Design lessons from the Nalgene bottle

Image courtesy dren88 via flickr (CC BY-SA)

Image courtesy dren88 via flickr (CC BY-SA)

Consider the Nalgene. Anyone who has done even a modest amount of camping will be familiar with these colorful bottles. They are ubiquitous on college and university campuses. You will find them in people’s offices, in people’s homes. In short, they are everywhere. This popularity can be ascribed to a number of features such as their durability,[1] their wide mouths, or the way they don’t affect the taste of their contents.

But the Nalgene originally had a much more narrow focus. It was a laboratory container, one of many developed and sold by the Nalge Company of Rochester, New York. Continue reading

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Design lessons from the badminton birdie

Image by Rebecca Partington via flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Image by Rebecca Partington via flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

One may not naturally associate badminton birdies with space flight, but Burt Rutan saw a connection. A shuttlecock inspired his solution to a significant engineering problem.

The Ansari X-Prize was created in 1996 to spur the development of private space travel. Ten million dollars was offered to the first team capable of designing a re-usable system that could take three people 100 km above the Earth, then return them safely to the ground, and do so twice within a two week period. Rutan’s company Scaled Composites, in collaboration with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, developed a vehicle called SpaceShipOne which won the X-Prize in October 2004. Continue reading

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