The LAB: Creating Mobile Products with the Division Template (November 2009)
Mobility is a good thing. As mobility increases, so does our standard of living. Mobility expands job opportunities, enriches our personal life, and boosts prosperity. For nations, mobility expands trade, creates wealth, and makes countries more competitive. Mobility even helps us live longer. For hundreds of years, life expectancies hovered around 40 years. During the 1800s they began to shoot up when road transport improved. Today life expectancies in many advanced societies approach 80 years thanks to improved mobility in transportation, communications, and network computing.
How can we use structured innovation to create more of it? How can we make the products and services we use every day more mobile? For this month’s LAB, we will use the Division Template. We begin by listing the product’s (or service’s) internal components. Then we divide one or more of the components in one of three ways:
- Functional (divide along functional roles)
- Physical (cut the product or component on any physical aspect)
- Preserving (each part preserves the characteristics of the whole)
Using Function Follows Form, we envision potential benefits of the new form and other ways to adapt the form to make it more useful. The trick is to use each type of Division with the specific intent of increasing a person’s mobility. Each type of Division results in a different type of mobility. Here is how.