Good design is about discovering the semi-obvious

February 3, 2009

Good design, inventing and creation to me is often about the obvious. I don’t mean this is a demeaning or negative way at all. Discovering the obvious, seeing what is in plain sight is a special skill.

Take the bicycle lamp as an example. Traditionally these have come in two varieties: battery powered or dynamo powered. Batteries cost money, are bad for the environment and have to be replaced (often at inconvenient times). The dynamo powered bicycle lights are human powered and so do not have any of the drawback of batteries but they do make the cyclist work harder and go slower (albeit a little bit). How obvious exactly is a wind powered bicycle light? This is an invention that each of us could have come up with.

My favorite example of this is the invention of Velcro. Again, something a lot of people could have done, but only one did.

Funnily enough, one of the main criteria for being able to patent something is that it is non-obvious. In that light, your creation might have to be semi-obvious.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Burgin and Michele Ryan, Creative Commons, Attribution.