My Three Top Engineering Products

These are three products I am deeply inspired by.

Product 1: The Nest

Made by a tiny bird, one straw at a time, this nest is remarkable for several reasons. First, it creates warmth during the winter. Second, it has natural channels to ensure that rain water does not enter, keeping the chicks dry. Third, there are two holes at the bottom as you can see, as the picture is of an incomplete nest. For a completed one, there will only be one hole, and the other serves as the base where the egg will be laid.

From Nest

Note that there are no straight lines anywhere. The streamlined shape allows it to prevent the wind from blowing it away, and the straw construction allows it to easily clink to the host tree. Could we humans come up with a functional design like this, where every aspect of our design served an important purpose?

Product 2: The Speedup Cycle

When life presents us with bumps, we are asked by the wise to treat the bumps as an opportunity. One innovator took this quite literally and designed a cycle that speeds up when it encounters bumps on India's roads (bore bumps than road). The cycle has a spring mechanism that absorbs the shock and transmits it back to the cycle. Life wisdom manifesting in product design, how wonderful!

Product 3: The Wiki

The Wiki, invented by Ward Cunningham, challenges several paradigms that we have taken for granted. It allows a community to form, and promotes content creation in a simple and powerful way.

In the Wiki software family, there are two that stand out for me. One is Wikipedia, based on the MediaWiki product, and the other is TWiki. Both stand out for their utter simplicity in design and use. TWiki stands out even more so as a great adaptation of a Wiki for smaller self-contained communities, allowing private organizations to create communities within. Having experimented with different wikis, I continue to be amazed at how quickly people familiarize themselves and come to love TWiki, using it from a tool for file management to a mechanism for knowledge capture.

The remarkable thing about the wiki products is that the best ones are open source and free. TWiki is easy to install on a linux server. The installation process has gotten so much easier over the years, that even a linux newbie can get through it quickly.

Under online products, the creation of the Wiki and its present incarnations stand out for their creativity and simplicity.

# posted by Capital Socialist/Social Capitalist @ 9:19 AM