Jef's web files - Design

Design

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 09:59:13 -0400

A place to discuss design philosophy, "form follows function", "creaping featurism", principles of robustness, "elegant" design, and more.

"I said, 'There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.'"

Wed, 03 May 2006 12:07:32 -0400

"A lady said, 'What's your solution?'
I said, 'There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.'
She said, 'The people demand solutions!'
- Thomas Sowell

Ideas Stolen Right From Nature

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 08:54:33 -0500

One day in 1948, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral was cleaning his dog of burrs picked up on a walk when he realized how the hooks of the burrs clung to the fur. His realization led to the invention of Velcro -- and a multimillion-dollar industry.

De Mestral wasn't the first to be inspired by natural selection's engineering solutions. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, drew from nature in his designs for flying machines and ships.

But while biomimetics, as the field is now known, has a long history, until recently Velcro has been the only major commercial success. Now, as technological capability catches up with intellectual inspiration, biomimetics is starting to fulfill its potential.

"At present there is only a 10 percent overlap between biology and technology in terms of the mechanisms used," said Julian Vincent, professor of biomimetics at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. "So I feel that there is huge potential."

Vincent knows better than most. He is director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies and one of the driving forces in the emerging field.

SELF-REGENERATIVE SYSTEMS (SRS)

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 18:10:10 -0400

Network-centric warfare demands robust systems that can respond automatically and dynamically to both accidental and deliberate faults. Adaptation of fault-tolerant computing techniques has made computing and information systems intrusion-tolerant and much more survivable during cyber attacks, but even with these advancements, a system will inevitably exhaust all resources in the face of a sustained attack by a determined cyber adversary. Computing systems and information systems also have a tendency to become more fragile and susceptible to accidental faults and errors over time if manually applied maintenance or refresh routines are not administered regularly. The Self-Regenerative Systems (SRS) program seeks to address these deficiencies by creating a new generation of security and survivability technologies. These "fourth-generation" technologies will bring attributes of human cognition to bear on the problem of reconstituting systems that suffer the accumulated effects of imperfect software, human error, and accidental hardware faults, or the effects of a successful cyber attack. The overarching goals of the SRS program are to implement systems that always provide critical functionality and show a positive trend in reliability, actually exceeding initial operating capability and approaching a theoretical optimal performance level over long time intervals. Desired capabilities include self-optimization, self-diagnosis, and self-healing; it will be important for systems to support self-awareness and reflection in order to achieve these capabilities.

"Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union"

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 14:47:33 -0500

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union"
-Frank Lloyd Wright

"...if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 20:03:38 -0500

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- Buckminster Fuller

"Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other."

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 00:25:31 -0500

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other." - Frank Lloyd Wright

TED Conference

Mon, 16 Jun 2003 21:16:50 -0400

TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind. Several influential members of the burgeoning 'digerati' community were also there, including Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand.

Intel talks up lip-reading software

Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:28:51 -0400

Intel has released software that lets computers read lips, a step forward that could lead to better voice recognition applications.

Intertwingularity

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 13:02:53 -0500

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
- Ted Nelson

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 14:12:52 -0500

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.
- Bernoulli

...make the thing you want to change obsolete.

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 14:05:07 -0500

It is impossible to make significant change by force.
The only way to make significant change is to make the thing you want to change obsolete.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

The world needs uninhibited thinkers

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:11:17 -0400

The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations;
it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true.
-Arthur C. Clarke

When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail.

Sat, 07 Sep 2002 11:19:15 -0400

When all you have is a hammer... everything looks like a nail.
- Unknown

Frank Lloyd Wright

Fri, 23 Aug 2002 21:51:14 -0400