It’s been a while since I’ve written, sorry about that. It’s been quite hectic lately, but in all the business of day-to-day life I’ve just come across this TEDTalks that I just have to share. It’s exemplifies the entire idea of You Should Know and what true innovation really is. What I find so frustrating about this, is that it’s so painfully simple. I feel like I could’ve come up with that and that’s what most of the world changing innovation and technological developments are, plain simple. So if you have 8 minutes and 25 seconds of spare time in addition to reading this, take a moment to watch the TEDTalks below.
For those that did not feel inclined to what the video, this guy, Anirudh, came up with a way to turn the particulate matter in air pollution into usable ink to write, paint or print with. It’s brilliant, and for those of you that watched this clip, how easy and understandable does he make it sound? It might just be me due to my engineering background but basically air pollution is caused by emissions from factories that release a whole load of particles that are mostly microscopic and practically invisible to the naked eye. Particulate matter is not only bad for our health but also damages the environment as well as damaging materials or products and reducing their life span by corrosion and comes from all sorts of sources like cars and factory outlets.
Funnily enough though, if you think about it, one of the first cars was invented over 100 years ago and somehow no one considered the impact and it took us this long to come up with something that resembles a possible partial solution to one of the world’s greatest challenges. Stick a filter to an exhaust of a car or factory that collects the particles and turn it into ink. Ink that is otherwise produced by burning fossil fuels for combustion and collecting the particulates released in the process. In my opinion it’s brilliant, a genius approach that may not be entirely successful (yet), but I believe that this is the type of innovation and approach that is actually really worth looking into.
You Should Know is about raising awareness for global issues and getting new perspectives on existing problems. It’s about looking at the same problems from a new angle and that’s what I believe these guys have done. To me it’s crazy to think people have been burning fossil fuels to turn the releases into ink while there’s other people that burn fossil fuels to drive a car for years and no one has considered putting these two together. It’s that resembles something people in my master Industrial Ecology call “industrial symbiosis”, but it’s not limited to the industry. Innovation is often emphasised to be about about discovering new technologies and new ways of do things, but what if we try to turn it around and use it to make something we already have better?