Griffith, a highly educated industrial designer, seems to be running into these "walls." A major idea which gained Griffith a "$500,000 MacArthur Fellowship-a "genius grant,"" actually turned out to be impractical. He had developed a much cheaper and more portable way to manufacture different sizes of eyeglasses with one tooling device, his "product." Instead of fully researching the situation in order to find the real problem at hand, getting third world people the medical attention to prescribe them a correct eyeglass prescription, he assumed it would be the manufacturing.
Griffith is no doubt a talented and skilled indivdual. He was able to create a machine which could develop a 3-D model out of chocolate from a CAD file. He also developed a device which could generate energy by swinging it around the users head. Both of these are no doubt innovational products and devices. Although in their final delivery of how they execute the function is flawed. The 3-D printing could be an incredible feat it it could be done cheaper then the existing product, but chocolate as a medium can only facilitate a chef. The same with the electric generating device, running out of battery on a cell phone or laptop is a terrible fate to happen to anyone, but to swing it around their head is seemingly one of the least practical ways to solve this issue. I have seen a concept to solve this situation of running out of battery but instead of swinging it around like a weapon, it simply is spun around the finger.
Therefor industrial design is the melding of not only form and function, but there are many other considerations to be had while sitting down sketching. The issue of solving the right problem for the situation and solving it in a practical way are both imperative issues which must be met in order to have a successful product as we can see with Griffith's sitauation. To avoid this dilemma I feel that a little more research such as, simply talking and consulting other designers, and people who will be affected by this design can solve these problems.
Fritz has thoroughly examined the ways in which Griffith goes about his innovation and designs. I agree with Fritz’s conclusions that Griffith is by all means and very talented and skilled individual. However it seems that Griffith tends to get caught up in his imagination. This is evident because as industrial design students, both Fritz and I agree that Griffith’s processes could be more researched and his proposed solutions could be progressed even further, making them more practical solutions.
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