ABSURD OR GENIUS?

In psychology it is called visualization and it is used as a simple performance-enhancing technique. You visualize yourself successfully completing a difficult task before you do it.

For example, you're scared silly of speaking in front of large crowds, so for days before delivering the important speech, in your mind you visualize the crowd in front of you as friendly and receptive, and you see yourself as relaxed and confident on stage.

Athletes in various sports use this technique. The New York Giants' receiver David Tyree, for instance, surely visualized dozens of times making a difficult catch. In last month's Super Bowl he made an absurdly improbable circus grab that led New York to win the game.

A similar practice in engineering is finding the absurdly ideal solution. When faced with a difficult task, you visualize solutions to the problem with no regard to how absurd or improbable they may be. What this technique is supposed to do is open up all of the possible avenues to solving the problem. As the theory goes, if there are no realistic boundaries to finding the solution, a designer won't feel restricted and can look at all the options. So, looking at the absurd solutions often leads to finding a realistic one.

About a year ago, I invited Rick Chin, a mechanical engineer at the software company SolidWorks, to run a design workshop at ASME's Think Tank Summit in Toronto. Before the meeting, Chin spoke with me about his topic-the absurdly ideal-and though I wanted to be polite, for the life of me I couldn't visualize what he was talking about. Then he told me the story of Steve Gass.

In a moment of either madness or genius, Gass, who manufactures saws, visualized the most absurd concept: Developing a saw that cuts wood but would not cut off the user's finger if the blade came in accidental contact with it. Common sense would tell us this cannot be realized, but Gass found a way to develop a revolutionary safety system that stops and retracts the blade of a 10-inch cabinet saw within 5 milliseconds upon contact with skin. If you don't believe me, see the video at www.sawstop.com.

Then Chin and I talked about Paul Kateman, the founder of MooBella Inc. Kateman had the absurd notion of creating an ice cream vending machine that would make a fresh scoop of ice cream to order, from non-refrigerated ingredients, in 45 seconds. Impossible, you say? Visit www.moobella.com and see the reality of Kateman's absurdly ideal concept.

(To learn more about the notion of the absurdly ideal solution, you can view Rick Chin's presentation by visiting www.memagazine.org and following the Think Tank Summit video links to Workshop 1, under Topic 3: Human Factors Engineering.)

There are many lessons to glean from the notions of visualization, and the absurdly ideal. One is the importance of successfully managing what is unpredictable. And this ranges from design elements to crisis management. "Managing the Unpredictable," in fact, is the title of one of the Engineering Management articles in this issue. The author, ASME Fellow Robert Bea, warns of today's relentless focus on productivity and the risk managers face in deviating from safe operating procedures in order to do too much with too little in the effort to become better, faster, and cheaper.

Visualizing and then manufacturing an effective absurdly ideal design is to be lauded, as long as someone allows for the unpredictable and carefully evaluates the serious consequences of failure.

—John G. Falcioni, Editor-in-Chief
He can be reached by e-mail at falcionij@asme.org