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For the
September/October challenge, the problem involved suggesting
where and why the cats-eye road marker invention might evolve in
the future:- |
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Cats-eyes are devices built
into roads that allow drivers to see the road at night by making
use of a reflection from their car headlights. Suggest problems
with the current designs and the directions you expect the
design to evolve in the future.
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Not many people responded to this one and no-one made any suggestions that appeared immediately attractive. As posed, the question was always going to be easiest to answer by comparing the existing design with the trends of evolution.
The best solution we saw from people who went in this direction involved evolution along the rhythm co-ordination trend. Most cats-eye designs are at the first ‘continuous action’ stage of the trend. The trend suggests that such systems will evolve to periodic actions, which should lead to the idea of a cats-eye that flashes. This sounds like a good concept since we know the human eye is more attracted to flashing images than static ones. The trick once we have this concept would involve how to achieve the flashing capability. One of the things we would like to avoid here is complication of the system. It would be very easy to achieve flashing lights by adding an external power source, but this would be highly undesirable as it would eliminate the biggest advantage of the system.
We have found a way to achieve the flashing capability without adding power or complexity. To do this we basically search for an appropriate existing technology on the patent database.
Here is an evolution potential radar plot showing the untapped potential for other TRIZ trends. What this picture shows is that there are a large number of trend jumps that have not been exploited yet. Any number of these jumps could give us significantly improved design opportunities.
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The second question from the
challenge was about how best to market a new cats-eye design.
No-on submitted any solutions to this problem. |
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Our own thoughts would be that the biggest problem to solve here
centre around the new versus retrofit market. Selling to a new
highway project ought to be relatively easy provided the
functional benefits can be demonstrated. Selling to the retrofit
market would be much more difficult as it would present
considerable inconvenience to the organisations responsible for
maintaining the highway. There would have to be both a very good
business case here, quite possibly an offer that shared or took
on the responsibility and inconvenience (i.e. offer the retrofit
as a service as opposed to trying to sell the cats-eye as a
product), and quite possibly exploit known consumer trends. We
know in many parts of the world, for example, that safety and
risk is a big driver. Our product (or service) needs to very
clearly connect itself to this kind of trend. Supporting data to
prove the improvements to road safety would form an essential
part of such an approach.
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©1997-2006,
DL
Mann, all rights
reserved. |
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