desire to  collectively bury our heads in the sand and hope the problems are not real. 

I will delve further into this in a future post. 

Posted at 05:20 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality | | Comments (0)

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04/16/2012

General Topics on Manufacturing and Product Quality

Since the Stanford ME 314 Good Products, Bad Products course is now over, I will leave the topic.  Should any of you reading this blog be teaching a similar course, or if you would like to do so, contact Dave Beach (dbeach@stanford.edu), and he will be glad to send you information or conspire with you.

I am scheduled to give a few talks on my book, as part of the routine of bringing it to people’s attention.  Dave and I did a “conversation” on the topics contained in the book to a couple of hundred people on the Stanford campus last week, and it was fun.  The format called for Dave to ask me questions, and for me to answer them as best as I could.  I actually had the easier role, because I had the option of muttering a few words and then saying “what do you think, Dave?”. 

I thought it might be of interest to discuss a few of the questions and answers (?) with you.  The questions are here.  Look through them and think about how you might answer them.  I thought that beginning with the next post, I would give you my personal, perhaps biased opinion on some of them.  But just so you know that the U.S. is not alone in worrying about such questions, here is an interesting article on Japanese concerns about the topic of manufacturing that was on the front page of  the April 16 edition of the New York Times.

Posted at 01:37 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Craftsmanship, Design, Emotions and Needs, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Human fit, Making, Fixing, and Tinkering, Management, People, Performance, Cost, and Price, Product Quality, Symbolism and Cultural Values | | Comments (0)

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03/26/2012

Final post on Stanford ME314 Good Products, Bad Products course

Since my last post, the final two sets of  “good product, bad product” examples were submitted and student groups wrote summaries and gave presentations on them. The first of these was aesthetics, elegance and sophistication, and the second had to do with products that were consistent with a finite earth.  For the first, students were asked to choose a product that they thought was simply beautiful and one that they thought was unbelievably repulsive.  Also to choose a third product that they believed to be extremely elegant and sophisticated.  They were  then asked to justify their choices, and conjecture upon how they could be improved, and what the improvement might do to the cost of the product.  A student paper summarizing the products is here.  Examples of beautiful products from the 2011 course, are shown here;.  Repulsive ones are here.  Ones showing elegance and sophistication are here.

The student groups chose Cartagas (two companies of this name produce “Cuban” cigars, but only one of them is in Cuba), Tesla Motors, Ziiro watches, and Victoria’s Secret.

For the second, the students were asked to think of products that that harmed the earth's environment, and changes could lessen their negative impact .  A student summary of the responses is shown here.  And examples from the 2011 course are shown here. I missed the final student presentations, as I was out of town.  However, Professor Beach and Julie Shryne, the teaching assistant in the course, had many positive things to say about them.  And judging from the quality of the students and the preceeding presentations, I am sorry I missed them.

Speaking of Professor Beach, those of you not having taken the course might be interested in knowing a bit about him, since is not only a superlative teacher, but has been responsible for turning what were the traditional student shops into not only vastly improved facilities, but an extremely exciting and innovative center at Stanford (the Produce Realization Laboratory).  He has an interesting back ground which includes study in the liberal arts, manufacturing experience, engineering degrees, and a strong dedication to video production. He best of all, a wonderful person, filled with good spirits, high motivation, and a dedicated and hard worker.  I am proud to count him among my friends.   A good overview of David Beach and his interests can be seen here.

Posted at 09:48 PM in Aesthetics, Elegance, and Sophistication, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Good Products, Bad Products book, Management, ME 314 Stanford Course 2012, People, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course | | Comments (0)

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03/03/2012

Stanford ME 314 Good Products Bad Products update #4

Since the last update, the class has continued to read my book, done the “good-bad” exercises, listened to some excellent visiting lecturers, and begun to work on their final presentations.  The first four groups, who focused on human fit, delivered their presentations a couple of days ago, and did outstanding jobs.  The first group talked about a company that produces products for people suffering from arthritis (osteo, not rheumatoid).   Arthritis is inevitable if one lives long enough, since it is simply due to the wearing out of cartilage.  I am presently two inches shorter than I once was.  When this was brought to my attention, I complained to my physical therapist daughter in law.  She happily told me that if I lived a really, really long time, I could be six inches shorter than I once was, since six inches of me were cartilage, and it would all wear out.  Nice kid!  Of course, the products of this company (who advertises ther comfort of their products for everybody, not just their target customer group), are easier to use for everyone, and therefore the company is doing well.

The second  company to be studied was a very successful maker of slot machines, and this group came up with the to me interesting conclusion that the human fit of this product was too good, since people became addicted to losing time and money to it.  They illustrated this with a chilling video of a woman who was a slot-machine addict.  The third group studied Wii, as a breakthrough in play stations, and in fact in its effect on computer game designs.  Like the first two groups, they involved student volunteers in their presentations, and I was impressed at the Wii skills of the students who demonstrated.  The fourth group talked about the makers of the Pill, a miniature speaker for digital devices that is enjoying great success, not only because of its small size and therefore compatibility with people seeking a portable speaker, but also because it was “cool”, which resulted in a fine discussion about the overlap between physical fit and emotional response.

The guest speakers provided an interesting contrast.  The first was Nancy Gioia, who is the director of electrification for Ford Motor Company.  She gave a superb summary of Ford’s plans for incorporating hybrid power, plug in hybrid power, and full battery power into their fleet.  It was impressive not only for its completeness, but for the extent to which Ford has incorporated electrification into their product plans.  She stressed not only the benefits of this, but also the necessity that it be compatible with the desired growth and profitability of the country.  A bit of information on her is here.  The next, Adam Grosser, who has had an extremely successful career beginning with Apple and now with a venture capital firm specializing in improving electricity distribution, began by pointing out that true innovation requires time and involves experimentation and failure, and may not be achieved if the sole intention of a company is to maximize income in the short term.  However, after pointing out the many areas of potential improvement in the electrical power business, he ended up captivating the class with venture capital stories.  But he emphasized at the end, that venture capital is a business seeking high returns as fast as possible.   A bit of information on Adam is here and a longer U-Tube lecture at U.C. Berkeley is here.  The final speaker of the period was David Klaus, the Director of Engineering at Proximity, a company in Myanmar producing irrigating equipment at very low costs ($15 U.S. for a foot powered pump).  Proximity’s goal is to bring affordable life-changing products to people with very low income ($1 to $2 a day).  They obviously seek enough income to not only stay in business but grow so that they can reach more people.  An interesting short video on Proximity featuring David is here. 

All three speakers were outstanding, and all in a sense promoting products that will improve the environment, but one as an executive in an established and very large U.S. automobile company, one as a venture capitalist backing entrepreneurs focusing on electrical power distribution, and one as the engineering director of an extremely idealistic company serving extremely low-income people.

The class is a bit behind on submitting its final good product bad product summaries, so I will include them in the next and final update. 

Posted at 08:20 PM in Creativity and Innovation, Design, Engineering, Global Constraints, Human fit, Management, ME 314 Stanford Course 2012, People, Product Quality, Stanford Good Products Bad Products Course | | Comments (0)

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