James L Adams—People and Products

Therapy Via the Hands - Mental health through welding

My need to rescue and restore unloved machinery leaves me with a large pile of cast off old parts.  In addition, I occasionally cannot resist acquiring interesting looking pieces of old metal.  We have a large yard, and my wife is a fanatic gardener, and happily seems to like me to try to keep my pile down by making her goofy yard decorations.  She has been on a hiking trip in Italy for a couple of weeks, and since she is due home tonight , I spent today welding up a bird for her yard as a welcome home present.  It is  big enough to watch after her when she is sitting on our deck and reading.

Here is a photograph of the result.  It is pretty skinny because it had to be over ten feet tall, since the deck is nine feet off of the ground, and it didn’t have much room to stand.  The head was made out of a couple of pieces of sheet metal that once covered the sides of the radiator of an old tractor.  It looks a little like a dog head, but there are, after all, bird dogs.  The neck is a grain auger, the body is a small tank, the wings are sheet metal, the legs and feet are pipe, and the flamboyant tail was someone’s failed attempt to make headers for an automobile engine, which I rearranged for my purpose.  It is shown on the back view to the right.     

The photograph below shows it happily waiting to watch over my wife.  It is not a sculpture.  It is a crude goofy bird for my wife made quickly from discarded metal scraps.

I have been doing a lot of work on my computer recently, in particular trying to write a number of things and sort several years of data on it— throw away what is redundant or no longer needed, and organize the rest.  I cannot express how much more pleasure and sense of accomplishment I got from making a silly bird for my wife, than all of this computer work.  Since I am retired, I don’t know why I just don’t work with my hands all of the time, since after all, much of our several million years of evolution have been spent doing so and it feels very good to use this ability.  I must be trapped by my many years of working in the university and the fact that the  society in which I live places a greater value on facility with the mind than facility with the hands.

In any case, at this moment I am in such a good mood that I think I will build my wife  an ant.  If any of you would like to share this feeling, go buy yourself a welder, if you don’t have one, and learn to use it.   I once had a neighbor whose elderly wife had been a shipboard welder during World War II.  She was a wondrously confident and capable woman, undoubtedly because she was such a good welder, and I was in awe of her because she could stick (arc) weld over her head. She would come over and borrow my welding equipment to show off her skill, and I would jealously admire her ability  —good for both of us.

When I retired, I had an oxy-acetylene gas welding rig, which one should have for heating things even if one does not weld,  and an old arc welder.  At that point I was wondering whether I needed a new pickup for the family, because the one I had was more than well used.  But instead I bought myself a mig (wire) welder, a tig (tungsten inert gas) welder which also does stick welding, and as a pure luxury, a plasma cutter.  Much cheaper than a new pickup, and vastly better for my mental health. Fortunately, a few years later my old pickup  reached the end of its life, so now I have both welding equipment and a new pickup.  Patience pays off.

U.S. Response Speed, the Metric System, and Product Quality

I hear constantly about the rapid change taking place in the U.S., and how our worries about the future will be taken care of by technical advances.  But let me tell you a story about how fast the U.S. moves.

When I was growing up in a small citrus town in Southern California, we heard nothing about the metric system, and hardly anyone I knew had ever been across an ocean.  And since we obviously were the supreme industrial power in the world, as had been demonstrated by World War II, there was certainly no thought of changing our good old system of inches, feet, pounds, and British Thermal Units (B.T.U.s).  Certainly the metric system was out there, and there was some pressure to adopt it in the  U.S., as can be seen in the chronology here.

It wasn’t until I took chemistry and physics in high school that I was introduced to the metric system, and then only fleetingly.  At Caltech, we finally began using it, although only in science courses.  Engineering courses held on to what was then called the “English” system.  There was some discussion about this, since the metric system is more logical, more elegant, and easier to use.  In fact, if you think about it, the English system is very weird.

 When I started working as an engineer and began traveling abroad, I realized that we were in the minority—most of the world seemed to be metric.  And still later, the U.S., or at least those involved in world trade, began to be aware of the cost of using a measuring system that was at odds with so many other people.  I remember that my 1956 Austin Healey, a British car, used Whitworth, metric, and SAE (U.S.) nuts and bolts.  A major inconvenience, which probably did not help sales in the U.S.  Image what people in Europe thought of a car that used only S.A.E. threads.

 But as more and more nations mandated the metric system (including England), we became more aware of the cost of not complying. In a sense we were manufacturing products that did not “fit” much of the rest of the world.   In the 1960’s I was doing some consulting for the Department of Commerce, which was then actively pushing the metric system in the U.S.  If you look at the Chronology again, you will see that a lot was going on at this time.  One of my friends coordinated the 3 year U.S. Metric Study, which produced a 13 volume report measuring the cost of being non-metric, and recommending the U.S. should “go metric” through a national ten year program.  It was accepted by Congress.

 As can be seen in the Chronology, there has been progress since the 1960’s, especially in government agencies and in industries and other businesses that operate globally.  But by the time my children went through school, the English system still was predominantly used in schools, but with quite a bit more attention paid to the metric system. And U.S. citizens were traveling more and becoming aware that we were in the minority.  I remember metric speed limit signs appearing in Arizona and other areas close to metric Mexico.  But metric speed limits are more commonly shown in a secondary role, as in the  photograph above, and we tend to ignore them. There has been a greater push in industry to change from merely converting English dimensions to metric (one inch to 2.54 centimeters), to using more tractable metric dimensions (2.50 centimeters). But undoubtedly, many kids are still growing up in families who rely on the old English system, and learning the metric system as a somewhat unfamiliar second language

 I ate breakfast today with the family of one of my sons, and my grandkids are being introduced to the metric system in the fourth grade, and my son works at Tesla Motors, which is pretty much all metric.  So we are getting there.  But It has taken us well over 100 years, and now we have the honor of being one of only three countries in the world who have not mandated the metric system—the other two are Liberia and Myanmar (and they are using it, although they have not mandated it).  Perhaps we are indeed believers in U.S. exceptionalism (or maybe just slow) when it comes to weights and measures.

 

 

Standardization and Product Qualtiy

I’ve just ordered The New Industrial Revolution, by Peter Marsh, subtitled Consumers, Globalization, and the end of Mass Production, a book that received good reviews in The Economist .  I will report on it when I read it, but I think I can predict its message — increased diversity in products allowing increasing customization is coming.  I do not disagree with this, and in fact am all for it.

But what about standardization.  Does this mean that it will be increasingly difficult to use “other people’s” products?  Will manufacturers agree that certain products should offer the user controls and displays that are standardized across variations of the same product (automobiles, computers, mobile phones, dishwashers)?  Or will we be increasingly annoyed by such things as the nagging small and meaningless differences between Apple and PC desktops?

Industrial products are to make our lives easier, not more difficult.  Our brains remain the same size as options in life increase.  We are beyond feature creep.  And not only do we have to use these products, but are having to continually invest in the care and feeding of them, a task that becomes more difficult as the diversity increases.  Probably a continual trend, but one that should be kept in mind by the designers and manufacturers of products.

  Think of fasteners.  Small items, but different fasteners require different tools.  Fortunately, nuts and bolts seem to cling to hexagonal and square external shapes, with some exceptions such as wingnuts, and five sided ones.  But internally, Wikipedia now lists 32 shapes.  They are shown here.  Each, of course, comes in several sizes.  Does this mean that the well-equipped mechanic (or owner) should have 32 sets of screwdrivers in six or eight sizes each?  Unlikely.  But I work a lot with mechanical things, have several sets of screwdrivers (slotted, Phillips, Torx, etc) and am constantly being caught short, and I am an amateur.  I do not love manufacturers who develop special fasteners, because I cannot help but think that they want me to buy a new product if something goes wrong, or take it to one of their “service” centers to be repaired. 

 And of course we do have to wrestle with the U.S. not having mandated the metric system (we are one of the three countries in the world , the others being Myanmar and Liberia, that have not done so).  We have been trying to do this for many years, but still are caught in the past.  A costly mistake, stemming from our unwillingness to move from our traditional system of measurement (even though it is a terrible one), and our strange tendency to think that even though we are only 1/20^th of the world’s population, everyone should be like us.  More about our attempts to join the world in mandating the metric system in my next post.

 

Creativity, Dogs, and Homework

For some unknown reason, in the 1970’s the Stanford campus blossomed with dogs.  It became “cool” for students to own dogs, and they became somewhat of a plague, especially in areas such as the outdoor eating area at the student union, where they were guaranteed scraps of food.

 I was at that time thinking a lot about creativity, teaching courses in it, and emphasizing it in design courses that I was teaching.  In  particular I was trying to get students to interact more with each other and with me on the early stages of design, so I was asking to see their work perhaps before they thought it was finished enough to show to me, the teacher. 

 On one fateful day, a student claimed to not be able to show me his work, and when I asked why, he explained that he had been working on his project at the union while eating a hamburger, the hamburger had come apart and spilled upon his papers, and a large dog had jumped on the table and eaten his homework.  As he said, “a dog ate my homework”.  I thought this an amazing use of imagination to explain his lack of carrying out the assignment.

 I was then beginning to give large numbers (hundreds) of talks, conduct workshops, and consult to groups of people  from companies and other organizations outside of Stanford, as well as to Stanford alumni, and often told this story, because it always resulted in laughter, and I think made my point.  But then I drifted off to other stories.  And imagine my amazement when “a dog ate my homework” and derivatives appeared all over the media.  I thought of this, because there it was again in this Sunday’s New York Times.  And if you put “a dog ate my homework” into Google Images, you will get lots of pictures.

 This is important whether this phenomenon of dogs eating homework and usually related items originated from the talks I gave or not.  The only reason I think it might have, is that it is such a daffy statement, and I have never seen any context to it.  In that case, I have to believe that of all the things I  have done in my life, the most visibility came to perhaps the least important.  

 If it happened independently, it is yet more evidence that with 7 billion people in the world, weird ideas occur independently, a situation that we tend to downplay in our feverish attempt to heap the awards on whoever is first.  I remember the shock in Silicon Valley, when people had to recognize that Jack Kilby, of Texas Instruments, quietly invented the integrated circuit at the same time as Bob Noyce, who was much more flamboyant and somewhat of a local hero.  In fact, I recently talked to an elder of the Valley that thought that the Nobel committee should make an exception to their rule that the winners of their prize should be alive at the time they receive the award, and posthumously give a Nobel prize to Bob Noyce, since Jack Kilby had won one. 

Spacecraft and Cars

As the publicity says, the Curiosity Rover now on Mars (seen here from a Martian orbiter while descending under its parachute) is the size of a small car, about one ton, roughly comparable to a Mini Cooper.  (2,500 lbs).  But it is vastly more complicated, able to withstand the environment of launch from earth, and the entry and landing environments of Mars, as well as to operate with no maintenance through the three year or so lifetime of the flight (35 million miles) and surface operation.

Granted that although the environment of space used to frighten  designers of spacecraft, it is now seen as fairly benign, since we have learned to control temperatures, orient ourselves, and correct trajectories on route.  But the launch, entry, and landing present formidable problems in temperature control, structural design, communications, propulsion, and other areas to the designers of space craft, and the reliabily requirements are off the chart.  Also, there is intense competition for being able to fly an instrument on such spacecraft, and launch vehicles are limited, so weight is of extreme importance.  The Curiosity includes ten extremely complex scientific experiments in its weight, as well as the ability to move over unknown terrain, generate the necessar power,  and communicate with earth.

When  I worked at JPL, spacecraft were not nearly as complex, and often failed because we were just learning the game.  But even then, we used to wonder about what was with cars.  Why did they weigh 2 tons, when all they had to do was move down roads under human control?  Why all the structure?  It was certainly possible to make sufficiently stiff structure for much less weight  Why did they only last for 200,000 miles or so?  At 25  miles per hour,  that was only 8,000 hours.  The Voyager I. shown at the right , was launched 35 years ago (over 300,000 hours) has now traveled over 11 billion miles and is about to be the first object we have made to leave the solar system entirely.

Admittedly, once the Voyager left we humans, with  our ability to damage things, it has had a pretty easy ride, and electronics seem to be more reliable than mechanical device, but still……

In the Sept 9 2012 issue of the New York Times, there was a review by Lawrence Ulrich of the Chevrolet Spark, a small car designed, engineered, and built in Korea, which will be sold in the U .S. The reviewer heroically tried to be positive about the car, although he could not help calling it such things as a “demented toaster”, and describing it as a “squashed face carnival buggy”. But right after the review was an article entitled “Taking the ‘Cheap’ Out of the Small Car”.  Although the bias toward “big” (read heavy, “luxurious, ”over-powered, and canceling out the feel of the road) still showed, there were indications that car designers are finally closing with the problem of making more efficient and better designed transportation machines.  But it did make me wonder.  Where did we get this idea of and desire for “luxury” as it is defined in automobiles (and often expensive bordellos)?  Why did we decide we didn’t want to hear any noise or feel the road?  Why did we decide that we wanted driving to be as automatic as possible, rather than requiring more involvement of we drivers?  And finally, how did we get caught in our strange expectations about what transportation machines should be?

I am still hanging on to a  1975 Alfa Romeo and a !970 Jaguar E-Type that have been in the family a long time and which I am in the process of restoring.  They are not all that reliable by modern standards.  I certainly don’t drive them between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  And my wife’s Acura beats them as far as handling, speed, and yes, luxury, are concerned.  But  for most of my driving, they will be much more fun.  And as for weight, it has become increasingly critical as fuel becomes more expensive and materials become more scarce (do you really think fuel prices will decrease with our new Frac gas?  Wait until we add enough tax to repair our failing roads—hello European prices).

Indianapolis race cars weigh about 1500 pounds, are capable of well over 200 miles per hour, and seem to allow drivers to survive horrendous crashes.  Can’t we at least make automobiles to go to the grocery store that weigh under a ton and also please Mr Ulrich?

 

 

 

Visual Clarity of Function, Kids, and Us

A bit more about my fondness for restoring old machinery.  I used to teach Product Design at Stanford with a man named Bob McKim.  Whenever someone would say “form follows function” to him, he would say no, the real win is for function to be obvious when looking at a product.  Perhaps a bit more difficult in these days of software, the cloud, and electronic boxes, but worth thinking about.  Perhaps the reason I liked the book Tubes I mentioned in my post of July 3rd is that the author went and found out what the “cloud” looked like—not very ethereal, but much more satisfying than the miraculous “heaven-based” force for good being promoted by computer companies.

  This photograph is a “before picture”.  It shows the majority of the parts for a post drill, a very common tool used to drill holes before the advent of fractional horsepower electric motors.  It had belonged to the grandfather of a handyman who works in the area, and he had found out that I like to rescue old machinery and wanted to know if I wanted to restore it.

The next photograph shows the parts de-rusted, painted, and equipped with a few missing ones and a bit of welding. It is difficult to see in the photos, but the workings of the drill are obvious, and when the crank (or wheel) is turned, the drill spins, and can be set to automatically advance itself with much interesting motion and clicking of gear and ratchet teeth.  Young kids love it, and quickly figure out how it works and how to use it to drill holes. I love it too.  In fact, I sometimes use it to drill holes, despite that fact that I own a modern drill press and several drill motors.  I find it elegant in its simplicity, and satisfying in that I know exactly what every part of it does. I also feel good about rescuing it from the scrap pile.

The last photo shows a larger machine I restored — a 1910 steam tractor— which is even more of a kid magnet. In fact I think it may outdraw most playground equipment, partly because it is more challenging to climb on,  and once again, kids seem to love it and rather rapidly figure out how it works (what does this do? What is this? What makes the wheels turn?  What are these gears for?) 

I believe that there is something innate in us (especially when we are kids) that makes us respond positively to products of industry that we can understand by looking at them, to say nothing of  the fact that if we can understand them, we can and want to fix them when they are ill. It is annoying, but I don't mind turning in a broken computer for "recycling".  But no way would I do that to my bicycle.

Classic Products and Product Quality

My wife brought not only her wonderful self to our marriage, but also a classic Kitchenaid mixer.  They both become even more wonderful as the years pass.  But let’s talk about the mixer here.  This is a photograph of it.  It was originally light green, but at one time she was so in love with her Honda CRX, that I painted the mixer to match, even though it did not go around corners as fast. It is a product that is often called iconic, and after its birth in 1919, it arrived in pretty much its present form in the mid 1950’s.  Its Wikipedia based history is here. It will undoubtedly outlive both my wife and me.

 We both cook, and from time to time I try to perfect bread, so we do quite a bit of heavy-duty mixing.  The mixer never even breathes hard.  The top locks down, and the speed is variable.  No other controls—none needed. The mixing tools skim the bowl inner surface, and everything is easy to clean.  It is heavy enough that it does not move around the counter, the bowl secures to the base with a simple part-turn, its form screams  MIXER, and no instruction book is needed to operate it.  Also it  has never broken in its 50 years of life.

 It is easy to use, reliable and serviceable, beautifully made, elegant, makes one feel like a big-time chef, and does not involve disposable items.  I love it.  It gets high grades on all of the items in my Good Products, Bad Products book.  The present version is definitely relatively expensive compared to the lower mixer prices at Walmart or even Target, but to me well worth the money, since obviously this older model does its duty magnificently and will continue through at least one human lifetime.  Since we haven’t owned a new one for 50 years, I can’t vouch for their quality, but I am hoping Kitchenaid hasn’t succumbed to lowering the quality to reduce their costs.

 Of course, by producing a mixer like this, Kitchenaid gives up the opportunity to produce a cheaper new model with “advanced” features and a shorter lifetime every few years, thereby opening up marketing opportunities and a chance to hook customers into buying new ones more often.  Undoubtedly it would be easy to include a bit of digital memory that held all known recipes—and for all I know someone is doing that.  But come on……….

 I always think hard when I like something that I have grown up with or had a long time, to try make sure that I am not giving up a better option by giving too much credit to sentiment and what I am used to.  But I usually conclude that if products stay around in near to their original form for long enough to be called “classic”, or “iconic”, there is something going on there.  If you are a consumer, it is worth figuring out what it is, and demanding it from industrially produced products,  If  you are a producer, focus on making such products.  They are better for  your brand than all the advertising you can buy.

Hands, the Brain, and Product Quality

I  will be talking about this topic in future posts, but circumstances have caused me to bring it up now.  I have just returned from an escape place I have in the Sacramento Valley, which in a short time provides me with amazing physical and mental therapy.  It consists of a bit of land and a small house (my wife calls it a run down shack), and a swell barn I built on a farm belonging to one of my oldest friends.  It provides me with the opposite of my life at Stanford —few people, little noise, no traffic, open scenery, no internet connection, and no cell service.  I go there and work on projects requiring heavy lifting and sweating, but which result in immediate feedback — primarily rescuing old, abandoned, no longer loved machinery. 

The photograph  shows a Model A John Deere and a Northwest crane (in the background) that I restored.  This is a hobby (addiction)  that is rather common in agricultural areas, but less so in the San Francisco Bay area, especially among university professors.  But even a short burst of such activity makes me feel wonderful, and in the opinion of my wife ever-so much more lovable.

In my opinion, the great medicine of my escape place is the uninterrupted opportunity to work with my hands.  We homo sapiens have spent the vast majority of our evolution working with our hands, which along with the brain that controls them, are nothing short of miraculous.  A book dwelling on this written in 1998 by Frank Taylor is The Hand (subtitle: How It's use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture).  If you haven’t thought deeply about these miraculous devices at the end of your arms, take a look through it. 

I was triggered to touch on the subject in this blog because of an article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing, by Michael Graves, a famous architect and emeritus professor at Princeton.  He grieves about the tendency of his students to use the computer to produce drawings whenever possible, rather than the pencil .  This is often a reaction of designers old enough to have fully established their career before computers and to have acquired great facility with drawing, but there is truth in it.  Computers are a great help to those involved in designing and manufacturing products, but drawing, especially trained free-hand sketching, when combined with the human brain result in tremendous ability to create, communicate, and think through problems, if for no other reason, because sketches appear less final and more open to iteration than the products of the computer.   I am a believer.  The connection between brain and hand is intimate.  Think of doodling, or resorting to a rough sketch when you can’t get an idea across.

 And drawing is a skill that can be developed through practice.  Not everyone will acquire the same level or proficiency, or have as easy a time improving their skill. But everyone can improve.  When I first began teaching at Stanford, I taught a large required freshman course in the engineering school entitled Introduction to Design.  It was about drawing.  Many of the students claimed they could not draw, and disliked the course because it was difficult for them.  But they were thinking of  photographic realism, and the course was about sketching and thinking visually in general.  It was a difficult course to teach, but very rewarding, because to many of these students it was an introduction to a new and extremely powerful way of solving problems. 

 I must admit I was not entirely successful.  At the time I taught it, there was great interest in engineering because of the “space race”. One of the students, David Kennedy, had declared engineering for a major, and fell prey to an assignment I innocently gave, requiring the students to make a freehand sketch of a steam locomotive (they were still around).  He hated the course and in particular that assignment so much that he dropped the course and engineering and changed to history. But  the good news is that he is now acknowledged as one of the top American historians in the world, and won the Pulitzer prize in 2000 for a magnificent book entitled Freedom from Fear.  He is now a very good friend of mine, and occasionally makes me famous by giving me credit for his career (with tongue in cheek) in his public lectures and interviews.  Maybe I was very successful.