That is a very insightful observation, and it sheds light on the reason why "visions of the future" are always so wrong: they aren't designed for the future. They're designed for the present, purposefully.

That wacky car of the 1950s doesn't represent an automotive engineer's thoughtful attempt to redesign the car. It's not even a real product! It's a marketing gimmick designed to sell the typical car of the 1950s. The idea is that Joe Consumer sees the "Car of the Future", notes that it's covered in chrome, subliminally associates chrome with Progress and Style, and then happily splurges on today's chrome-covered model down at the local Mercury dealer.

Naturally, considering it's raison d'etre, the Gimmick Car looks exactly like the cars that were for sale at the time, only more so.

The lesson to draw here is that most of the "paradigm trap" is a marketing barrier. It turns out to be generally more profitable to sell people a slight variation on what they already like than to show them something totally different and have to prove that it's better. It turns out that the real "vehicle of the future" invented around 1950 was the Land Rover, but that took a long time for people to get used to.

Perhaps the single most useful insight I've heard thus far. The best part of this observation is that we have many examples that are readily available to illustrate it for us, yet we somehow fall back into thinking that is governed by preconceived notions.

Maybe the more interesting question is:

Why do we default to thinking that is driven by prevailing paradigms?

We break out of a paradigm when we push it to the extremes and notice effects that hadn't been observed before. For example, in quantum dynamics when something can pop up out of nothingness and 2 + 2 can sometimes equal 5.

The difficult part of escaping our paradigms is that we can't just assume any random thing in our current paradigm is false. (e.g., My sky is not blue.) You need to find the key ingredient in order to come up with a new paradigm that is actually useful.

They're what you think in.

So how do you break out of these things?

I'd think the best way is to recognize that these "prevailing paradigms" are just models for the world that only have some degree of applicability.

If you want to create the next paradigm shift, you need to figure out where the current paradigm breaks down. Look for the rough edges: the places where the solution doesn't quite fit the problem contour.

I agree that we necessarily must be thinking in one of many paradigms, but there is a tendency to default to the larger overarching "trending" paradigm. If you look at the car from the 1950s, it doesn't have the curviness of cars and this could be attributed to the manufacturing process as opposed to the design process.

The functional features on the car that have changed most notably are the doors...

Maybe I'm applying the word "paradigm" inappropriately...perhaps mindset or something else is what I'm aiming at and not "paradigm".

------------------

OK, I've had some time to think about that which I am attempting to grasp...

I think there is a common thread with "advances" in technology such as the 1950s car in the link above (really, the only apparently visible "innovations" are with the many directions in which the doors open outwards) and with other "advances" that we might see around us today. The common thread being that we tend to reinforce what works in hindsight and project that into the future. Perhaps we can call this the "hindsight paradigm" but I would like some input on whether or not this is an appropriate usage of the word "paradigm".

Advertising markets will also stick to "what works". It had to be a company founded by two Stanford kids that created a revolution in the advertising industry because they were not bound by the traditional thinking of not having to reinvent the wheel such that they could actually deliver the marketer's dream of highly targeted adverts...

Engineers will (hopefully) build something that is solid and then tweak as necessary. There is no need to reinvent the wheel over and over again and this is something that is similar to what I'm groping for: we are sometimes trapped by the convenience of what works at the moment. There seems to be no end to the length at which we may improve anything, but at the same time if people are comfortable with what works, then they can revel in that comfort and simply pass by innovation after innovation because the additional uncertainty of new ideas require somewhat of an adjustment phase, which can be uncomfortable for some and possibly unfeasible for large collective groups.

(This leads me to dream that there should be some sort of way to perhaps time levels of comfort such that when people are sufficiently comfortable they might be more susceptible to shifting to something new...)

Now when I look at the picture of the car (after blocking out the loveliness of the ladies who oddly look quite fashionable by even today's standards) I see a number of innovations that at the time "worked" because it was merely projecting the past upon the future. It is perhaps the very natural tendency to seek that which is familiar because it is safe and project that into the future thus becoming trapped by our past. Contrast this with the notion that I was suggesting in my questions earlier that there is a paradigm of some sort that shifts from generation to generation and that advances are somehow governed by such paradigms.

Now the reason why I think this is worthwhile for a segment of the News.YC community to reflect upon is because those of us who like to think of ourselves as innovators need to constantly question the merits of creativity invested in any given direction. The 1950s car just seemed to me exemplary of how the leading thinkers in the automotive industry were so trapped by the prevailing notion of what seemed to be working (because of past experience, aka "we know best") at the time and just seemed to me to be adding more of that into future projections.

Sure, I could just as easily imagine a car that looked like a matte black monolith. Problem is, that's just a random shot in the dark. There is no current trending to lead me in that direction.

I think the genius in creating a new paradigm lies not in extrapolating from superficial trends, but in isolating a fundamental problem that no one else has fully appreciated yet. It would be like predicting a future car that doesn't need to be replaced as soon as it's paid for.

My suggestion is read more broadly on a daily basis and let the ideas percolate into consciousness rather than as an strained product of it. Once there gradually shape them on their own path. I also find that talking to a broader sample of friends and family and even strangers on the bus forces you to re-evaluate those basic assumptions. Groupthink affects us all but it's really a symptom of who we associate with (and why) than it is of how we think.

Sure, it's easy to laugh at how many superfluous ornaments that are visible. I get the impression that the futurism that is present in this car is representative of the auto manufacturer's perspective of producing cars in that the manufacturing process of the future will afford automakers to pack more "features" than is necessary for the customer to take practical advantage of - that is the message I see being communicated (I can hear the manufacturing engineers patting themselves on the back saying, "gee whiz! look at what we'll be able to make in the future; no matter that anybody needs a needlessly complicated door, by golly we'll have the process streamlined so that we can increase the complexity of what we put together!!"). By this I mean that the car reflects the car maker's vision and not the customer's vision.

Let's take a wildly different example of breaking the mold: The Matrix. I would argue that what made that movie (aside from the loyal geek following of Neo wannabes, myself near the top of the list) was the unusually original photography method of "bullet time". It was something so wildly different and brought a new experience onto the silver screen unlike anything else, and to experience that on such a large scale (the movie theater) was the big selling point.

I am very guilty of the type of mindset of the automakers in the 1950s and at the moment cannot claim to be as ground breaking as John Gaeta (the visual effects genius behind The Matrix). I just feel somewhat relieved that I'm aware of it!!

I think photo sharing is trapped in the paradigm of the early adopters (photography enthusiasts), and I write about that here:

http://ourdoings.com/2007-12-19

In general, the only way to break a paradigm is to throw it very hard against the wall of reality.

For product design that means immersing yourself in what people want. Evolve as you come into contact with different needs, wants and behaviors.

You may benefit from the most widespread example of this analysis because their company, Seymour Powell, inverted the cordless kettle. The initial design worked in one orientation. Copies are omni-directional.

That's a great quote! I'm curious to know how your photo-sharing site is exemplary of this statement. I'm not trying to be a jerk here (I think I do a great job of that with little effort!), instead I'm just trying to understand from the perspective of a potential user (or for that matter an investor) of your site who is interested in innovative thinking that is distinctly different from the superfluous ornamentation that you see in the "car of the future" picture given.

[just to be clear: I'm just asking for the sake of knowledge exchange, I am not at all a picture taker and I am not in the business of funding startups!]

Up until late last year the ourdoings.com paradigm broke if people had a lot of photos but no time to choose the good ones. Finding what else is broken is tough, in that people may go months without using the site (putting up more photos) without that being a problem. They know they can come back and catch up easily when they have a little time.

On the other hand, I have seen some quite advanced car ideas in literature from as far as the late 1800s.

It's just one data point, and I think it's being drawn out way farther than it deserves. Some really inventive things have come out of the automotive industry throughout the years. The hybrids that people are getting into now? They've existed in one form or another since the 1920's (or earlier).

For a modern example of "wow-hey-neat" in automotive design, I like to use the Jeep Hurricane. I'm not wowed by its incredible suspension, the sweet, sweet blend of the new and the familiar in its overall design, or by the really cool transaxle drive train they came up with. What I like about it is that they built this thing with two frickin' engines, and then figured out how to run the engines in banks of four cylinders at a time depending on load. So, driving down the highway? You're on a four cylinder engine. Pulling a gentle hill? Have four more. Pulling a trailer up a steep mud slope? Here, have all 16.

Product design isn't all-revolution-all-the-time. Simply churning is really important; keep on improving your existing design incrementally, as often as you can. Then, when you do get that holy-wow revolutionary design in your head, you do something with it.

But you can't force that.

Change happens from the bottom up, not from the top down. When a new radical idea takes hold and is adopted, it gradually becomes part of the system and is no longer a paradigm. You can only iterate so far on a current design before something else comes along to replace it.

If you took the standard car design in the 1950s and tried to use it as a basis for what the future brings, well...you'd get roughly the same thing that you'd get if you took a Toyota and used it as the basis for what cars look like in the future.

Have you ever noticed in the music in futuristic sci-fi movies? It's the same thing. You can't imagine what music sounds like in 50 years any more than you could have imagined rap or hip hop in the 1940's.

The question as I see it is, can we predict the trends of the future? This divides itself into 2 questions: 1) Do we have enough knowledge/creativity to see the next waves of the future, and 2) If we saw a thousand possibilities of what would happen in the future, would we be able to pick the right one?

A different way to see it is that you are the force affecting the future - can you push your design/plan/idea far enough to make it groundbreaking?

What is interesting to me is not answering these questions, but rather, asking -

What can I do to strengthen my ability to answer 'yes' to these questions?

What I do (having thought a bit about it) is this:

1 - having a pretty good grasp of a broad spectrum of technologies and where they are heading. This includes things as diverse as FPGA's, software and diesel engines. I don't know much about the details of any of it, but I have an idea of how stuff works and where it's heading.

2 - A good sense of human nature. Basically knowing what people want...

3 - Having lots of "what if" thoughts.

4 - being able to extrapolate the "what if" thoughts using my knowledge of technology and people.

Think "natural selection" rather than Lamarckian evolution.

Then again, as Ken Kesey put it -- "we thought we were writing the history and future of the universe, but what we really said was 'if you pick your nose long enough, the world will unravel'." Drugs, strange experiences, etc. may unlock insights but they don't seem to help the unprepared mind very much.

“We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish.” Marshal Mcluhan