Summary of the Sole Writers SIG Meeting

Held December 1, 1997 on How to be More Inventive in Your Work

On December 1, the SIG met to discuss How to be More Inventive in Your Work. Six members of the SIG described fascinating case studies from a superbly written book called Invention by Design by Henri Petroski. Check out these presentations:

Paper clips and Design
Pencil Points and Analysis
Zippers and Development
Aluminum Can and Failure
Facsimile and Networks
Airplanes and Computers

Each presentation included strong and clear messages for the field of technical communication. There is a technical communication corollary for every aspect of the engineering process. Here are some of the principles we discussed:

Incremental improvement - we build on the knowledge, experience, and results of previous works.
There must be a need for your innovations. There's not a lot of success in solutions before their time or of solutions in search of a problem.
Solutions must solve enough defects in a current solution w/o introducing too many new ones. Think how this relates to documents on the internet.
Don't jump to conclusions; strong connection to our discussion at the November meeting about impediments to good decision-making.
Be explicit about your assumptions.
Study and learn what does not work; strong connection to our upcoming January meeting where we discuss Edward Tufte's fascination with magic in "Visual Explanations;" there is also a strong connection to our upcoming meeting on customer surveys (you must ask questions that reveal how things are NOT working).
Evolutionary change versus radical leap
The importance of or business, economic, professional context.
Ergonomics; the importance of knowing your audience.

An Exercise

Max Planck (the physicist) said, "An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning."

Ponder the following questions:

What current innovations in tech communications have attracted opposition?
Are the innovations compatible with previous solutions? or are they mutually exclusive?
What drawbacks do opponents cite about the innovations? Are they insurmountable? Will the drawbacks be relevant to the "growing generation?"
How could the innovations be drawn into the mainstream?

Data

Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing
Henry Petroski
ISBN 0-674-46367-6
Harvard University Press, 1996