First Post - What's it About?

The rationale for this blog is very simple.  I'm often coming up with ideas for new products or refinements of old ones, but I'm not an industrial designer and I don't have a great deal of time, patience, or money to develop, refine and commercialise these ideas. But I would still like these ideas to be 'out there' and helping to contribute to the creation of better products in the real world.

 

When I was a boy, I would love to invent new machines and devices, and I spent seemingly hundreds of hours drawing plans for new inventions. Often these were fairly crude doodles, but sometimes these were more elaborate drawings and plans, and occasionally these "inventions" were really pretty advanced for a young boy. For example, when I was about 11 or so, around 1977, I drew up designs for the carriages, tracks and points for a maglev train system, at a time before I had ever read about magnetic levitation train technology. Again, around this time, I "invented" a means of aerial navigation, relying on radar scanning of the underlying topography and matching those scans with computerised countour maps. This technology, I later discovered, was deployed by the USAF in its nuclear cruise missiles. (Incidentally, one drawback of the technology, which has been superseded by GPS, is its unreliability in deserts and snowfields conditions. )

There will basically be two categories of idea forward on this blog: 

• Firstly, "half baked" ideas for new products or new software. As almost everyone knows, there is no copyright in an idea, so any reader is free to take this idea and try to refine, operationalise and commercialise it. It would be great if those readers would, via the comments section or by becoming contributors to this blog, keep their refinements to the basic idea open source and in the public domain. However, at some point the investment made by a reader in refining an idea into a product may well require secrecy in order to maintain enough novelty to ground a patent application. To that extent, there is no intention to try to enforce openness on readers.  

• Secondly, actual designs for inventions, possibly to seek comments and refinement from readers. If any readers wish to contribute to or commercialise these drawings, I would be very interested in entering into discussions with them, via the comments section or directly. Once again, the idea is to have my ideas put into practice "out there" in the real world. 

Well, enough preliminaries. What ideas do I have have up my sleeve? Read my second post to find out.