There is a trend that cuts through the industrial design world (you can see a new instance of it pop online every few hours) - the idea that the regular market economy is missing the boat on some GENIUS idea that involves recycling / underlooked materials / sustainability, and that this genius idea can also drastically cut costs.

I happen to love the Lego-block nature of cargo containers, and while doing research on them first stumbled into this pattern: it seems that every third design major comes up with the idea to use cargo containers as cheap pre-fab houses. Well, it turns out that while cargo containers are relatively cheap, they're really not all that good for housing - they're too small, they're uninsulated, they need as much (or more) build out on the inside as a regular house, they're harder to put windows into, etc.

The same sort of pattern appears with all sorts of other materials: people get the idea that left over offcuts of wood at house construction sites can be laminated into tables or bathtubs, that asphalt shingles and be ground up and used as a flex fuel, that cardboard can be folded into bicycles, that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side, etc.

All of these schemes fail in similar ways:

* they ignore the huge amounts of evolved-in wisdom that long-held solutions have

* they ignore production costs

* they ignore labor costs (the "Earthship" underground house plans are great...but they implicitly assume that a thousand hours of labor swinging a sledgehammer is free)

* they ignore the costs of ancillary features (brakes on a bike, insulation on a house)

* they pretend that some materials are "green" and others are "anti-green".

* they often assume a superior attitude to people in the third world, assuming that first world design students have better ideas than millions of third world people who actually know what resources are available and what features are desirable.

Steel bicycles have a TON of evolved cleverness in them. They are the end result of a fierce evolutionary winnowing.

If you're ever tempted to announce to the world that everything that's gone before has been mistaken and you've got a solution for other people that's a ton better, take a moment and think through all the OTHER criteria that these people might consider relevant. You may have come up with a wonderful new idea (it happens!), but chances are that there are good reasons that the idea has not already been adopted.