The best inventions spring from necessity, not technology. Seymourpowell's co-founder Richard Seymour explains...

1. The
Violence
of the New
The best inventions spring
from necessity, not technology
By Richard Seymour
ExplodingLightbulb-JamesEdwardMcDonough

2. The best inventions
spring from necessity,
not technology
My dad was an electronics engineer during
the second World War and his specialisation
was radio. He told me once that he went
into the conflict believing that he knew pretty
much all there was to know about radio: the
maths, the science, the theory, and much
of the practice. However, when he came
back in 1945 the science had expanded so
dramatically that he felt he only knew about
a tenth of what he needed to know. He went
further by suggesting that NOBODY knew all
of it any more. Now, that wouldn’t necessarily
impact on his imagination of what might be
possible, but it certainly held him back when
he needed to know how to do it. He often
claimed that his biggest single contribution to
the development of practical electronics was
his sand-excluding technology for electrical
relays…stretching a condom over them.
In that solution, we have an interesting
analogue to our present condition. It’s the
same analogue that allowed the ground
station staff during the Apollo 13 mission
to work out how to make a carbon dioxide
scrubber out of the bits they had on board
the stricken spacecraft. The term ‘necessity
By Richard Seymour
Funny thing, the future. We’re sort of scared by it.
We’re worried about what to do about it.
And it’s not surprising really. We’re at a very
interesting point in history right now. It’s so
interesting and dramatic that we may only
be able to appreciate its importance ten or
20 years from now. For perhaps only the
third time in 600 years, what we can do
technologically is stretching miles ahead of
our ability to imagine what to do with it. This
is having a profound effect on how things
change, and the rate at which they do.
Effectively, the future proceeds at the rate
at which we can assimilate it.
SLOW-MO EXPLOSIONS
In many cases we no longer have to say, ‘If
only we had the technology to do this,’ because
we already do. We have to say, ‘What is the
real need here? And, of a thousand ways of
achieving it, which shall we choose?’
Think of this as a slow-mo explosion. Bits fly
out in all directions, and keeping track of all
the bits gets harder and harder the further they
diverge. So it becomes harder and harder to
put individual streams of thought together, and
to lace the individual solutions and knowledge
together to exploit the New.
© Seymour Powell Limited, 2013. All rights reserved.

3. © Seymour Powell Limited, 2013. All rights reserved.
but it’s a mistake to believe that this is where
imagination comes from in the human brain.
Engineering expert Robert B. Johnson once
said: ‘The world is run by those who show
up.’ In this case, we have to stop being so
lazy about the future and buckle up for its
great challenges.
Someone once asked how to get the best
performance out of me. My reply was:
‘Say to me, “I know that this is impossible
but wouldn’t it be great if…”.’ Try it.
If we design for now, then the future will
look like now. It’s time to stand in the future
and drag the present towards us, whilst not
forgetting that the tools we need to do it
probably already exist.
Richard Seymour is co-founder and
Design Director at Seymourpowell
www.seymourpowell.com
sort of ‘bloke in a shed’ approach that we in
the UK seem to be so good at (although he
wasn’t a Brit and much of the thinking came
out of the US Strategic Defense Initiative).
So here we see where the future is actually
forming. Not necessarily in labs and
innovation studios, but amongst the hackers
and techno-nerds that haunt corners of
Kickstarter.
Inventors, that name we’d almost forgotten in
our haste to adopt marketing buzzwords, are
on the rise again. Inventors – people who
spot needs and then get out the toilet rolls
and sticky-backed plastic to nail the theory.
PRAGMATISTS. BROAD-BANDWIDTH
THINKERS. TINKERERS. CAN DO-ISTS.
The web provides us with a fantastic, never-
before-experienced-since-the-beginning-of-
mankind resource to connect our thinking,
is the mother of invention’ has never been
so appropriate as it is now. Stretch our
imagination and it’s suddenly amazing what
we can actually do, sometimes with quite
modest technological means.
HACKING THE FUTURE
The problems we need to solve here in the
21st century are huge, so we need to choose
our fights carefully and be very expansive in
our search for solutions. One of my favourites
is the guy who worked out that you could
rip the laser out of a Blu-ray player and rig it
so it would fire, automatically, at the sound
of a mosquito, shooting it down. He worked
out what was really needed and then hacked
his way through other disparate, existing
technologies to find out how to do it. Of
course now, with the rise of 3D printing, he
could whack together the missing structural
bits to make it all work should he choose…a
Image - Wikimedia
Deke Slayton (check jacket) shows the adapter devised to make
use of square Command Module lithium hydroxide canisters to
remove excess carbon dioxide from the Apollo 13 LM cabin.