Confessions of a Recovering Toy Inventor
- I never shared the tools I created
- There is no innovation. We just recycled old ideas.
- Could have given up evil ways sooner and joined IDEO!
- Will go through slides really fast!
So:
lots of stuff created but never shared
design engineering with constraints - making stuff that guarantees a return on investment means no incentive to do anything new (ie, risky)
off-the-shelf prototyping!
tools that people outside the toy industry never see (ie, EM5700 sound chip)
aside: toys don't have power switches because consumers don't remember to turn them on and off
no user-friendly tools for designers - imagine making 2 or 3 prototypes a week
they started to break the tools and needed better software
started to use LabView - very powerful, but very expensive
paradigm is powerful for him, but does not reach larger community - so we're all losing out
conversation
learned about LabView through doing biomedical engineering
two views: graphic programming environments not always useful, but a good tool for doing complex things quickly vs using graphic programming environments to do small things and doing large things with code
phil van allen: not "either or" - lots of options
maybe what we need are interchange formats so that people who work in different modes can translate work between them
Leave a comment