This week we took a tour of C.R.E.A.T.E. Lab which is housed on Carnegie Mellon’s Campus. They are an interesting group of inventors who are pursuing social good through the advancement of technology. Their focus is on making technology available and transparent seems to permeate throughout their innovation, and creation. I say that they are inventors only because they have no drive to commercialize their products. They leave that to outside partnerships. I think that this is the real differentiator between an inventor and an entrepreneur. An inventor is taken by the solution, and an entrepreneur is obsessed with its adoption. It takes both. A good entrepreneur is part inventor (or brings one onto his team) and a successful inventor, pairs with an entrepreneur or two (as they generally have the ability to further fund the inventing process.)
 |
|
|
I feel that I should provide my motivation for taking this class as it will undoubtedly provide valuable context for my insights and observations. I have been an inventor plagued by the lack of support for bicycle commuters (or transportation cyclists, as I like to call them). Specifically there is a lack of integrated bicycle accessories available in the marketplace geared towards people who use their bike to get around and get things done. Specifically my focus has been on bicycle lighting, and bicycle storage capacity. While there are solutions available, they are awkward and plagued by numerous shortcomings that seem to stem from a lack of consideration more than anything else. I should also mention that I am the worst kind of inventor. I am a designer. I sit around and dream up things on paper, and never sit down and try to put them together. So a year ago I applied to school at carnegie mellon to take my worst kind of inventor tendencies and become an entrepreneur.
So now I am working with my roommate on creating a line of classically styled, innovatively functional bicycle bags that are equally at home on and off of a bicycle. Our core value is to provide products that wear in, not wear out, are repairable, and upgradeable. We want to change the way that people approach product obsolescence and recognize that that is a deeply ingrained social behavior.
I noticed two striking things that apply to my social venture (and social is a stretch here. Perhaps, socially considerate venture would be more appropriate.) First, CREATE Lab is dedicated to making technology transparent. They want the layman to be able to figure out how it works by looking at it. This leads them to make products that have visually revealing mechanisms and connections. This relates directly to our mission in that visually revealing “technology” (we don’t plan to use anything that hasn’t been around for 100+ years) lends itself to understanding. Understanding empowers repair. If we want to make a repairable bag, we will have to make a straightforward bag.
Secondly, CREATE Lab only invents using off the shelf parts. what struck me mostcwas the breadth of solutions they have been able to assemble using things that you can generally pick up at your local (circa 1990s) radio shack (unfortunately radio shack seems to abandoning its tinkerer roots, but perhaps product opacity is to blame) I was amazed how innovative their products were and how basic the parts. For example gigapan uses a point and shoot camera that they have borrowed from your mom. (probably the one she used before she had an iphone). This also relates to repairability in that available parts empower the availability of repair. More importantly for me though, this empowers the prototype. I don’t need to wait around for manufacturing to prototype something for me when all of the parts are available to me. I can get started today (or tomorrow, or friday, because the weeks are pretty busy)
So yeah, Class is going really well. I look forward to diving into this process and seeing what comes of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment