Imagine, for a moment, that you are a penguin

9 July 2005

Hans Henrik H. Heming

Posted in Innovation

John Thackara has done a book with some very important insights about design and innovation – “In the bubble”. I’ve only read the extracts but by doing that it gave me thoughts about lot of things….
… If we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out…it seems that we should substract the technology for a while, focusing on social innovations instead?

… where do we want to be?…

… how do we get there?…

I think I’ll buy the book for my self and a few very good friends

A little snip from the book:

You hang around on ice flows, in extreme cold, for weeks on end.
Standing there, in bare feet, you are able to sustain a temperature
differential between your own body and the outside environment of
eighty degrees Celsius. Every now and again, when you’re feeling
hungry, you jump into the icy water, catch a fish, and then clamber
back onto a sunny beach. You do this without ever over- or
underheating.

The secret behind this impressive thermal performance
lies in your dense feathers: When a nasty wind gets up, they reduce
airflow around your body so that it slows down and warms up, like the
water inside a wetsuit. Your feet are also remarkable: They open like a
fan to get rid of excess heat when you land from a flight—then, back on
the ice, they act like radiators and heat up the ground where you’re
standing.

I
often wish I were a penguin when contemplating the Honeywell
Chromotherm III central heating controller that sits on the wall of my
home in Amsterdam. This little box is covered with arrows and buttons
and words and—of course—a digital display. It was designed to look
technical and smart, and I don’t doubt that somewhere inside its little
head thoughts, of a kind, are clattering around. But the Chromo’s
interface is, to me at least, incomprehensible, and the fifty-page
instruction manual long ago disappeared. So it leads a life of its own.
And a profligate life it is: The central heating system it “controls”
is ruinously inefficient. My house is heated uniformly from top to
bottom throughout the days and evenings—whether or not at I am at home
or even in the country. A thermal-engineering acquaintance reckons that
my domestic energy performance is ten thousand times less efficient than the penguin’s.

How smart is that?