Innovation, thinking beyond the obvious

100+ uses of a paperclip

One of the ways to make the world a better, more sustainable place is finding new uses for things. By looking for new and innovative ways of doing things with what we already have, we can avoid buying or building new things. Versatility is key in the new economy. Something that portable storage San Diego has understood well and true.

There was a recent study done how where they challenged 4 year olds to come up with as many different ideas as they could for using an everyday object, like a paperclip. Within an hour time frame a group of preschoolers could come up with over 160 ways of using a paperclip, ranging from picking your nose or ears with it to, if you made a really big one you could slide down it. The childs mind is not yet throwing away any ideas as “unmanagable” or “unrealistic”. Instead it centers upon finding as many different uses for the paperclip as they can and let their imagination run free. Now this was a longitudinal study and they retested the kids at age 15. By the time these preschoolers had gotten an education they have trouble coming up with more than 20 uses for the paperclip. We lose a lot due to our education.

Smart thinking

I don't know if portable storage San Diego invited a bunch of preschoolers to work alongside them for the project but they did come up with some very usefull and innovative ways to use containers. First of all containers are for transporting stuff, right? Storage is a new use for containers and an innovation in its own right. Now you can put a bunch of those containers together and build a fence around them and you have transformed a vacant lot into a regular storage rental space at a fraction of the cost of putting up a building. This is exactly the way Coronado Mobile Storage started out!

Now there is more things you can do with a container and one of the things that I thought was really clever is that instead of asking people to bring over their stuff to storage, you can also deliver the container to their door to be filled with their stuff. A lot easier for both the customer, who can put their stuff in at leasure and for the service provider as well. All you have to do is drive the container out there and pick it up after the customer calls to say it's filled! How smart is that?

Many uses for containers

The next step is even more innovative. What else can you use these containers for? Well, it's a huge enclosed space that with a few adjustments can be modified into a mobile office, or you can provide an enclosed space to safely put equipment in at an on location jobsite, roadwork or the like. A few more adjustments and you can make a container into a complete home, where you can live part- or fulltime. A mobile home without the wheels, so to speak. And let's be honest: how many mobile homes are really meant to be mobile, meant to be moved around a lot. Generally it's more like a parked home to begin with. So lose the wheels and use a container to form the basis, put in a few adjustments such as electricity and running water and you have cheap housing, if not on a permanent basis then certainly in times of a crisis or disaster. Heck, let's go even further and equip the containers with their own solarpanels and you'd really be able to park them anywhere!

Solar energy: solar film, the solar panel of the future?

The future might be thin film

The developement of technologies is accelerating at a high rate. Where only a short 30 years ago solar panels were largely unheard of and considered highly advanced technology, the first generation is already outdated and the second generation will soon follow suit. Many people have started their own solar farm, helped along by government stimulation programs and the enormous rise in the cost of fossil fuels. They have formed co-operative efforts and use smartgrids to share the energy thus collected off their rooftops and in sharing they have found that they can be selfsufficient much easier than when everyone has their own closed circuit. So sharing is the name of the game, with smart computer programmes measuring the relative use of everyone connected to the smartgrid. Still for a lot of people solar panels are prohibitively expensive. The market for renewable energy resources is ready for the next breakthrough in technology making gathering solar energy available to even low income homes and families. And it might just be thin film.

Red light, blue light, all can be used

Thin film is a layer thin as can be, we're talking nanometers here. I don't pretend to know everything about the technologie that produces these thing films, but it's the same type of process that I wrote about in the blog I did on Magnetron sputtering. A thin film has to have certain properties that allow it to convert speed of the sun's fotons into energy. Now the classic first and second generation solar cells use only the red light out of the whole spectrum that the sun sends down. Red light is less energetic than blue light, but less blue light reaches the earths serface, so that sorta balances out. The idea now, with these thin film technologies is to create layers of thin film in which both the red light energy and the blue light energy can be converted into useable energy. This would effectively increase the output of solar panels manifold. A single layer thin film could already mimic the results of the (relatively expensive) solar panels, but a multilayer thin film is expected to increase efficiency enormously.

Imagining the future now...

Thin film can be mass produced, simply, effectively and for all kinds of purposes including solar energy. You can go to the hardware store and buy solar film for your windows (they're so thin that they are see through anyway, so why not put them on all your windows or at least the ones that get the most sunlight). Then you plug your household appliances into your windows and of course, because we've already learned the advantages of sharing, we build a smartgrid for every office building, every block of housing. Every empty building is turned into a powerplant by covering it with thin solar film from Vergason for instance and because it's so cheap, we cut our cost of living radically (incidentally ending the world wide financial crisis we're now in the middle of)

I don't know the particulars, but wireless electricity seems to be the next necessary step to connect people without needing a world of infrastructure and wires going everywhere. Because of all this interdependent technology we're also getting to know our neighbors better and because of this we're investing in each other more, becoming less dependent on the money grabbers at the utility companies and at the same time let's also get smart and share our wifi instead of letting the telecom companies bleed us dry. The future then finds us interconnected on a global scale while being interdependent on a local scale. Now there's a twist on globalization!