Theory Chapter 2 The Innovation Continuum
Chapter. 2 The Innovation Continuum
The Innovation Continuum is the basis for all efforts to rationalise material creativity into a scientific platform for future design. As you travel back along the continuum you drill down into the fundamental basis of all intelligent design – the laws of nature. This simplicity taken from natural events and interpreted into scientific laws, is however not the panacea it would first seem. The laws are so abstract when compared to day to day needs that it really would take the intellectual leap of a genius to bridge the gap.
The difficulty in innovation is twofold. The number of possibilities for combining laws that run a universe, with the demand vagaries of six billion people, is statistically overwhelming. Secondly, generating successful product designs from thin air with no design patterns, is the reason 250,000 years of pre history just resulted in a bow and arrow, a comb and some hopeless wall paintings.
Patterns
Pattern forming is also at work when engineers design complex machines. There are only a very small number of basic machines—levers, wheels, screws, cogs and so forth—from which every mechanical device is constructed. Technological invention is the process of forming new patterns with simpler components by combining elements and operations in novel patterns.
Robert Root-Bernstein and Michele Root-Bernstein
All innovations are patterns.
This is the underlying principle behind the innovation continuum. The innovation continuum is the realisation of centuries of pattern forming.
Theories, concepts, effects, principles and products, all form links between the patterns of physical laws and the patterns of human need. Physical and natural laws (e.g. gravity), give rise to phenomena (e.g. weight), that enable humans to make reproducible patterns for innovation (e.g. the principle of balance or design of a crane).
The continuum depicts the full reach of innovation from the abstract to the particular. This timeline can be viewed in many ways: -
The next section takes us on to investigate these links between patterns.
posted by Waldo Hitcher @ 4:01 AM
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