Here’s  a fantastic Director’s Commentary for gearheads.  Honda’s Bradley Buchanan takes us through all the design work that went in to the creation of an Odyssey that hauls at both ends. 

What a sound this thing makes!  And how it hunkers!  It has all the gravitas of a hairy-armed first-generation Porsche 911 Turbo.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there’s a market out there for vans that pack the punch and handling of a BMW 535i.  People in my demographic and psychographic could easily absorb 10,000 of these a year in North America alone.  I’d buy one in a second, especially if it were powered by a turbodiesel. 

Space is the ultimate luxury. 

Space coupled with warp-speed performance?  Well, that’s nirvana.  Honda, are you listening?

The Harvard Robotic Fly

(click thru to witness an amazing video)

Here’s an excerpt from the accompanying article:

Designing an automated fly implied having the ability to make
lightweight, miniature working parts, a process that Wood says took up
the bulk of his doctoral study, because of the lack of any previous
research on which to draw. “For years, the thrust of our work was ‘How
do we do this?’” says Wood. “There was no existing fabrication
paradigm, given the scale we were operating on, the speed we wanted to
operate with, and things like cost, turnaround, and robustness.” His
research group developed and fabricated a laser carving system that
could meticulously cut, shape, and bend sheets of carbon fiber and
polymer—both strong but lightweight materials—into the necessary
microparts.

And how to power those wings to beat 120 times
per second? To keep this 60-milligram robot (the weight of a few grains
of rice) with a 3-centimeter wingspan to a minimal size and weight,
Wood says, you can’t simply use a shrunken version of the heavy DC
(direct current) motors used in most robots. So he and his team settled
on a simple actuator: in this case, a layered composite that bends when
electricity is applied, thereby powering a micro-scale gearbox hooked
up to the wings. Wood says the actuator works even better than its
biological inspiration. The power density—a measure of power output as
a function of mass—of a fly’s wing muscles is around 80 watts per
kilogram; Wood’s wing design produces more than 400 watts per kilogram.

That’s some kick-ass engineering at work.  Professor Wood, you are one gnarly dude.

Many thanks to the folks at Telstar Logistics, a key member of the metacool horizontal keiretsu, for bringing this innovation to the attention of our R&D group.

Moonwalking designers in a Halloween parade featured prominently in my earlier post about the weird and wonderful culture of my own innovative workplace.  I recently learned about a similar Halloween parade at Zappos, a significant sponging agent for my disposable income, and a remarkably innovative retailer in its own right.

Might there be a causal link between putting on killer Halloween parties and forging corporate cultures capable of innovation on a routine basis?  Or does the causality flow in the other direction?  Or both ways?  Or is this merely correlation, and not causation?

No matter.  I really dig the Poltergeist reference at the end of the Zappos video.  Very nice.

The salt-spitting machines of Speed Week, as seen through the eyes of BW Jones. 

Here, here, and here.

I heard this statement expressed the other week while walking around the campus of a thriving business:

                "This is the building where we do failure"

A very simple statement, but very deep.  It referred to a building dedicated to the support of prototyping behavior.  In other words, a place where people are encouraged to craft probes in to the future, each designed to bring back a bit of evidence meant to guide decision making.

What I also found significant about this place is that it is open to anyone.  It’s not a special lab or skunkworks for a select group of people.  Anyone can walk in and do failure.  I think this is an important kind of resource to have available if your organization is serious about engaging in innovation on a routine basis, whether that innovation be incremental or evolutionary in nature.

There’s a Field of Dreams aspect to having a place designed for failure.  You have to believe.  In particular, three points of belief are key to sustaining a place for failure, otherwise it won’t get used in the right way or even understood:

1. You can prototype anything
2. You can prototype with anything
3. Failure sucks, but instructs

At the end of the day, having a place responsible for the creation of variance, fueled by intuition and experimentation and optimism, is key to making failure instructive and productive.