Five things I wish I had designed

I was thinking of the five things I wish I had designed. These are not great, disruptive systems like electricity or the internet but more humble objects that have provided great service to so many.  My list:

1. Bicycle
2. Sailboat
3. Scissors
4. Nut and Bolt
5. Zipper

I like many of these because they both complicated and work reliably, such as bicycles and zippers.  I love to sail.  In the context of design, I’m thinking of a Bermuda rig that can sail upwind.  Harnessing all that power safely and then directing it to provide a somewhat predictable force is amazing.  I have an 1899 Scientific American article where someone watched how snow got entrained in an ice boat’s sail as it sailed upwind and observed an eddy in the upwind side of the sail.  He then confidently asserts that it was the counter-rotating of the eddy that pushed the sail forward.  All wrong but asserted with great authority.

I would not have been clever enough to develop a machine that is unstable at rest like a bicycle.  I would have kept the training wheels on as a vital part of the design and written severe admonitions to future designers who would have the temerity to reduce the wheel count to anything less than three.

Scissors are probably the most boring of these designs but I can imagine someone messing around with knives and figuring this out.  I imagine lots of people designed scissors independently.  And here scissors remain, largely unchanged, being vital tools of the 21st century.  No manuals or safety instructions required.  A great example of affordances and mapping.

I realize these things are all evolutionary but they still amaze me.  They have evolved to high levels of reliability through the careful work of generations of people.