CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: Problem Finding
CHAPTER 1: MARTIAN JET LAG
CHAPTER 2: USER-INVENTORS
CHAPTER 3: SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES
CHAPTER 4: THE FUTURE OF FEEDBACK
Part II: Discovery
CHAPTER 5: SUPER-ENCOUNTERERS
CHAPTER 6: DATA GOGGLES
CHAPTER 7: BUILDING AN EMPIRE OUT OF NOTHING
Part III: Prophecy
CHAPTER 8: THE PONG EFFECT
CHAPTER 9: THE WAYNE GRETZKY GAME
CHAPTER 10: THE MIND’S R&D LAB
CHAPTER 11: HOW TO TIME-TRAVEL
Part IV: Connecting
CHAPTER 12: THE GO-BETWEENS
CHAPTER 13: ZONES OF PERMISSION
CHAPTER 14: HOLISTIC INVENTION
Part V: Empowerment
CHAPTER 15: PAPER EYES
CHAPTER 16: TINKERING WITH EDUCATION
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Pagan Kennedy 2016
Pagan Kennedy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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To my grandfather Stephen Patrick Burke, inventor
IN 2012, THE New York Times Magazine hired me to write the weekly “Who Made That?” column, and so I began hunting down the people behind such inventions as sliced bread, the 3-D printer, and lipstick. Week after week, I discovered that ideas pop up wherever they please, and inventors come from every corner of life. A test pilot created aviator sunglasses; a frustrated father devised the sippy cup to foil his own toddler; and experiments in a kitchen in Queens, New York, led to the Xerox machine.1
Why did these people hit on solutions that everyone else had missed? That question became a thread that I followed to an even bigger one: Is there a formula for invention, and if so, can anyone learn it?
So when I reached out to creative people for my column, I asked them about the process that had led them to conceive their bold ideas. One of the first people I queried, Jake Stap, taught me that sometimes we discover the power of our imagination only when we feel desperate. In the late 1960s, Stap worked as a coach at two Wisconsin tennis camps, and during those long days of lessons, he spent hours stooped over, retrieving hundreds of balls. His back ached, and he urgently needed to invent his way out of this drudgery.
Stap placed a tennis ball on the passenger seat of his car, where it rolled around for weeks, a reminder that he needed to think about the problem. As he drove, he performed mental experiments: he built an imaginary tennis court in his mind’s eye and pictured what it would be like to wear an arm extender that would let him reach the ground without bending over. But, he realized, the mechanical hand would pick up only one ball at a time. That was no good. Finally, during one of his meditations, Stap reached over and pinched the tennis ball on the seat next to him. When the rubber yielded under his fingertips, he had a new idea: the ball could squeeze through metal bars, taking a one-way trip into a wire bin.
Stap rigged up a basket with a handle and metal bars across its bottom so he could perform real-life experiments. “I fooled around with the bars to find the right distance” so that the balls would pop into the basket and stay there, he told me. He called his invention a “ball hopper.”
The next summer at tennis camp “everyone wanted to use them,” recalled his daughter, Sue Kust. “It was a mad dash for the ball hoppers.” She observed that “when people saw how [the ball hopper] worked and how simple it was, they would always say, ‘I could have thought of that.’”2
His concept might have seemed obvious, and yet it wasn’t. Rubber balls became standard tennis equipment in the 1870s, so by all rights, a Victorian gentleman should have used a wire basket to wrangle his tennis balls. Instead, for nearly a century, tennis players chased down the rubber balls without ever seeing Stap’s solution. That’s the mystery that surrounds some inventions. They seem easy in hindsight. And yet, the most elegantly simple breakthroughs can hide from us for decades. So what blocks us from grasping an idea? And how can we find the “obvious” ideas that are hiding from us right now?
To answer those questions, we must study many inventions and look for patterns. For instance, if you delve into the history of cancer cures, squirt guns, and smoke detectors, you’ll find startling similarities in the way that they came into existence. So if we can observe the techniques that have led lots of inventors to success, we might extrapolate what methods work best.
People tend to use the words invention and innovation interchangeably, which causes confusion. And so before we proceed any further, we should come up with working definitions for both. Art Fry — the originator of the Post-it Note — developed his own way of distinguishing invention from innovation, and his definitions are so illuminating that I will borrow them and use them throughout this book. Invention, according to Fry, is what happens when you translate a thought into a thing. More specifically, Fry points out that an invention usually involves creating a prototype that lets you test your concept and demonstrate that it works. Once you’ve created that model, “the creation becomes an invention,” according to Fry.3 The process may require dreaming, drawing, observation, idea generation, discovery, tinkering, and engineering. But it should end with the proof.
Innovation is what happens afterward. It “is the act of working through all of the obstacles and problems in the path of turning a creative idea into a business,” according to Fry. Indeed, the term innovation is often used as a catchall word to describe the challenges companies must overcome in order to mass-produce a product — like streamlining, shaving costs, managing supply chains, and assembling teams of collaborators. The business side of product development is an art unto itself. But this book, for the most part, will not concern itself with business innovation.
Instead, we will investigate the first steps, the embryos, origins, and private visions that give birth to new things. As I spoke with inventors, they told me stories about hunting the original thought as if it were a rare bird flitting through the forest. The process often involves a craftsmanship of the imagination, in which we carry out experiments in our fantasies. “When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. I change the construction, make improvements and operate the device in my mind,” the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla wrote. He was describing a process of mental iteration that we all possess — but that too few of us have truly learned how to use.
This book will focus on what might be called “micro-creativity,” that is, invention at the level of the individual. I’m not trying to advance what is known as the Great Man Theory, in which lone heroes are given sole credit for a breakthrough. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that you are one person, and so am I. While it’s interesting to find out which city generates the most patents per capita (Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, is often at the top of the list), that doesn’t give us much insight into what we need to do, as individuals, to become more imaginative; after all, if you buy a plane ticket to Eindhoven and stroll along its charming canal, you likely won’t be struck with genius.4
It’s crucial that we find out what people actually do as they invent things. What are they doing in their minds and with their hands? We need a new field of study — call it Inventology — to answer that question. If you aspire to run a marathon, you can read thousands of books on training for peak performance; you can pore over studies of the benefits of carb loading and wind sprints. But for those who aspire to invent, it’s much harder to find this kind of actionable research.
And yet, as I dug through historical archives, I encountered a few pioneers who did try to discover a formula for invention. For instance, a Soviet science-fiction writer named Genrich Altshuller pored over thousands of patents in the mid-twentieth century, mining that trove for clues about the human imagination. He developed methods for predicting future technologies and for solving mechanical riddles. He also founded a school for inventors in Azerbaijan the likes of which has never existed before or since. Later in this book, we will spend time with Altshuller and some of the other visionaries who tried to launch a new science of invention.
We will also meet the modern-day researchers whose work can help us understand the inventive mind. They’re economists, psychologists, inventors, neuroscientists, engineers, crowdfunders, and ethnographers. Because these investigators are isolated from each other in different fields, the puzzle pieces of Inventology are widely scattered. This book will put those pieces together. It is based on more than a hundred interviews with inventors and explorers in many fields, as well as dozens of studies and research papers.
I have set out to answer four questions:
1. Who really invents?
2. How do they do it?
3. What can the rest of us learn from the data on successful invention?
4. How will twenty-first-century invention be transformed by crowdfunding, 3-D printing, big data, and other new technologies?
A bit more about that final question. We are at a moment in history when the barriers to invention are falling as never before. On your laptop, you can draw upon R&D tools far beyond anything that a Bell Labs engineer would have had in his workshop in the 1960s. You can raise money from a bunch of strangers, and then ask them to give you feedback. You can exchange digital files that encode the shape of an eyeglass lens or the curve of a bike frame. You can communicate directly with factories and operate like a commercial manufacturer. You can use your phone and a credit card to hire lab researchers who will test a drug on a genetically engineered mouse according to your directions. You can consult a worldwide library of millions of research papers and exchange ideas with zillions of potential collaborators.
Many of the people I interviewed for this book alerted me to how profoundly their lives had changed because of these new tools. Their personal experiences speak to the revolutionary shift now taking place.
In the 1870s, Thomas Edison built an idea factory where he corralled engineers, mechanics, and chemists and leaned over their shoulders. That centralized, invention-in-one-place method caught fire in the twentieth century, but now it seems to be going the way of the incandescent light bulb. Already many of us are becoming, at least in some small degree, inventors. We can act as small-time funders of products. We can tell corporations about what we want and even collaborate with them on design, entering into a two-way communication about the things that we use. If we hate a product, we can collectively kill it on a site like Amazon, where we band together with other people who point out its shoddy design. And we can form communities to invent everything from sports equipment to body parts.
The tools are changing, and so too is the kind of imagination that we will need to master the new opportunities around us. Ideas are no longer just hovering in the air; they’re also zipping through fiber-optic cable. For this reason, I will focus on inventions and discoveries of the past fifty years, rather than those from earlier eras.
We tend to believe that great ideas arrive like angels, in a flash of light. This assumption has been handed down to us from the ancient Greeks, who regarded creativity as a gift from the Muses; as the ancients saw it, people don’t invent so much as wait for a deity to deliver an illumination. In the Middle Ages, the word inspiration meant that God had breathed the truth straight into a person’s mind. Even today, we talk of problem solving as a passive process of gobsmacking — and we treasure stories about revelations that came easily and took only a moment.
One of those fables concerns August Kekulé, the chemist who dreamed about a snake eating its own tail and woke up to discover the ring-shaped structure of the benzene molecule. But that story, so often repeated as fact, was popularized by a humorous article written in the nineteenth century, and Kekulé’s famous dream was likely the punch line to a joke about scientific posturing.5 Still, even when we know these stories are false, they enchant us.
Perhaps that’s because the true narratives of invention are nuanced and labyrinthine, and they don’t lend themselves to fairy tales. The wizards I interviewed, like Bill English (who worked with Doug Engelbart on the first computer mouse), were eager to instruct me about just how much time it takes to crack a difficult problem — you have to observe, imagine, fantasize, forage, and experiment just to cobble together the idea, never mind the prototype.
They described several different paths toward the breakthrough, some of which had never occurred to me. For instance, an engineer named Martin Cooper, inventor of the hand-held cell phone, told me that his first inklings began in the 1960s with a vision of a science-fiction future. Cooper imagined that one day everyone would be issued a phone number at birth and walk around with communicators in their pockets.
In the 1970s, as smaller batteries and transistors became available, Cooper and his colleagues at Motorola did manage to cobble together a hand-held cell phone. Primitive though it was, the prototype opened up a new set of possibilities when Cooper staged a theatrical stunt on the sidewalk of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan; he paced around, yelling into the gizmo, and nearly collided with a cab, drawing a crowd of amazed New Yorkers who had never before witnessed this kind of behavior. But even after Cooper proved the technology could work, it would take Motorola another decade to commercialize the first handheld cell phone.
What Cooper described to me was the opposite of a eureka situation. He began with a vision of the impossible, and then he deployed his imagination like a movie director or novelist to time-travel into the future. Indeed, many technologies start out like the plot of a science-fiction story. And so that is just one of the routes that inventors take to prove that their “impossible” idea is actually inevitable.
I have divided this book into five parts to reflect various strategies that inventors deploy on the way to success. Each part tells a story about one kind of imagination and how it can be used to overcome challenges and root out hidden opportunities.
Part I delves into problem finding. We will look at how creative people — like Jake Stap — use their frustration as a doorway into the imagination. According to an old saw, necessity is the mother of invention; that’s certainly true, but the adage is annoyingly vague. What kind of necessity works best to help reveal the outlines of a hidden problem? Why do some frustrations lead to a big idea, while most don’t? And can we learn from someone else’s pain?
Of course, not every invention begins when someone recognizes a new problem. Some inventors work backward; they stumble across a surprise — a sound, a flavor, or a clue in the data — and realize that it could be the answer to a well-known problem. In Part II, we will look at discovery and consider the role of serendipity in the creative process. In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to his lab after a vacation and found mold growing in some of his Petri dishes; he might have washed away the mess, but instead he peered at the dishes under a microscope.6 In 1929, Fleming published a paper describing the antibiotic action of the mold, and that inspired others to develop penicillin as a medication. So how do accidents turn into inventions? And is it possible to use new tools — like big data — to supercharge the rate of serendipity?
In Part III, we will examine the strategy of prophecy and futuristic thinking. In one of his novels, Jules Verne sent explorers to the moon in a bullet-shaped capsule, and by doing so, he encouraged millions of other people to dream of exploring space. Through science fiction, we can jolt ourselves into finding new possibilities. This is particularly true in the fields of computing and communications, where the spin of technological improvement is so fast that the future arrives in a matter of months. How can we think ahead of the curve? Are there laws that govern the way that technology evolves? What kind of imagination is required to predict the future?
In Part IV, we’ll delve into the challenge of connecting unusual ideas together. We will meet the people who act as cross-pollinators, buzzing from one domain to another, carrying ideas with them like pollen. Here, we will investigate the mental skills required to bring together two seemingly incompatible ideas. Who are the matchmakers? And how do they unite a problem and a solution that otherwise would not emerge? We’ll also find out how new tools are bringing together unlikely collaborators and ensuring that the best ideas rise to the top.
In Part V, we will explore the challenges of empowerment. It takes enormous courage to claim a problem. When you dare to tackle a big question, you may face ridicule, rejection, and opposition. So how do you grant yourself permission to invent? And how do educators teach children to challenge the status quo and take possession of the designed environment? In this final part of the book, we will contemplate the future of the imagination itself, and the political and social implications of a world in which billions of people have access to sophisticated R&D tools.
IN 1970, BERNARD D. Sadow, a vice president at a luggage company, was schlepping two suitcases through an airport when he noticed a workman pushing a machine on a dolly.1 Inspired, he began to experiment with a rolling suitcase that looked like a large pull toy; eventually he patented a suitcase that sat squarely on rollers, with a flexible strap attached to it. Instead of carrying this suitcase, you pulled it behind you on a “leash.” Sadow’s idea was revolutionary — here was one of the first suitcases designed for airports.
Though it sold well in the 1970s, his suitcase didn’t end up becoming standard equipment for the air traveler. You rarely see pull-toy luggage today. Why not? Sadow’s design was only a half solution. When you pulled too hard, the suitcase would crash into your legs. If you yanked it around a corner, it might lose its balance and flop onto its side.
In the 1980s, a pilot named Robert Plath custom-built his own version of the rolling suitcase in his home workshop. His design was a vast improvement over Sadow’s. Plath put wheels on one edge of the bag so that it could tip on its corner, and he outfitted it with a rigid handle. You could adjust the length of the handle by sliding it up or down, trombone-style, allowing you to find just the right angle so the bag would follow you obediently, without attacking your ankles.2 This was a bag that you could comfortably tote over miles of airport linoleum.
So why was a pilot’s insight so much more fruitful than the executive’s? The answer has something to do with the way the two men experienced the problem. Bernard Sadow, a businessman heading off on vacation, was merely a tourist looking for a better solution. His was a short-term form of necessity. But Plath — who dragged his bags to and fro after every shift, day after day — was motivated to think deeply about the suitcase problem, to tinker in his garage, and to come up with an ingenious design for frequent flyers. By virtue of his job, Plath was already living in the future, when flying would become a commonplace misery.
In the 1990s, the price of airline tickets plummeted. Companies began sending executives around the world, sometimes on three or four flights a week. Planes began to feel like buses — crowded, smelly, and raucous. “Life Sucks and Then You Fly,” as one Wired headline put it, in an article that described tech employees suffering in the middle seats during their coast-to-coast commute. By that time, passengers were hunting for anything that would ease the pain of cramped flights — from Xanax to noise-canceling headphones. And that’s when the rolling suitcase became essential equipment. Plath’s Rollaboard suitcase took off.
Adam Smith, writing in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), observed that there is a special kind of magic in tasks that we repeat over and over again. He described a pin factory where one man straightened the wire, another man cut it, and yet another man sharpened the tip, and so on. In a factory like that, each laborer became an expert in one small task, and his close attention might inspire him to “find out easier and readier methods of performing” his job.
In fact, Smith argued that one of the side benefits of the factory system was the way it turned workmen into inventors. He praised the “pretty machines” that factory laborers devised to ease their drudgery. For instance, he noticed a boy who was supposed to pump a lever in time with a piston. This relentless, grinding task inspired the boy to figure out an ingenious work-around: he tied a string between the lever and a moving part elsewhere on the machine. Now the machine itself pulled the lever for him. After automating his job, the boy skipped off to play with friends.
The economist Eric von Hippel, speaking in 2005, made his own observation about the way repetition can feed the imagination: “I’ve learned personally that you can get a graduate student to do a lot of things, but you can’t get them to do it twenty thousand times in a row, [because] they will start to invent” a way to automate the boring job.3 There seems to be some kind of threshold — some number of hours — after which frustration produces creative insight.
In the 1970s, von Hippel came up with a name for the people who struggle with problems for which no off-the-shelf solution is available: he dubbed them Lead Users. Their job or hobby exposes them to an unusual kind of repetition, tedium, or danger. When bike hobbyists began to spend hours out in the woods riding over boulders and tree stumps, their tires popped, and that inspired them to build what we now call mountain bikes. Surgeons who pioneered new methods of operating on the heart had to design tools in order to perform these feats. And in 1982, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University recognized a new problem with digital communication — the flame war — so he devised the happy-face symbol, or emoticon, to cool tempers online.
Before he joined academia and became a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, von Hippel worked as an engineer at a start-up. And that’s how he discovered the existence of Lead Users. In the 1960s, he became one himself.
Back then, von Hippel needed a tiny fan that would allow him to improve the performance of a fax machine, so he contacted an aerodynamics expert at Princeton and together they designed the fan. With his plans in hand, von Hippel struck a deal with a manufacturing company to produce the device.
Soon, von Hippel received a call from someone at the manufacturer: “It turns out a lot of other people want your fan too,” the company rep told von Hippel. “Can we … produce it for them?”4
Von Hippel said yes. And then one day he picked up an industry journal and noticed an advertisement for his fan. The company had claimed credit for inventing it. You’d think he might have been angry. But instead, he was fascinated. He had just stumbled across a clue — the first inkling of an insight that would change his life, as well as what we know about technological creativity.
In the 1970s, when he switched careers and became an academic researcher, he dedicated himself to a question: Who really dreams up breakthrough ideas? To find out, he came up with a method that bears a startling resemblance to the way that a detective works a cold-case murder — digging deep into files, interviewing witnesses, and wearing down shoe leather to follow clues. In one of his earliest studies, von Hippel picked more than a hundred lab equipment products and then hired researchers to help him discover the backstory of each of the devices. He learned that about 80 percent of the scientific equipment products had begun with someone who needed the tool. For instance, at a Harvard conference in 1964, a lab worker described a method he’d invented to “bake away” the dirt on a microscope using a piece of gold foil; later that year, a manufacturer transformed this concept into a product. Subsequent studies — by von Hippel and others — have shown that the pattern holds true in many other fields.
A company may have “begged, borrowed, stole[n], or bought [its] idea from a person who never becomes famous,” Dr. Nat Sims, the inventor-in-residence at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. Companies then “invest a few hundred million dollars into making [the product] successful and getting over all the hurdles. So it becomes an integral part of their culture — not for any mean or malicious reason — to forget that history” of the product.5 After a few years pass, no one knows how the product came to be — and the true origin story is very hard to uncover. Eventually, we all believe that the product started with the manufacturer.
Of course, only certain kinds of problems are valuable. Ideally, you would want to suffer from a frustration that is rare now (so that no one else knows about it) but that will one day bother lots of people. “Lead Users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others,” von Hippel wrote, and so they “can serve as a need-forecasting laboratory.” And some Lead Users experience a problem so futuristic that the rest of us have trouble even imagining it. Take Martian jet lag, a sleep disorder that bedevils the engineers who work with Mars-based equipment.
Because the Martian day is slightly longer than ours, people who control robots on the Red Planet have to continually shift their schedules, eating breakfast at 3:40 a.m., then 4:20 a.m., then 5:00 a.m. “It feels like you are perpetually flying east 40 minutes every day,” said one scientist, Deborah Bass. “It starts to take its toll.”
To add to the discomfort, each Mars landing mission operates in its own time zone to correspond to the local sunrises and sunsets on the planet. For this reason, Scott Maxwell, an engineer and driver on the Mars Exploration Rover mission, had to consult a spreadsheet and then perform several calculations to figure out when he needed to wake up. In 2012, Maxwell created the MarsClock phone app to help him track the Mars rovers and get to work on time. Writing the app, he told me, “scratched two itches: it gave me a handy Mars-time alarm clock, and it let me share a bit of the fun of the mission with rover fans, something I’m always seeking ways to do.” Thousands of fans did download the app — an artifact from the Mars mission that lived on their phones.
Engineers like Maxwell face all kinds of other problems that don’t affect anyone else right now — like what to do when dust clogs a machine located on another planet. And many of their inventions are one-off solutions that will never spread widely. But imagine what would happen if a company decided to install a vast robot-run mine on Mars; at that point, thousands of us might be complaining about our damned droid with its burned-out wires. And if that future does come, who will have pioneered the solutions to the problem of interplanetary robot control? Most likely, it will be the scientists who first grappled with the problem. In Part III of this book, we will dig deeper into the question of futuristic problems and see why prediction and forecasting are crucial to the inventing process.
But for now, let’s return to the subject at hand — problem finding — and recap what we know so far. The most valuable kind of frustration has three components:
1. It plays out over a long period of time, thus inspiring more and better solutions.
2. It reveals a hidden problem that is difficult to detect.
3. It forecasts a problem that will affect thousands or millions of people in the future.
As it happens, all three kinds of frustration came together in Jack Dorsey.
As a kid in the 1980s, Dorsey loved to listen to the chatter on CB radio and police scanners, and he became fascinated with the way that drivers of fire trucks and ambulances had developed their own lingo; the drivers spoke in short coded blasts, telling each other where they were located and what they were doing.6
By 2000, Dorsey had found a job as a code jockey, writing dispatch software to help route cars and trucks around city streets. He was still passionate about traffic, so much so that he developed a strange desire. If an ambulance could announce its whereabouts and activities, why couldn’t he? Dorsey began to imagine a kind of dispatch software for himself, one that would work something like a police scanner, bleating out his activities as he moved around San Francisco and Oakland.
“I wasn’t considering what everyone else wanted. I was considering what I wanted,” Dorsey later told a reporter.7 So he cobbled together some software just to satisfy this private desire. At the time, Dorsey owned the RIM 850, one of the first phones that could display and send e-mail messages, and he devised a method to send out text-based broadcasts.
One day, in Golden Gate Park, he sent out a dispatch intended to alert friends to his location and what he was doing (watching the bison). The message was met with silence. Few of his friends owned the type of phone that would allow them to receive the broadcast Dorsey had sent out. This was his moment of Martian jet lag; he experienced a problem years ahead of everyone else. And yet, Dorsey felt confident that other people would catch up.
Six years later, now at a company called Odeo, Dorsey explained his concept to his coworkers. By then, the world had caught up with Dorsey, and millions of phones were enabled with the Short Message Service (SMS) protocol, which made it easy to send and receive texts.
Dorsey and his collaborators hacked together their social network in two weeks. In the beginning, Twitter was something like Bernard Sadow’s suitcase. Sadow had recognized the potential of transforming luggage into a vehicle on wheels, but his execution of the concept had been awkward. Likewise, Dorsey and his collaborators at Twitter had given entirely new capabilities to the cell phone — turning it into a twenty-first-century CB radio on which impromptu communities could spring up to report on unfolding events. And yet, the site was awkward to use in its first incarnation; it crashed frequently, and it lacked many of the features that now make it so addictive.8
Earlier in this chapter, we saw that pain and frustration have a cumulative effect on invention — as Adam Smith noted, when people begin repeating the same operations over and over, they learn an enormous amount about how to remove the drudgery and unpleasantness from machines.
The story of Twitter — and many other social platforms — suggests that the hours of frustration do not have to be experienced by a single person. If thousands of people repeat the same unnecessary keystroke, even if they spend only a few seconds a day doing it, one of those users will notice this nano-frustration and will invent a way around it.
So while Twitter’s engineers struggled to put out their fires and keep the site running, a bucket brigade of users were improving the functionality of the site and tailoring it to fit their needs. For instance, in 2006, a user named Robert Andersen added an @ sign to the front of his brother Buzz’s name to indicate that he was addressing a remark directly to Buzz. Other users embraced the idea, because it was so useful. “If you look at all the early tweets, there are no conversations until people started using the @ symbol,” Dorsey himself acknowledged.
As users spent thousands — then millions — of hours on the site, they accumulated lots of insights about its failings and their own frustrations. Those hours of drudgery or exasperation had enormous value. The Twitter citizens began to experiment with their own lingo and thumb-saving shortcuts — not just the @ sign, but also the hashtag and the retweet.9 This suggests a fourth principle connected to necessity and invention: if you want to understand a problem, ask a community.
When lots of people experience the same kind of pain or frustration, they generate an enormous amount of information about unsolved problems. But if that knowledge is scattered across thousands of different people’s minds, how do we gather it together again?
In the chapters that follow, we will investigate how communities of people come together to articulate their own needs and define problems. We will also look at how inventors can work with those communities to extract the most valuable insights from them.
IN THE 1990S, Tim Derk spent a lot of time inside a fur suit and a foam head, prancing around basketball arenas as the Coyote mascot for the San Antonio Spurs. That was back in what might be called the “slingshot era,” a time when team mascots used enormous rubber bands to fling souvenirs into the crowd during games. The slingshots had limited range, and Derk was frustrated because he couldn’t reach the fans at the top of the arena. So he worked for months to find a better way.
“It weighed ninety pounds, including the tanks,” said Derk of the T-shirt cannon he debuted for fans in the 1990s.1 (Derk is hazy on the exact date.) “It was like carrying a TV set on your back. The gun was probably at least four feet long. It used a cast-iron pipe — the kind that goes into the floor underneath your commode,” he told me. Fans adored it, and the T-shirt gun went viral, spreading to arenas around the country.
Derk didn’t care whether he received credit for his “invention”— as he saw it, no one in particular owned the idea. “It wasn’t that one minute it did not exist, and then it did. It just evolved” out of the mascot community, Derk told me. “The Phoenix Gorilla and I were two of the pioneers,” but many of their colleagues also contributed to the stunt. Professional mascots are, as he puts it, a “fur-ternity.” Everyone shares gimmicks; they borrow, riff, and vie to come up with the wackiest spin on any particular idea.
I’m not sure whether Kenn Solomon considers himself to be a member of the fur-ternity, but he also believes in sharing and improvising. Solomon, the mascot for the Denver Nuggets, wears an enormous yellow head to perform as Rocky the Mountain Lion. He too is constantly inventing. “If your hand is a fluffy paw, you can’t run a camera,” he told me. “You can’t pick up a pencil. You don’t have any grip to throw a football or a basketball.” He solved the paw problem by rebuilding his own costume so that he can extend and retract his (human) fingers through small holes in the claws. Now, he signs autographs and can even “pick up babies and hold newborns without being afraid of them slipping.”
Mascots are always trying to solve a problem: How do you project a personality from inside thirty pounds of plush and foam? And that pushes them to think hard about their equipment. “I would never build a mascot costume where you don’t look out of the eyes,” Solomon said with passion in his voice. “Mascots look awkward with the mouth open all the time and having to hold their head back so they can see. You can’t develop a character that way. You’ve got to look out of the eyes.”2
Tim Derk and Kenn Solomon possess knowledge about human movement and costume making that few other people can match. But they don’t presume to own any of this expertise. They operate in a free space where sharing is the norm. Patent lawyers have a term for it: the “negative spaces” are the zones in which people create without seeking to patent their ideas. Agriculture, folk songs, magic tricks, religions, jokes, hairstyles, Wikipedia, languages, and roller-derby noms de guerre — many of the great human endeavors have emerged from the negative spaces. In this common realm, we come together to share our worries and find solutions together, as members of a community.
The Internet itself is a negative space, because it belongs to no one and is continuously revamped by everyone. It affords an entirely new ecosystem — a virtual universe — that nourishes the weeds and wildflowers spawned by millions of minds; it’s like a vast R&D lab where we all share our own experiments and benefit from the work of others. For instance, a friend of mine, who was constructing an elaborate dollhouse for his daughter, discovered hundreds of instructional videos on YouTube dedicated to this one task. After starting his project, he fell down a rabbit hole into the world of doll enthusiasts who have come up with ingenious ways to build tiny mansions.
The negative space is so enormous, and involves so many millions of people, that it’s hard to measure, and even harder to figure out how much value it generates. Eric von Hippel calls it “the dark matter,” because the creative ferment is all around us and yet difficult to quantify. He and his colleagues have pointed out that this inventive activity in the garages and basements — which is then shared on the Internet — probably dwarfs the efforts that companies put into R&D to develop their products.
Organizations like the National Science Foundation track spending on R&D by universities, companies, nonprofits, and state agencies, but there has been little effort to measure the output of makers, hobbyists, and open-source inventors. Hundreds of public hacker-spaces have popped up in the past decade, yet it’s difficult to find a comprehensive list of them all.
However, we do know a bit about the people who tinker because demographers have begun to map out the invisible nation of gearheads. A 2010 survey of British citizens found that 8 percent of the population modify and prototype their own tools and technologies.4 According to a 2013 Time magazine survey of thousands of adults in seventeen countries, one-third of respondents called themselves inventors, suggesting that billions of people take pride in the way they have improved, built, or tweaked the designed environment. This could include creating or modifying products at home, from Ikea furniture hacks to phone apps to go-carts. The dark matter out there appears to be enormous, and it contains a potential mother lode of information about the needs and problems that have not been addressed by off-the-shelf products.
Of course, some people tinker just for the sake of tinkering. But many others do so because they haven’t been able to find a product that satisfies their needs. Dr. Nat Sims, the inventor based at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me that some of his doctor friends maintain their own machine shops; when they notice a problem with a surgical tool, they will often reinvent it or design a new one on their own. They do this because they need equipment that simply doesn’t exist, and it’s easier to make it themselves than to convince a company to manufacture it for them.
Of course, there are many inventions that simply cannot come from home workshops. Some (which we will look at later on in this book) must be developed by institutions with long timelines and deep pockets. The cell phone, the transistor, the laser — these are the kinds of breakthroughs that are discovered in the lab and that cost millions or billions to research and develop. But in the area of applied inventions — simple fixes that satisfy a need — the users often have an advantage over companies and academic labs. They’re the ones who experience the long-term frustration that reveals opportunities for invention. The home inventors step in to fill niches that the professional designers have neglected.
This is spectacularly evident in the world of prosthetics, where a community of volunteers is rising up to create affordable devices for themselves and those in need.
Debra Latour was born with an arm that ends just below the elbow, so when she was a toddler, doctors fitted her with a mechanical arm with pincers in place of a hand.
Back then, in the early 1960s, prosthetic devices were primitive and clunky. As a girl, Latour had to strap herself into a harness that wound around one shoulder and a cable that ran down her arm to control the pincers.5
When she was little, Latour believed some inventor would eventually free her from the awkward harness; surely by the time she’d grown up she would be wearing a space-age device. And indeed, engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other cutting-edge labs have developed bionic arms that mimic the look and feel of flesh; but these devices can be staggeringly expensive — upward of $100,000. Our health insurance system often doesn’t help patients to pay for the high-end devices, according to Latour. And she points out that simple mechanical equipment tends to be more reliable than the high-tech gear.
That’s why in 2005, she was still lashing herself into a harness every morning. “When I wanted to grasp an object, I had to pull forward on my opposite shoulder in order to create tension on the cable that ran down my arm,” she told me. Decades of performing that motion had damaged her body and caused chronic pain.
I asked her why the mechanical prosthetics hadn’t improved over those decades. Why didn’t someone come up with a better solution?
“The thing about people with upper-limb deficiencies is that we are a niche group,” Latour explained. “We’re a very small population.” With so little profit to be made, companies weren’t offering a lot of options.
For Latour, the turning point came when she attended a spiritual retreat. While meditating there, she realized that she couldn’t wait around for someone else to solve her problem. She began imagining ways to improve the harness, and then one night, about two weeks after the retreat, “I woke up with an uneasy feeling,” she said. A vivid image took shape in her mind; in her imagination, she was examining her own back, the pale skin glimmering with portent. As she concentrated on this image, a pushbutton materialized underneath her right shoulder blade. “I realized, ‘Oh, my goodness! I could replace the entire harness with a small plastic patch.’” The next day, she began experimenting with cables and plastic parts. Within three months, she had engineered a device the size of a drink coaster that she called the Anchor. She affixed it next to the skin near her shoulder blade. By flexing a small muscle in her back — and using that muscle almost like the tip of a finger — she could push against the catch on the Anchor; that triggered a cable, which in turn would control the grip of her mechanical hand. She no longer needed to wear a harness. And she was no longer in pain.
Latour offered the device as an option to patients at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she then worked as a clinician; she discovered that it worked well for dozens of people with upper-body differences.6 She donated the intellectual property to Shriners Hospital, and then the hospital granted Latour permission to manufacture and market the Anchor. Now Latour and her husband run a business out of their dining room, assembling the devices and sending them out to people who need them. “We don’t do it for the money,” Latour told me; instead, she is driven by a passion to help other people escape from their harnesses.
When I first met Latour in the summer of 2014, she had driven for hours through a rainstorm to Brown University to speak at Superhero Cyborgs workshop, a weeklong program for kids interested in engineering. Dressed in a crisp white shirt, black pants, and sneakers, with her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, Latour projected the capable air of someone who works with patients. That day, she was wearing her favorite arm — a carbon-fiber tube that ends in a pair of strong pincers. The kids gathered around as she demonstrated the precision of her gripping mechanism. She put one foot up on a chair, untied her shoelace, and retied it; her movements were fast and graceful.
“Wow,” marveled a teenage boy in the group. “That hand might not look human but it really gets the job done.”
“Exactly,” Latour said. “And it’s not just the hand that’s important. You’ve got to power it with your body.”
Here Latour turned around to show the kids the bump beneath her shirt — this was the Anchor device that she’d been using to control the grip of her pincers. “What I’m trying to tell you is that sometimes the simplest ideas are the very best.”7
She was teaching them a lesson in survival. The cost of many upper-body prosthetic devices (like carbon-fiber arms) is still so high that many patients can’t afford them — they can run from $5,000 to $80,000. Parents are faced with heartbreaking dilemmas: Would you spend, say, $7,000 for a hand for your daughter even though she’ll grow out of it in a year or two?
Even in the United States, kids with upper-body differences often have to make do without mechanical hands. That dilemma has inspired a community of children, parents, and craftspeople to come together. There are now thousands of people around the world designing and sharing body parts.
In 2012, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Jon Schull, attended a conference where engineering students talked about how they had designed and built a custom prosthetic device for a patient. “Everyone else felt great about it,” Schull told me — but he began to worry. He remembers asking a question at that meeting: “If there’s one guy who needs that prosthetic device, there are probably another hundred thousand people around the world who have the same problem. Are we doing anything to help them?”8
His colleagues told him, “Actually, no one is dealing with that problem.”