Analogy is often what takes innovators from point A to point B by way of points M, Z, and Q. Take the humble ink jet printer. (We won’t talk about the ink cartridge mafia and design decisions that make color ink jet and laser printers cheap to purchase but thirsty for ink and thus costly to maintain.) The printer moves the cartridge head in relation to the paper and squirts tiny drops of ink into precise locations.

ANALOGY 1: How is printing an object like printing a document? Result: additive manufacturing, 3D printing, and rapid prototyping.

ANALOGY 2: How is building a skin graft like printing a document? Result: Skin printing. An “ink” cartridge filled with skin substrate that “prints” a skin graft or bandage based on a 3D scan of the injury.

ANALOGY 3: How is building a road like printing a document? Result: Road printer.

Yes, you heard me, road printer. You know those nice patterned brick roads all over Europe? The ones that are more durable than asphalt and allow precipitation to more easily return to the water table? You can build these roads with a machine that rides over the graded area and prints road. The “print head” is made up of three or four people inserting bricks at the top of a road-width slide in the pattern that they want on the road. Due to the curvature of the slide, the bricks’ weight and gravity do the work of making them fit together snugly at the bottom of the slide where they arrive on the ground. http://www.tiger-stone.nl/index.php/multimedia/filmpjes

Analogy is one of many key tools in design and innovation. The more radical the analogy, the more likely we are to find ground-breaking solutions and ideas.