The saying, attributed to Aristotle, that "nature abhors a vacuum," is not true. Voids abound in nature, but they are abhorred by most humans, who have an existential problem with the idea of non-existence. Fear of mortality, I think, has something to do with this. Radical innovators, on the other hand, have long used the power of the void create new paradigms in everything from philosophy to politics to consumer products.
A great example of the latter would be the Dyson Air Multiplier, pictured above facing the zen calligraphy. Dyson claims to have improved the efficiency of of air movement 15 times over a tradition fan by simultaneously avoiding the "buffeting" that happens when fan blades "chop" the air and by multiplying airflow through the processes of acceleration, inducement and entrainment. By removing the fan blades—in some sense the mechanical essence of what a fan is—Dyson has been able to use multiple flow systems to radically innovate the performance of the fan's actual essence, that of moving air in a specified direction. (See illustration below.)
I bring this up not because I am a Dyson fanboy. I'm not. I bought an early version of a Dyson "bagless" vacuum cleaner and found it hard to maneuver and over-engineered for my needs. I returned it and got a more traditional Miele instead. In the intervening years the design, and variety of designs, of their vacuums has improved and I might be quite happy to own one today. But although removing the bag improved the suction, many users prefer to have less suction and less mess. The point is that not every radical innovation is an immediate slam dunk. Taking the wheels off cars is radical, but won't necessarily make them go faster.
These thoughts about the relationship between emptiness and innovation came into focus for me at a meeting last week with a truly radical innovator. Richard Lugg is a Maine neighbor of mine who has a company called HyperMach that is working on hyper-sonic jet engines for aviation and aerospace applications. Its first aircraft, the High Supersonic VVIP Business Jet, would carry up to 32 passengers from New York to London in less than an hour at speeds approaching mach 4.5, and is scheduled to fly by 2021 (see image below.)
Aviation and high-energy physics are not among my many specialties, so I will limit my discussion to what is innovative about Lugg's approach and why I think it may be representative of the design processes through which we make radical innovations of many kinds. The kernel of Lugg's idea is strikingly similar to Dyson's epiphany of a fan. The design of jet engines has progressed over the decades, but has been stuck for many years in a plateau where efficiency gains have flattened out to only .5% a year. Compare that to Moore's Law or Zuckerberg's sharing principle and you see the problem. The limiting factor, according to Lugg, is the very core of the mechanism itself, the turbine shaft around which the jet's internal rotors spin.
What HyperMach is working on then, are "shaftless" jet engines capable of increasing fuel efficiency by as much as 100%. And, similar to Dyson, Lugg is proposing to achieve these radical efficiencies by coordinating multiple engine systems (analogous to the acceleration, inducement and entrainment of the Air Multiplier) to create optimal conditions for each stage of flight and to use the excess energy the system produces to create a plasma field to reduce drag and eliminate sonic boom.
I spend most of my time talking to software engineers who are trying to make apps and the web get up to mach 1, not jet planes to mach 4, but I recognized some familiar echoes in Lugg's description of his process. For one, he told me that reaction to his idea within the aviation community has been fairly evenly divided between people who told him it wouldn't work and people who wanted to invest. Many of the tech innovators I talk to describe how their investors often don't get what they are trying to do. The successful ones manage to hold to their vision and find investors who share it, or at least defer to what they don't completely understand.
Another interesting thing about the development of this engine is the role of software in high-end hardware design. The engine exists now as a digital simulation, a million lines of code. One could never afford to build such a project today without being able to test and demonstrate it digitally first. But the same software that runs the simulation will also control the physical engine in flight. The fine-grained control that the command software enables combined with a design that is more electrical than mechanical creates enormous flexibility in how the different systems can be coordinated. What computer aided design and manufacturing have done visibly for architecture in the work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, they can now do for the unseen working of jet engines.
Once it entered my mind, this theme of "shaftlessness" began to appear everywhere. The idea that a technology evolves and stabilizes around a central core is something we are familiar with from the evolution of creatures to the hierarchy of corporations. What we are less familiar with is what happens when these structures approach the end of their ability to improve. Disruptions and revolutions are quick and often violent, but I wonder if structurally what happens in these situations is the spontaneous replacement of an old central structure (the shaft) with a new exoskeleton (the housing of the engine itself) that can contain an energetic process of a higher order than the old structure could metabolize.
An example of how something like this could be happening right now on the web has been the rise of high-performance JavaScript frameworks like node.js and most notably Famo.us. In the case of Famo.us, the innovation has been to bypass the webkit render engine by writing a new, higher-performance engine. The idea that you could render in the browser but not get bottlenecked by webkit is the equivalen of Lugg removing the shaft from the jet engine. I will be reporting from the HTML5 Developers Conference in San Francisco in a few weeks where Famo.us founder Steve Newcomb will be keynoting. I will be curious to see what mach his framework has achieved by then.
The other resonance on the web is the concept of unbundling promoted by App.net founder Dalton Caldwell. In this case, the idea is to replace the "shafts" of data from our multiple accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. with a single App.net "container" for all of our data that can be accessed by apps via APIs that the user controls. “It’s important to question assumptions about why things are the way they are,” he told an audience at SXSW yesterday. Jaron Lanier takes this idea one step further in his new book, Who Owns The Future, where he argues that not only should we all own our own data, but it should all be monetized as well.
What all of these radical visions share is a de-centering—a questioning of the dominent paradigm—the destruction within the creative process. This form of critical thinking should be a built-in part of our approach to innovation but it is often considered fringe and pushed to the periphery. And paradoxically, it is in fact by pushing what was considered central to the edges, to the periphery, that we make room for something new.
BONUS ROUND: Play with your voids. Download the free Dyson Balloon Game iOS app!
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