ORGANIZATION SPOTLIGHT
Turning a Child into an Engineer in
30 SECONDS
Kristjan Järvan and Eerik Kivistik
Conveying complex concepts is difficult, it takes effort. Building abstractions on top of the ones built
before us, standing on the shoulders of giants. How else would you go about explaining a domain
specific problem to people outside it, if not by abstraction or analogy? Elon Musk put it like this: “Any
product that needs a manual to work is broken”. And he is right, in that simplicity is the prerequisite for
wide adoption.
As the pace of technological advancement increases, so does the complexity for the would-be user.
That is the result of simplified examples and analogies lagging behind the technological progress. Since
everyone working on the fringes of science are well versed in their fields, there is no drive to simplify, to
draw parallels. Not until there is wide commercial support and applicability. The rapid developments in
the 3D industry show as much: cumbersome tools, poor support, multiple competing standards and
guides that span hundreds of pages.
So why are we telling you all of this? To answer that we need to take a look at how iterative
improvement works. We take a working product, we modify it and we repeat. This process is good for
refining something. It is not however suitable, for introducing an idea or a concept from the fringes to
STEAMed Magazine
42
April 2016 Edition