A couple of weekends ago, I was on a remote Gulf Island with some friends. They had a lovely cabin on a bluff, but it didn’t have any electricity. I was, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, delighted by this device, called the Ecofan (click to enlarge):
This little fan sits on top of the wood stove, and whirs like magic, pushing the stove’s heat around the room. Here’s an ad that shows how they work.
There were six arts majors at the cabin, so nobody could explain with any kind of authority how it worked. I had the notion that it had to do with a thermoelectric process, but, well, lacked the words.
The fan has something called a Peltier element in it, which works as a heat sink. Electricity is generated by the difference in temperature between the side facing the stove, and the other side. This electricity powers the fan. I gather that’s why the top parts of these fans have all of the metal bits, to increase the surface area and the temperature difference.
In any case, I thought it was pretty cool. Here’s a video showing somebody’s hacked together homemade version:
Coincidentally, I read about some rubber boots on Springwise today that aspire to exploit a thermoelectric effect to recharge your mobile phone. It apparently takes you 12 hours of charge time to get one hour of phone power, so it’s really more gimmick than useful tool.
I get questions like this occasionally. Sometimes they’re about a website, a video or some other webby thing I had a hand in creating. Oddly, nobody asked that question about our book or the play I wrote a couple of years ago: “I liked that comedy you wrote. What software did you use?” And I rarely hear anybody remark to a city employee, “hey, that’s a nice ditch you dug. What shovel did you use?”
I’d imagine that people who spend all their time being creative with new tools–web designers, animators and so forth–get asked this question all the time. I’m guilty of doing it myself. I remember, for example, asking Rob about his process in creating his Noise to Signal comics.
I was just curious more than anything. A lot of times, I think people are asking the “what software did you use?” question so that they can replicate your efforts. It may be subconscious, but they think “if I had that software, I could do that too”. And maybe they could.
In creative enterprises–from a pencil sketch to a feature film–the tool is the thing that matters least. What matters is that weird combination of skill, clever decisions, intuition, good fortune and the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s blessing that makes for a successful creative project. For example, Jorge Colombo drew this week’s New Yorker cover using Brushes, an iPhone app.
In thinking about this topic, I’m reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”. Most of us don’t understand the in’s and out’s of how you create a website or a digitally-animated short. As such, we tend to ascribe the ‘magic’ of the creation to the tool, as opposed to the creators.
What do you think? Do you ever get asked this question?
I read about TiltViewer, a sexy photo viewer on del.icio.us. It displays Flickr photos, sorted by interestingness, in a three-dimensional black void that you can manipulate. The folks at Airtight Interactive built this bit of webby fun, and have a good attitude about it:
Does a 3D UI give more functionality than the equivalent 2D interface? No, but its certainly a lot cooler! Part of the motivation to build this was to explore ways to make 3D interfaces simple and intuitive.
Make sure you read about the controls. They’re not super intuitive (we don’t necessarily expect to use the keyboard)–the app could do with a little ‘?’ icon that users could click for pop-up instructions.
