11–20 of 34 posts
On the other hand, I have seen some quite advanced car ideas in literature from as far as the late 1800s.
Think "natural selection" rather than Lamarckian evolution.
This is one of my favorite topics. I like the movie "The Nightmare Before Christmas" because it's all about being trapped in a paradigm. I think photo sharing is trapped in the paradigm of the early adopters (photography enthusiasts), and I write about that here: http://ourdoings.com/2007-12-19 In general, the only way to break a paradigm is to throw it very hard against the wall of reality. For product design that m…
You may benefit from the most widespread example of this analysis because their company, Seymour Powell, inverted the cordless kettle. The initial design worked in one orientation. Copies are omni-directional.
That is a very insightful observation, and it sheds light on the reason why "visions of the future" are always so wrong: they aren't designed for the future. They're designed for the present, purposefully.
That wacky car of the 1950s doesn't represent an automotive engineer's thoughtful attempt to redesign the car. It's not even a real product! It's a marketing gimmick designed to sell the typical car of the 1950s. The idea is that Joe Consumer sees the "Car of the Future", notes that it's covered in chrome, subliminally associates chrome with Progress and Style, and then happily splurges on today's chrome-covered model down at the local Mercury dealer.
Naturally, considering it's raison d'etre, the Gimmick Car looks exactly like the cars that were for sale at the time, only more so.
The lesson to draw here is that most of the "paradigm trap" is a marketing barrier. It turns out to be generally more profitable to sell people a slight variation on what they already like than to show them something totally different and have to prove that it's better. It turns out that the real "vehicle of the future" invented around 1950 was the Land Rover, but that took a long time for people to get used to.
It's entirely not possible. The opinion leaders have to die or retire and new people thinking new thoughts have to come along. Think "natural selection" rather than Lamarckian evolution.
I think the hardest part of breaking out of a paradigm is to realize that you're in one. For example, in physics, the only time physicists ever break out of an existing paradigm en masse is when stuff starts breaking so badly that you realize there must be an erroneous assumption somewhere. (e.g., the Michelson-Morley experiment that proved that there is no aether.)
Perhaps the single most useful insight I've heard thus far. The best part of this observation is that we have many examples that are readily available to illustrate it for us, yet we somehow fall back into thinking that is governed by preconceived notions.
Maybe the more interesting question is:
Why do we default to thinking that is driven by prevailing paradigms?