Should Professionals Design Boats

I see again, you refuse to define what you think is a professional. But it helps you to make an unfounded baseless argument, which is real the point isn't it

 

Enough !!!

Now now children take two paces back and think a little !!!there could be cultural differances here and complete differant ways of thinking .what good in one country may not be the case in another . i know this from first hand exsperiance and having to so sorry a few times

 

Being professional means if the design fails and kills someone and it's due to a lapse on the designers part then they go to prison. That's the protection you enjoy every time you use an elevator, cross a bridge use a hotel staircase or board a ferry.

Amateur designers and that includes most "yacht designers" are not held responsible for their failures. But no ones arguing that people shouldn't design for their own use are they?

 

A professional is the best you can get not just accountable for there actions.

Try being a professional boxer, ille give you 4 seconds at it.

Try being a pro golfer --you would be wasting your time and thiers.

I agree that yacht designers are ameteurs but hopeful the professional builder will tweek out the bad bits during construction.

 

Yes a good professional yard can pick up a lot of mistakes and was always a good safety net. But many yards are now unfortunately quite the opposite, and need watching closely to get a quality build.

But really anyone savy can design a 'boat' adequately even for commercial use if they go through the class process or similar.

 

Examples of successes can be cited as evidence that non-professionals should design boats for their own use and only their own use. I would never design a boat for another builder because I know I am an amateur. I do have a lot of fun building for my own use. Enter at your own risk.

 

A refresher:

 

There's actually a lot more agreement in the comments here than it first appears. Everyone agrees that the professional and the non-professional (however you define it) will view problems and solutions somewhat differently. Professionals -- by definition -- have financial and reputational liability for their decisions. This liability alone will cause them to favor solutions that have been tried and tested whenever they're working on a non-experimental design. The amateur, on the other hand, will view almost all designs as experimental.

While an aversion to risk (i.e., experimental solutions) is rational -- in research it represents a cost, and there is a large body of social experimentation and literature developed with the sole purpose of identifying the causes and avoiding the costs. Including --

Groupthink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Bandwagon effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect

Communal reinforcement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_reinforcement

Confirmation bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Status quo bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias

One company that has successfully navigated these problems is 3M Corp., who regularly rotates professionals and non-professionals in all of their experimental projects -- and finds that most solutions or applications are identified by the non-professionals (non-professionals meaning smart, intelligent people who simply are not trained in that specific field).

So a professional naval architect may learn a lot about problems they're facing from a chemist, just as a chemist may learn a lot about applications from a naval architect.

Consequently, it's often the apparently silly solutions offered by amateurs (in the field) that moves the ball down the field. It may be true that 99%+ of the ideas offered by amateurs really are silly, but that doesn't mean they should be summarily dismissed -- entertaining a lot of ideas that go nowhere is how we progress.

Research and experimentation are areas where we really should embrace diversity in peoples background.

 

That less than 1 % makes it all seem worthwhile.

 

that reminds me of the story of the honey bee (which can be very important for any population): There are mostly worker bees in any hive, they go out, collect nectar and store it. But there are also "rouges", that just wander around at random looking for new sourses of nectar. When they find it they return to the hive and do their dance that indicates direction and distance to the new nectar supply. All the workers go there and bring back the nectar, while the rouge goes back out wandering around looking for new nectar. In an experiment they separated all the rouges, the after all the known nectar was recovered, the workers sat around with nothing to do, slowly starved and the hive die. When they put all rouges together, little to no nectar was brought back to the hive, and they also starved and the hive died. Without a certain amount of rouges to find new nectar, the hive could not thrive, and without workers nothing got done.

So without inventors, experimentor, and those looking for a better way, there will be no new inventions to make and sell, made and sold by the "workers". Both are important for a thriving population. If you punish successful inventors and entrepreneurs, they go away and the workers sit around unemployed and starve. Yet without workers, no new products get produced.

So people with wacky ideas are necessary for a thriving and productive population, even if lots of time their ideas are worthless, for that is the source of new product ideas so workers do not starve. The workers will make the few and rare good ideas into viable products, so the inventor does not stave.

If you punish hard work, the population suffers, if you punish inventors and entrepreneurs for taking risks, the population also suffers.

 

I used to work two jobs The jobs are totally unrelated so when i jhad enough of all the grap in the fibreglassing i used to go and lay wooden floors !! after i had enough of flooring id wander off back to the boating glassing thing again . that way i was able to see thing in both jobs differantly and have a new fresh look at the same old problems . If you do the same job all the time you become brain dead so to speak its just the same old same old every day !! Take a break and go climb a mountain or find the randyest women you ever laid eyes on but get some change in you life . then after you screwed your self silly and done your thing and go back to the job you profess to be a proffessional at you just might get the lacking shot of inspiration and see thing as others do !!
Its why i like working in asian countries ,they are from a differant planet . they are wired completely differant to western people and its so refreshing to live and work with them for a period of time . they see and do things completely differant to the way us western people do and go about there business like little robots the way they have for thousands of years .
Its absolutly impossible to even come close to thinking like they do even after 5 years of living and working and being with them 247 /365 days of the year they are impossible to predict what they will do or say !!.
So have two jobs and live dual life styles and you will become a much better person from the exsperiance of using both sides of you brain ,thats for sure

 

Petros,

I like it.

Thanks for coming out.

 

Tunnels,

Good one.

Thanks.

 

This tends to be a view from people outside of the tech fields they like to imagine amateurs play a role in. Engineers are not bound by conservatism, they are bound to ensure safety which is quite different. That doesn’t stop engineering innovation, and design itself is often about innovation.
I think it would be safe to say the ball has never been moved down the field by amateur input in high tech areas. That includes modern science of Naval Architecture.

Progress in the past was often helped from brainstorming sessions with ideas coming from the far left field that lead somewhere, but the modern technological advances are from highly specilaised teams and individuals. The field of hydrodynamics is a good case in point. It’s painstaking professional research by small specialized teams and individuals that lead to significant advances.

For example can you name one significant advance, say over the last 20 years in Naval Architecture that came from a rank outsider with no pre existing proficiency in the field?
Let alone the real advances in materials and metallurgy.

There’s always the odd spark of brilliant deductive reasoning from unexpected sources that leads to a better solution but there’s enough people within most fields to get that variability. In my experience its nearly always the other way around; the bright trained engineer sees solutions that others miss, even though it’s outside of their field.

There’s also a tendency to imply that proficient people are amateurs because they didn’t study a degree directly in the field. Naval Architects might fit this bill, they often come from other engineering disciplines that have given them a good basic understanding of materials and structures. It’s common enough to find the Chief Naval Architect studied Civil Engineering at uni. But it’s demonstrated proficiency that makes the professional not the university qualification.

To progress technologically you need some proficiency in the field and you need enough intelligence to get valuable insight. As the fields move on and become well described the “ball” only gets moved down the field by very knowledgeable people never by people I’d consider amateurs.

I think you’ll find every tech company and organization require a thorough grounding in the discipline of development to be employed and most likely a doctorate. These are the people who push the tech boundaries. You mention 3M, the amazing advances of consumer electronics over the last 20 years are another good illustration, the amateur input might be to dream up a new application but making it work is down to the professional engineers to give a working platform to the professional programmers.

It always makes me smile when I read people suggesting that formal engineering training somehow stops innovation, the truth is the complete opposite. Nearly all modern innovation is produced by proficient professional specialized research.

 

Knowing the application, and the desired function, is design. That's the hard part. Once you know what you want there are any number of people who can tell you that it can't be done -- or can do it.
Many of these threads are a perfect illustration of that.