Against Method: Critical Summary

Aanya Patil, Eshwar Sk, Shaurya Sighadia, Tanisha Saraf, Vansh Gupta, Vikas Kumar
Team 17
Students, Plaksha University
FM115 The Art of Thinking and Reasoning
Dr. Brainerd Prince, Dr. Aditya Malik
January 20, 2022
As Steve Jobs rightly said- “innovation is the ability to look at change not as a threat but as
an opportunity”. Innovation has helped humans to survive the cauldron that life on this planet
was, in a sense that was our adaptational survival advantage. The ability to use available tools
and ideas to create something new that wasn’t always the expected progression helped us
evolve at a pace that was much faster than other species. Innovation in that sense is one of the
most essential tools in critical thinking because it creates inherent possibilities where there
exist none. Critical thinking is also very essential for innovation, where the ability to
understand by reason and logic is important to creating anew. Thus, innovation both drives
and benefits from critical thinking. The best examples of these were the ability of early
humans to establish control over fire. The critical thought given to the nature and abilities of
fire led to innovation to control it and use it for protection. However, once the innovation of
crude devices occurred, it led to thought about other uses, like cooking and warmth, thus the
innovation led to critical thinking.

We may not be Steve Jobs, but that did not prevent us from sharing our thoughts on
innovation. Innovation as we see it arises out of dissatisfaction, by which we mean that even
upon gaining existing knowledge or using prevalent technology, a certain urge to change
something is created. The next step is to assess conventional wisdom on the matter and then
irreverently take an approach that is not recommended or explored, especially that which
seems trivial at first glance. The thought is then to list out these possibilities and use
Sherlock’s famous axiom- “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth”. While this reflection on innovation may seem very
nonlinear and unstructured, that is what we feel is the essence of innovation. The ability to
have an approach of “how could this be done differently” is the only fixed step in the journey
of innovation because to fix the other steps would be to fix a destination, thereby defeating
the whole purpose of this wondrous, reverential exploration.

Innovation is a very important aspect of most fields, but probably none more so than in the
field of engineering. The crux of engineering is to reduce workload and perform previously
impossible tasks using machines. Innovation provides the spark or trigger required to create
these new technologies and processes that are a significant step above what previously
existed. The nature of the engineering world today has become very linearly progressive and
slow-moving. Small aesthetic enhancements to existing products are considered as new
innovative ideas. This slowing down of the radical nature of innovation appears like it is due
to a saturation of technology to where it is much more difficult to improve. However, this is
the result of engineering training telling us to not fall in love with machines, but instead to
just rearrange and marginally improve what exists already. The ability to look at a problem
and say how can I use or create a new technology to solve this problem is reserved for a few
of those brave engineers who stray from the common path. This imbalance in innovations
from people who are expected to be innovative by nature is best explained by the following
example-

Mobile phones have come a long way from the initial days when they were introduced. The
introduction of the Motorola DynaTAC 800x was announced in 1983, and this could be
termed as the first ‘mobile’ phone, as it was smaller and much easier to carry than car phones
(visualhierarchy.co, April 2018). This almost 20 cm long device was cumbersome to carry
around and use but marked a radical innovation for its time.

The next great innovation in mobile phones was the introduction of the small candy bar
phone by Nokia and the email on phone by Blackberry around the year 2000. For the next
seven years, however, conventional engineering wisdom followed, and these products were
milked to the point of saturation. A few small superficial improvements would be made to
these phones and sold as a new variant. This was when one company decided to offer
something that would have sounded ridiculous, perhaps even ten years later if conventional
engineering had followed. Launched in 2007, fully equipped with a digital music player, a
two-megapixel camera, and marketed as an Internet-enabled PDA, the iPhone series is still
the heartthrob of billions. These were radical changes in an industry still trying to use SMS
and email to sell products.

Thus, Apple’s ability to use other industrial advancements and apply them in a new approach
to an engineering problem was a perfect example of critically thought innovation.