At any given time during the day, 300,000 human beings are airborne? That’s pretty wild. I like that. You’re absolutely right about cross-referencing. Very few people look beyond their specific industry’s knowledge base to advance their products’ design, and that is always surprising to me. One of the projects I recently worked on involved some basic cross-referencing that yielded fantastic results. (I’ll spare you the novel and only give you two quick examples:) 1) We were looking for a way to stop a free-floating metal lever handle/trigger on a new product design from flopping around. The project engineers went around and around for weeks without coming up with a simple, cost-effective solution. Finally, purely by accident, I found it in my car. I was at a red light one afternoon and I started absent-mindedly playing with the little safety handle above my window. Up and down. Up and down. The action on those things is awesome. You let them go and they slowly retract back to… their… cradle… and shazam! The lightbulb came on. I took the idea to the design team and helped them adapt it to our design. Problem solved. 2) Another item on my wish-list for this same product’s features was impact-resistance. This particular type of product is always made of Brass and hard plastic. Always. No one has ever made it out of anything else. Well… brass and hard plastic don’t do well when slammed to the ground together – so we made this one almost entirely out of a bouncy thermoplastic polymer to make it flexible and unbreakable. (It serves as its own bumper.) I got the idea from watching my dog play with her toys. It didn’t matter how hard her chew toys were. She found a way to break them. She had a softer toy though. A thick rubbery thing called a “rhino”. She worked on it for months but never put a dent in it. I looked at it and figured ‘you could probably drop this thing off the roof of a skyscraper and it would be fine. Bingo. By adapting the labrador-proof properties of a rubber dog toy to a common commercial plumbing product, we solved a fifty-year old problem that scores of engineers across an entire industry had pretty-much given up on. How? Simply by stepping back and looking at the world around us. 99.9% of the time, the solution to every problem is already out there, right under your nose – just… you know, a bit out of context. Once people open themselves to the connective nature of design, that’s when things start to happen – and when things start getting fun. Great post.