In this issue we honor the readers’ choice for 30 Innovative Products of 2016—our 5th year doing these awards. Readers voted from a long list of submitted products—the ones with the most votes are acknowledged here starting on page 48.
I’m an engineer’s daughter and an engineer’s wife, and sister to an engineer and sister-in-law to three more. Growing up Halloween costumes were engineered. So I have always been aware of what engineers do and the challenges they overcome, sometimes elegantly, sometimes imperfectly. They are often, even usually, stepping into some form of the unknown. Good engineers are willing to be that person who wades into the messiness and takes responsibility for bringing order and functionality to a collection of unformed elements—whether mechanical or electrical. These elements are rarely in harmony and must be navigated and negotiated until they come together to a common cause. There is always horse trading to do between the ideal and the possible. There is rarely enough time or money.
I admire that work because it takes so much creativity and fortitude, and it’s almost guaranteed that it will on some level fall a bit short. That’s the stinger in the tail that’s always there. Creating reality from ideas—especially engineering reality—is always about compromise. So when I look at the long list of nominees, I see hours and hours and hours of honorable work to design and make something useful that wasn’t there before.
Thank you to the readers for voting, congratulations to this year’s winners.
And if I may segue—this got me thinking about innovation in general, so just for kicks I checked into MIT’s annual list of 10 breakthrough technologies. It includes frontier science like immune engineering, gene editing in plants, rockets and Gigafactories, and robots that teach each other. Some of it is available now, other innovations are 10 years away from being useful. The list also includes wireless power, which is supposedly just 2-3 years away. That will absolutely affect the engineering done in our industry. So the frontier is always moving.
Happy New Year to you and your loved ones. Thanks for reading and may 2017 bring inspiration, abundance, and peace however you define them.
