Peter Brabazon (Director, Discover Science & Engineering): Thanks very much everybody, thanks very much for travelling in so far particularly today. It’s a great day for us in Discover Science & Engineering, the 14th year of Science Week Ireland, and this is the first in a lecture series this week here at the Science Gallery, which if you haven’t been here before maybe another day you might come in and have a look around - a very interesting place indeed.
Obviously you’re all interested in science and that is why you are here. [Audience laughs] A bit of an open question, sorry about that! I would particularly like to congratulate of course your teachers for bringing you. That is the most important thing isn’t it? You’re very welcome as I say. This is the first of a series of lectures during Science Week. That is, 400 events this week all over Ireland organised by my colleague - I don’t know where she has gone - Cathy Foley, who has a lot of work to do as you can imagine. So let’s make this a particularly good lecture series in that we have got a really interesting person here today, Damini Kumar, who is a really intelligent and clever person.
She is the Director of Product Design in NUI Maynooth. And that goes back I suppose to her winning the UK prize as being the most innovative Young British Female of the Year 2001 - so you can imagine, an important person. She is an engineer, like myself, but she is more qualified than I am to say the least. She has a masters in product design and also has a masters in medical science. So she's a very bright and exciting person as well.
She has also invented a few things but particularly a drip-free tea pot. So there you go, so there are quite a lot of innovations that you can make out there. This is important for this week because it’s all about innovation and creativity. And Damini is the European Union's Representative for Innovation and Creativity because it’s the year of innovation and creativity. So we've got the right person to kick off Science Week Ireland's lecture series here at the Science Gallery. I am going to hand over to her and she will be talking to you for about 40 minutes and then there will be some opportunities for questions and answers. So think up the questions - they don’t all have to be about teapots by the way. Enjoy the rest of the week and can I hand you over to Damini Kumar. [Applause]
Damini Kumar: Thank you. Welcome everybody. Peter has now taken away about 10 of my slides on what I was going to speak about, my background and stuff. But basically today I am here to talk about design, creativity and innovation, how it fits into science, engineering, all the disciplines. And it’s very exciting, the first day of Science Week today. So welcome all. So just to give you a bit of background, obviously Peter said a bit. [Slide: ‘Background’]
There’s me with my funky teapot many years ago. But at school it was my lifelong ambition to become an inventor. I was told that around your age at school that I couldn’t go off and do a degree in inventing. So the nearest thing I could get to it would be mechanical engineering. I studied mechanical engineering. I then went on… I realised that my actual interest was in design, creating new products, new innovations, new inventions. So I went on to do an MSc in product design, very hands-on, very practical. And I will go into that in a bit more detail.
Then I went on…recently in Ireland, I moved to Ireland six years ago and I have been working here in universities and in industry. But I did a Masters in medical subjects. And basically what I did for this MSc is, I was inventing a suit that people could wear and it would measure their movements by this suit. So it had sensors built into this suit. If you imagine if you are in hospital and you have had a stroke or you are in rehabilitation and you are moving your arm slowly every day. But no-one can actually monitor how far you are moving your arm or if it’s getting better or if it’s getting worse. Or if you are at home with an illness, the same thing applies.
So basically I invented this medical suit that you could wear with sensors built in, that would talk to a computer and measure your movements every day and give you feedback. And it was to do with yoga as well, the movement of the joints with yoga. That was my recent Masters. But in between both my Masters I worked in industry for about 10 years. So Habitat - which used to be in Ireland, I don’t know if you remember the shop Habitat, it has now left Ireland but it is still in Europe - so I worked for the likes of Habitat and other companies designing real products.
And how it used to work is, they would come up to you and say, right, we need a new juicer for our shops. And you would go off in your design team, you would see what juicers were out there. Consumer products, household products is my particular field. And you would go off and design it. I'll go through the design process in a minute and what it entails. But designing new products for the shops. And then most recently I am now at university. I am in the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. I am Programme Director for the Product Design Degree, which is a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree. And the degree is new. It’s three years old. So again I am designing the degree to try and make it the best design degree I can in product design. So I will talk about that process as well. I will talk about the Imaginate competition.
And January this year the European Union announced this year to be the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. They believe that creativity and innovation is what’s important in the future, new products, new innovations, new science. All of that is going to help us out of this recession. I am not going to go into the economic details, but help us out of this recession, and help us in the next recession, if and when it comes. So with that role as the European Ambassador I basically speak around Europe, speak to different audiences. I work with the European Parliament. And my basic role is to promote creativity and innovation among everyone.
The other Ambassadors, we are all across Europe, there’s 25 of us. They are probably a lot more famous than me. So you would have heard of them. The likes of Philippe Stark, who had that series – I don’t know if any of you saw it on BBC 2 recently. No? OK, Edward de Bono, he is another famous… but Erno Rubik, the guy who invented the Rubix cube. You all know Rubix cube. He is another Ambassador. The guy who invented the MP3 player format in Germany. That’s the reason we all have iPods and MP3 players today. So they are the other Ambassadors.
Just to go a bit in my past, my journey so far. I always wanted to be an inventor. At the age of eight I started keeping a little book of ideas, of things that I wanted to see designed better or changed to make my life easier. And I am sure you have that all the time, everything you interact with, every product, everything you use. I am sure at some point in the day you think, ‘Oh my God, this doesn’t work properly. Why can’t someone design it better?’ Well I had that curiosity right from a young age. So I had a little book of ideas, which I still have. And, as I told you, the closest I could get to innovating - or so I was told - was mechanical engineering. And that’s what I went into. Mechanical engineering was great, but I felt constrained on the artistic side so I went on to do product design.
Now I am going to talk about my actual invention and how I set out to do it. During my Masters in Product Design I wanted to set out to invent a new product. I wanted to be a famous inventor in the UK, in London. And someone came up to me and said to me, ‘If you invent a non-drip teapot you will make it.’ And I was like, ‘Really? A non-drip teapot, is that really a problem for people?’ And the more I researched it, the more I realised that actually the last 50 years there’s been scientists, engineers and designers trying to solve the problem of dripping teapots. I don’t know how many of you use teapots, how many of your families do. But actually wherever you go you will find they will drip. Whether you are on a train, at home, no matter, you can pour it in a special way which I am not obviously perfect at doing. But they drip, they spill, they ruin the tablecloth, they get hot liquid onto you. So I set out to do it.
How did I go about it? I spent three months on this project. And to be honest a lot of design and invention and innovation is to be practical. So you can…you need the theory, you need the maths, you need the science. You need to know what is behind…like I did all the maths and all the science but that was in the evenings. In the daytime I was working in a pottery, a little pottery in Londonbridge, in the centre of London, with a clock maker who made ceramic clocks. And I was actually doing design-make-and-test projects. So I had…I was building teapots with my hands, with crazy spouts. Some of them just like any shape that came into my head, I would make the spout that shape and test it, and see did it drip more, did it drip less, was it any good, or was it worse? And I had about 12 different prototypes. They are actually all sitting in London.
And if you see the spout shapes on them they are all weird and wacky designs. But it was just to be practical – to get to know how something works and what it is doing. Obviously you need the science and maths. You need to understand it. But I believe all innovation, all invention comes from being practical and design making and testing. So I set out to do it. And together with the science and maths and all my crazy shaped spouts and teapots, I realised I had hit on the solution. That if…here you can see in this picture. [Slide: ‘Non-drip Spout’] You can see the groove on the under side of the spout. So basically what it is – is if you see the spout there – with that groove on the outside, that tiny shape change the spout becoming narrower. You can see that – as it is coming up it is getting – it’s becoming narrower. As you are pouring, as you are tipping this teapot and the spout is becoming narrower, it is speeding up the fluid inside.
So if you’re pouring, it’s becoming narrower, it’s speeding up the fluid inside. As you tip back or as it’s …basically liquid works in a way that the faster it is the less likely it is to drip. So if you’re speeding up the fluid you are going to actually prevent the dripping, from that simple shape change on the underneath, on the under side of the spout. Not only that – because of the shape change that it is, a little upside down ‘V’, you can imagine on the inside it has now got a ramp. That is actually a ramp. I wish I had the teapot here to show you. But if you are pouring that and there is a ramp on the inside – when you tip back from pouring a liquid, that ramp actually prevents any more fluid going past it. So it’s working by (1) when you are pouring it, speeding it up. As you’re tipping back it has now got a lip on the inside, which is sending the fluid back. And that is the invention - a tiny shape change to a spout. It’s not an attachment. It’s not anything else.
And the beauty of this upside down ‘V’ is that I wanted it to be able to be mass produced. I didn’t want this teapot to cost, you know, €100 to buy and no-one could afford to buy it. I wanted it to be made, manufactured in a process that could be mass produced in the existing machinery. So with ceramics, which is one of the hardest materials to mould, you cannot put anything on the inside of the spout because of the process of manufacturing. It has to go on the outside. So without even realising it at the time, by creating this shape on the outside I’d created the shape on the inside without actually having to go inside the spout. So totally non-drip. Obviously I allowed for mistakes, which I will go into. And it’s a simple innovation. What was to come after this I wasn’t prepared for at all. And this…it’s a non-drip spout.>[?
So I have a worldwide patent now. And it can be applied to anything that pours. So wine bottles, petrol pumps, industrial machinery, anything that pours any liquid. On a wine bottle this would be 360º, going all the way round the lip. Anything that pours any liquid with this shape in any material can now make it completely non-drip and non-spill. Petrol pumps – you will realise later when you are driving – it’s quite annoying to get petrol on your shoes. It’s a waste of petrol as well. So it’s a solution to everything. I had my eureka moment with this invention. I spent, I think, the next seven days testing it, to make sure it was foolproof. And it is completely foolproof, even if there is minimal liquid in there, and the liquid can’t speed up. It actually…when you pull back you see the ‘V’ now on the outside, that groove.
This is the third way it works. If there is going to be one drip, as you are pulling back, the liquid cannot speed up, because there is not enough liquid in the teapot. As you pull back the last droplet, well the fluid will start to drip, it will hit this ‘V’ which is now at an angle. Water can’t go upwards, so it will come off that edge into the mug. And then as you tip back, if there is any dripping, the droplet will stick to that ‘V’ on the outside. And I have had the likes of Unilever and the other companies test this invention by hammering the top of the teapot to try and get that last droplet to come off on that ‘V’ on the outside. And it can’t, because of surface tension. If you put a droplet onto a ‘V’ like that and the droplet is going around it, you can bang the top, but that droplet is now stuck to that ‘V’ on the outside. It cannot come off. It grips onto it because of energy and surface tension. So it works in three ways.
So what came next after this? Then after this the next morning I was called, and I won quite a few awards. I was the Young British Female Inventor of the Year, as Peter has already said. Magazines, newspapers, [shows slides of press clippings] I started to tour the world with this invention – trying to promote it. And then also hit the media as well. And before I knew it, Big Breakfast – I don’t think…do any of you remember the Big Breakfast? No? It was a morning programme. Or GMTV, Richard and Judy, all these programmes, within the next couple of weeks I was on live TV speaking about this invention, pouring every presenter in the UK practically a cup of tea from this teapot - proving that it wasn’t dripping. You know, they made me pour it live on every TV programme there was – Sky News, BBC News. And I gained a lot of media interest from it.
Going back to the point where someone said to me, ‘If you invent a teapot that doesn’t drip you will make it as an inventor.’ And in three months I had done it. At the same time there was a professor at one of the universities who was trying to solve the same problem, who had spent the last 20 years of his life trying to do it. But the difference was, he was a scientist, which was great, but he didn’t use any practical element to it. So he just got caught up in all the science and maths, but didn’t do any practical side of it. And in science and engineering and design you really need to have a practical side. You need to be experimenting. You need to do design-make-and-test.
So creativity – everyone is talking about creativity. I don’t know if they are in your schools. To try and be more creative, this is the future of Ireland and the next generation. What is creativity? Basically, to me, it can be broken down into simple language. Creativity is to be inquisitive and be curious. Start questioning things. We put up with so many – product design obviously is my field, product design engineering – but we put up with so many products that we are not happy with. We are really not happy with them. But we put up with them.
Does anyone know when the wheel was invented? [Responses from audience] A long time ago. Any idea? [More responses from audience] "Yesterday" we have got over here. [Laughter] Apparently…well not apparently – the wheel was invented approximately 3,000 years ago. Yet only 30 years ago some scientist, designer, engineer, whoever it was, realised that putting a wheel on a suitcase would be brilliant for us. So 3,000 years and then only in the last 30 years does someone realise to put a wheel on a…to make it a trolley bag, a trolley suitcase. So being creative is questioning things. It’s not living with the products that you don’t like or the science or whatever it is you are trying to create or be innovative. You’ve got to start questioning. And you will find that you will get a lot of people around you at that time saying, ‘Oh, no, that will never work.’ I had that during my stages of trying to invent the non-drip teapot. They would say, ‘Oh you will never do that.’ And ‘You have set aside three months – impossible.’
Believe me you can do anything. If you want to, if you are passionate, and if you put your mind to it, put the hard work, get the science and maths, learn about it, you can do anything. So you need to have an open mind as well. I will give you examples of this. To have an open mind, you need to be original, and take risks. Here is another thing. We are too afraid to take that risk. But actually the best ideas come from failure or learning from your mistakes. Don’t be scared of failure. Actually failure is positive in the world of science, engineering and design. It actually teaches you what doesn’t work - with my 12 crazy spout shapes. And if you could see them – you might find them on the Internet. If you see these spout shapes, people will laugh at you. But they actually taught me what was really not going to work. And from that failure, from those mistakes I went on to develop the idea. And lateral thinking.
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