On the conceptual edge

This is an excerpt from the epilogue of my new book, "Engineering for Industrial Designers and Inventors: Fundamentals for Designers of Wonderful Things" (http://oreil.ly/thomasask)

As a child, you watched a leaf fall slowly from a tree. It fell easily along a route of its own design. You stuck your finger in a stream and watched the water rise up and around your finger. You felt a power over the water and marveled at the beautifully contorted flow. You wished to understand the things around you, discover wonders, and create marvels. Discovery comes from wonder, and the topics you learned in this book will be a small part of your design and inventing tool kit. You didn’t learn all this stuff just to know it, you learned it so you can use it. You make thousands of decisions when you create something. The engineering background gently offered here will help infuse your design process with some boundaries. You hate boundaries? That’s OK, they are not offended.

There are so many ambiguous elements that go into creation that some structure is helpful. The structure of engineering principles doesn’t constrain you, it just lets you drive your creative enthusiasm into different directions. So as one channel closes because of some physical reality, you ricochet o‚ the channel and blast through a twisty bend to discover something else. And if you do close a channel because of some “rule of physics” problem, you are closing it with a tired Velcro flap, not a dead-bolted slab of steel.

There is beauty in drawing deeply upon the mind’s ability to connect ideas, to steal back the time from forces which wish to squeeze entertainment and communication between every heartbeat. Pausing to think is the opposite of the keyword searching approach to acquiring knowledge, with its uninvited AI curating. These pauses can provide insight, empathy, curiosity, and ambition. Reading this book, or any such book, is a challenge. It required focus and processing. It competes for your time in an era when technology is always your partner— when smartphone-coupled conversation encourages superficial topics that easily allows us to check in and out.

This book is intended for those working at the conceptual edge of the design process. It is for the inventor who sees a need and ingeniously creates in the void. It is for the industrial designer who brings user-centric focus and connoisseurship into design. Unlike intrinsic material properties and anthropometric data, the boundaries for those at the conceptual edge should always be pushed back. Those who work with concepts operate across disciplines and constantly challenge the status quo.

Article Image: I took this photograph in India in 1994.