Some friends recently pointed me to slashdot article about a challenge on Engineering for Change.

https://www.engineeringforchange.org/workspace/view/22/1#tabs=/workspace/activities/22/1.

I was delighted to find E4C, as it is very similar to what I want to do with the organization I am trying to start, Public Invention for All Mankind (PIFAM). I have now joined E4C. Following Buckminster Fuller's dictum of non-competition, I would certainly prefer my energy to strengthen E4C than to run PIFAM just for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.

However, after some time reading on the site, I think it may be too soon to assert that PIFAM is completely irrelevant. The recent solar cooker idea that I proposed demonstrates some differences with E4C. Firstly, that particularidea, of placing a cooker in a public park in Austin, Texas, doesn't really help anyone in the third world, or even the part of the third world that we have here in the back-alleys of America. Secondly, I don't want to design for a low-cost solution, I want to design for an effective solution. Although I applaud E4C's design principles, there is room for projects that don't follow them. If we can successfully construct the public park solar cooker, we will not have achieved the benefit that E4C aims for of changing the whole world, but surely we will have made the world a better place. As Buckminster Fuller said, “Think Globally, Act Locally.”

I want to be perfectly clear that I applaud the challenge that was proposed and all the attempted solutions. Good work, engineers! However, I'd like to express some critical thoughts---but a critique rather than a criticism.

The challenge was carefully crafted to make cooking work for the people in India, without asking them to change their habits. This is great. Often I find myself playing what I call the “'Fonly” game. 'Fonly those people in India would learn to cook in the middle of the day! 'Fonly Americans would start riding their bikes to work! 'Fonly people would invest the 100 hours it takes to learn Esperanto! There are worse games in the world---cockfighting comes to mind---but the 'Fonly game doesn't lead anywhere.

However, I just don't believe this particular challenge is really possible. (I've looked over about half the 10 papers that were selected as solutions to the challenge.) I think, and many of the papers point out, that sensible heat is just too hard to store for a long time for one to be able to collect heat energy at noon and then cook in the morning with it. Some of the papers use either a battery or, somewhat exotically, molten salt, to store energy. But this seems to be counter-productive to me. If I am going to pay the price of converting sunlight to electricity (by which I mean both the cost of the photovoltaic arrays and the fact that only 10% of the energy will be converted), then I have simply created an electrified village. The idea of using a phase change material for storing heat could work---but the particular design seems so complex that again it would be easier to just electrify the village, or put the same resources into something else.

I have read some of these papers, particularly the one for University of Iowa. I would like to suggest a different approach, although I don't want to take anything away from those students. I wish I could have been on their team. They were constrained by the fact that they were working within a semester. However, reading their paper, I think they did too much design, and not enough building. Since I wasn't there, I can't really be sure what they did or why they chose to do it, but I'd like to describe the approach that I would take---and will take, on my own solar cooker project, if I can get anyone to join me. A lot of this design methodology I owe to Kent Beck and the other creators of the Agile software design methodology, which I personally believe can be applied to physical inventions as well.

• Nobody is likely to change the world in one semester. We have have to think in terms of multi-year projects.
• You go fast by taking small steps as rapidly as you can. No “Big Design Up Front”. If we are honest, none of us are likely to succeed in a challenge like this based on a single design. If you are skeptical of this, read the history of the Wright brothers and note all the baby steps they took before the Wright Flyer flew on its own power. It is an inspiring testament not to brilliance, but to persistence.
• You cycle from theory to test to theory to test as quickly as you can. The Iowa team does not appear to have done this---their paper makes no mention of intermediate results. For that matter, it makes no mention of final results either. I suspect their device simply doesn't even come close to satisfying the challenge---I hope I am proved wrong by them soon.
• You don't invest in building a giant collector when you can test a design be building a tiny collector.
• In the case of the system, they had independently tested systems, and they modeled them theoretically, but made no mention of an attempt to test them. For example, they do not mention testing there heat-storage system independently of a the solar collector. But surely this could have been done by just putting a heater inside the system, raising the temperature to an expected level, and seeing how hot it was hours later.

What does this mean for Project Idea #5, the Public Park solar cooker? Here is what I want to do. (Please, somebody, join me!)

• I will build a miniature model of the Compound parabolic collector with cardboard and aluminum foil. We will test the ability of this to collect light by direct measurement of both light and heat at the exit pupil. If we can't build a tiny CPC that will get an insulated box up to 500 degrees (F), then we should abandon the project. First you melt chocolate. Then you melt cheese. Then you toast bread. Then you cook an egg. If we can't make a little thing that will cook a thimble full of egg-white, we have no business building a big collector.
• If we can past that test, we can build a big collector out of sheet aluminum and rivets and test that.
• If that seems to work well, we will first build a properly scaled non-functional insulated box with a glass window and see that we can make it hot enough. If we can't do that, we need not waste time designing a convenient cooking surface.
• If we get past those steps, including an evaluation of how hard or easy it is to manage aiming it at the sun, we can design the insulated cooking chamber in miniature. If that seems to function, we can build a life-size model.
• We can then build the mounting post, spindles and counter-weights needed to make it truly function at a convenient cooking height.
• Then we get other people to test it and carefully note the problems and successes they have. We make improvements based on this information.
• We then test it in a real-world setting. This means we fill it up with pigeon crap and see how that affects it. We drop leaves in it and see if there is a danger of spontaneous ignition. We figure out if there is any way someone could be blinded by it or burned by it.

I'm forced to write this in a linear fashion---but it isn't really a linear approach. It's more a loop, or a helix: one step on the drawing boards, one step in a real world test, and repeat. Hopefully real progress is constantly being made, but APPARENT progress comes in fits and starts as you complete a test.

Most importantly, we do this PUBLICLY. That is why I call this “public invention”. That means that we post copiously, richly, voluminously. That means we publish our failures. We publish every step along the way---even when this exposes us to embarrassment and the possibility of ridicule.

As of right now, this blog has a tiny number of readers---three, on a good day. But I am trying to put the energy into these posts as if was widely-read, in hopes that content will eventually lead to readers. Please, if you have a related blog or some other venue, help me publicize this blog.

However, I soon hope to begin trying to recruit people here in Austin to help me directly---I don't intend this blog to be my only approach to getting PIFAM started---but it, and other web-related materials, will remain very important.