Dot Earth Blog: Designing Outside the Box

When I stumbled on the grainy video clip above in my laptop this morning, I found myself reflecting on the wonderful work of Douglas Martin, a designer of ocean-going rowing shells whose forays into violin design and construction exemplify the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that I would love to see flourish in other arenas in the next few decades.

I wrote about him for Science Times in 2006 in ?String Theory: New Approaches to Instrument Design.? I?ve posted two other clips of him playing his fiddles on YouTube ? here and here. Many of Martin?s prototypes ? built of balsa wood ? are literally out of the box, in that he puts the structural ribs on the outside of the fiddle body to ease his ability to make adjustments.

This passage from my article conveys how his purposeful rejection of orthodoxy was at least partly learned (and thus illustrates the potential to foster an enthusiasm for ?breaking things on the path to breakthroughs? in our classrooms):

In art school in the 1960s, a professor once tossed one of Mr. Martin?s sketches on the floor and scuffed it up, urging him to abandon caution, and he clearly absorbed that notion.

When a violinist tried an instrument at a recent workshop and one of its blunt shoulders got in the way of his wrist, Mr. Martin summarily sawed off the corner and sealed the opening with a scrap.

I?d like to spend part of this year finding and drawing attention to people who are the Douglas Martin equivalents trying to develop ways to bring illumination and cleaner, cheap sources of cooking energy to the billions who lack these core assets; devising scaleable means of providing potable water and sanitation (not easy) in poor places; closing the huge ?yield gap? between African farmers and there counterparts in many other regions; boosting environmental literacy and engagement with science?

Who?s out there?

7:30 p.m. | Coda |
This is tangentially related but well worth adding. My wife directed me to an excerpt from a forthcoming documentary, Landfill Harmonic, about a youth orchestra in Paraguay playing instruments built mainly from trash:

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/designing-outside-the-box/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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