STEVE SASSON is a brisk, middle-aged man. At 6-foot-3 he maintains the poise of a cavalry officer. He grew up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. His father was a longshoreman, and his mother managed their three boys while working as an office secretary. The Sasson brothers are now an engineering triple threat: John Sasson studied civil engineering, Steve Sasson trained in electrical engineering, and Richard Sasson specialized in chemical engineering.
As a kid, Steve Sasson was a natural at tinkering. He built radios and intercom systems in his basement and put up antennas on the roof. He dragged home discarded television sets off the street and took capacitors, resistors, transformers, and tubes out of them.
One Saturday in the mid-1960s, a teenaged Sasson and a buddy were playing with sulfur, carbon, and potassium nitrate in their basement. Their goal was to make gunpowder. “If it were today, the Department of Homeland Security would be paying me a visit,” Sasson joked.
Sasson went to college at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His freshman physics professor was a quiet, whimsical man, and a renowned educator. “OK, what problems have you had this week?” he’d ask the class. Sasson always had a question, since he struggled with his homework. The professor would go to the chalkboard and “start off with an equation like F = ma, and three lines later he’d have the whole thing,” Sasson recalled. “It was so elegant. It was so freaking elegant. Even if I had the right answer it took me three pages, but it took him just two or three lines. It was like watching Michael Jordan play basketball. It looked so smooth and freaking easy, but when you tried to do it you couldn’t do it.”
A FEW YEARS LATER, Sasson read a biography of George Eastman. Eastman, who had dropped out of high school, was self-taught. An accountant by trade and an avid kitchen sink experimenter, Eastman eventually revolutionized film photography and founded Kodak. Sasson’s core belief about engineering was influenced by Eastman’s motto: an artistic technology like the camera should be as “convenient as the pencil.”
Sasson joined Kodak.
As one of his first projects, Sasson was asked by his supervisor to explore the potential uses of a new technology called the charge-coupled device. The CCD is an electronic light sensor that was pioneered by Bell Labs. “It was at best a forty-five-second conversation with my supervisor,” Sasson recalled. There were no formal reviews or expectations for the project.
Kodak then had a profusion of mechanical engineers. As one of the very few electrical engineers on staff, Sasson thought he should build an image-capturing system “with absolutely no moving parts.” As an early-stage technology, the CCD was “very, very difficult to work with,” Sasson remembered. Its resolution was 10,000 pixels (or 0.01 megapixel). “On top of the actual device was a folded piece of paper on which the twelve voltage designations were printed,” he added. “Next to each one, handwritten in pencil, were specific voltage settings for each pin. At the bottom, it said, ‘Good luck!’ ”
Sasson spent long hours in a back lab doing tests, incrementally inching toward a groundbreaking technology. He barely spoke with his supervisor. “Our plan was unrealistic. No one was paying attention. We had no money. Nobody knew where we were working,” Sasson explained. “In summary, the situation was just about perfect!” A year later—in 1976—the twenty-five-year-old Sasson finished a prototype. It was a clunky contraption, more like an 8-pound toaster, requiring sixteen AA batteries.
“It was a dopey little device,” Sasson said.
“It was my baby.”
IN A WINDOWLESS conference room, cushioned chairs surrounded a long table in the center. Sasson was ready to demonstrate his prototype of the first digital camera to Kodak’s upper management. He took a head-and-shoulder shot of one of the executives. Then he began to describe what he had done, cleverly trying to hide the twenty-three-second lag required to record each digital image on the magnetic cassette tape that stored them. The tape was then removed from the camera and placed in a purpose-built playback device that connected to a television. A black-and-white picture of the executive then appeared on the screen.
The people at the table were stunned. Some really loved the idea, and some hated it. Some were so shocked they said nothing. “The technical people were impressed that some stupid little kid in the lab could build this thing,” Sasson recounted. But others launched a fusillade of questions and concerns. “Well, where would you store these images? You’re not making a print. People love prints. People don’t want to look at their pictures on a television set. Well, that image quality isn’t good enough.”
Sasson had no answers.
“It was like . . . shit!” Sasson told me. “I immediately wanted to pull back.”
In hindsight, who could blame those critics? Kodak was, after all, an institution anchored in Eastman’s film photography. Here was Sasson showing pictures that didn’t require film, photographic paper, or darkroom processing. This was a digital eruption in an analog world. “It was not a good way to get invited to the Christmas party,” Sasson said. “The whole thing was too far out there to be seriously considered.”
A colleague of Sasson told him privately, “Don’t worry, the world will get there. They don’t know it yet.”
THE PROTAGONIST in the 1951 movie The Man in the White Suit is a chemist played by Alec Guinness. His character invents a white suit that never gets dirty and turns out to be everlasting. This idea summarizes Martin Cooper’s view on technology: it has to be durable and self-sufficient. Cooper invented Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage—or DynaTAC. In English we call it the cell phone.
In the 1920s, Cooper’s parents emigrated from Ukraine, where they had been subjected to persecution. His grandfather was the town butcher. He raised enough money to arrange a wagon train across Europe to Belgium. Cooper’s parents then managed to move to Winnipeg in Canada and then to Illinois, where Cooper was born. He later studied engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Cooper is a slender man with curly, paper-white hair and beard. His career began at Motorola in the 1960s. “We were the most boring business in the world,” Cooper quipped. “When my mother asked me what I was doing, she’d have loved to hear me say ‘I’m a doctor.’ My mother knew who a doctor or a lawyer was. I used to say ‘Well . . . I’m in the two-way radio business.’ It broke her heart.”
Since the late 1940s, Motorola—then known as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation—had been a leader in car phones. In practice, they worked just as walkie-talkies do, but with a connection to the landline network supported by a switchboard operator. The car phones were convenient for people, but their performance was limited. Because there were only a small number of frequencies to begin with, the car telephone network was often congested and could handle only a few calls at any given time. Especially in big cities, as the installation and use of car telephones increased, frustrations among callers began to multiply as well. People had to wait a long time to be connected to calls from their car phones.
In 1968 the Federal Communications Commission opened up additional frequency ranges, expanding the possibilities for a “wireless” spectrum—meaning: “It will be possible to make telephone calls while riding in a taxi, walking down the city’s streets, sitting in a restaurant, or anywhere else a radio signal can reach,” announced a Motorola press release. How? A geographic region was broken down into smaller segments called “cells”—comparable to how ZIP codes and standard time emerged from modular systems design. Within a single cell network, hundreds—if not thousands—of callers could share the spectrum at the same time. Once the person shifted from one cell to a different cell network—say, while crossing a bridge—a set of computer-controlled radio transmitters and receivers would keep the call connected. This signal transfer would be so automatic and dynamic that callers wouldn’t even be aware of it. The call would just drop if the connection between the cell networks was bad.
This concept was the starting point for Cooper’s DynaTAC. In the early 1970s he approached his colleagues in Motorola’s industrial design group about converting his concept sketch into a prototype. They offered very creative ideas. One idea was a slider phone; another was a flip phone. Cooper selected a single-piece design that looked like a brick. “The last thing in the world we needed was the complexity of moving parts. You know that moving parts are going to break,” he said.
Cooper’s team took about three months to prototype the first generation of DynaTAC. The effort was informed mainly by Cooper’s previous experiences in building a commercial pager technology at Motorola. DynaTAC had thousands of parts in it: radio, antenna, coils, capacitors, synthesizers, oscillators, and batteries. As the prototype evolved, so did Cooper’s vision of a practical framework for modern cellular telephony. “The phone by itself can’t do anything,” he told me. “You needed a whole infrastructure around it.” The idea bears an uncanny resemblance to John Shepherd-Barron’s vision for the telematics of ATMs. Cooper kept shuffling and rearranging his ideas until he produced a proof of concept.
“When I get something working and demonstrate the principle, I lose interest,” Cooper said. “I never thought that I was a very good engineer,” he added, “but what I’m really good at is getting into the mind of the consumer. I’m the ultimate consumer myself.” This point of view was the key to the success of his cell phone concept. Updates to transmitter and receiver technologies, coupled with customer feedback, inspired further improvements to DynaTAC. The prototyping and refinement of the design continued, leading up to the demonstration of the first fully wireless call in the United States in 1973. At that time, Cooper’s cell phone weighed slightly more than 2 pounds. It had a battery life of thirty-five minutes. Hamstrung by regulatory constraints, commercial wireless service did not become a reality until a decade later.
Beneath the dense web of wireless communication lies an ascetic virtue that energized Cooper. If John Shepherd-Barron’s idea for the ATM was fired by an inventive spark, Cooper’s was more like a slow-burning ember: the belief that people are fundamentally mobile. Wires and cables only restrict them. “They infringe on our freedom, and to be free, you have to be disconnected. You have to be wireless,” Cooper said. “If you’re wireless, all of a sudden a whole bunch of things change. Things have to be small and light so you can carry them with you.” This outlook influenced every bit of engineering that Cooper did.
MODERN CELL PHONES are hardly just cell phones. They are motifs of hyperfunctionality. Even the simplest phones are complicated. Developers and customers routinely become slaves to feature creep that bloats otherwise simple designs. This is where Cooper’s wife, Arlene Harris, comes into the picture.
“I am unconstrained by the teachings of pure sciences,” Harris asserts. “Marty, however, is far more methodical and grounded on the firmaments.” Cooper first met Harris at a party in the late 1970s. Cooper was then a vice president at Motorola. “Her older brother never forgave me,” Cooper said. “He wanted to tell me all his new ideas, and all I wanted was to talk to Arlene.”
In recent years, Harris has been agonized by the mentality of cell phone manufacturers who ignore the needs of senior citizens. “The phone companies didn’t really care about that market,” says Harris. She designed a cell phone that was friendly to senior customers—really simple to use, and supported by an old-fashioned operator service. Her creation was the Jitterbug. Its features are basic. It has a numeric keypad, a screen with large-font display, and a big button to place a call.
Now consider this: Many people change phones every year. Each phone looks different, feels different, claims different improvements over its predecessor, and requires relentless software updates. Whether it’s cell phones or breakfast cereals, manufacturers push out “new” products for their own reasons. Within the business realities of “planned obsolescence”—or the technical realities of relentless improvements in operating systems, processors, and memory capacity—last year’s optimally functional technology is rendered extinct, sent to the graveyard of gadgets.
By comparison, the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, has been safely functioning since 1883, requiring at most preventive upkeep and occasional fixes. The designs of the Jitterbug and the Brooklyn Bridge uncover a question in the temporality of engineered systems: where is the line between transience and durability? The Jitterbug is a reminder of how difficult it is to create an intuitive, user-friendly interface. Simplicity is not about stripping down features to a bare minimum. It’s about achieving elegance while maintaining performance. A technology is effective only if it enhances the user’s value and experience. One can easily embed a miniature camera on a cell phone screen for the sake of doing it, but only its usefulness can prove that it’s a powerful tool, not a toy.
JUNE 1989. On the eve of the Tiananmen Square protests, Beijing cut off all communications with the outside world. Just two years earlier, in the United States, a handful of law enforcement officials and real estate agencies had purchased new digital image transmission systems from Kodak. This system—developed by Sasson and his team—was able to digitize and compress the images captured by a video camera and transmit them using a standard telephone line connection.
There was another early adopter: CBS News. It took Sasson and Kodak by surprise when CBS News used this technology to stream images from Tiananmen Square. “I was shocked. We had no idea,” Sasson said while showing me an archival video in his home office, where hung a picture of him receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama.
At first, Kodak felt there was only a limited market for such a device, but Sasson viewed it as a critical step toward the development of commercial digital cameras. He needed to exploit image compression techniques to make the storage of megapixel images practical. Sasson’s imagination now veered toward a digital camera with a built-in hard disk. By 1990, Sasson’s camera had evolved into a very sophisticated prototype. Kodak engineers added JPEG-like image compression features before JPEGs were standardized. The camera had a memory card–like technology for storing images. It was a completely handheld unit. It had a color resolution of 1.2 megapixels. The simultaneous flowering of personal computers had opened up new possibilities. People could download the images onto their computers and do almost anything with them.
Sasson sensed sunny prospects. But soon he hit a wall. Kodak was rigid in its belief that digital cameras would cannibalize the company’s lucrative film products. Sasson’s innovation didn’t mesh with Kodak’s legacy. The company “basically told Sasson to take that box and go away; we don’t ever want to see you again,” a top executive from Kodak recalled recently. Sasson was frustrated. He left the digital camera business and looked for other opportunities. He even applied for a mission specialist job at NASA. No success.
A few years after he left Kodak, Sasson and his wife went to Yellowstone National Park for a summer vacation. Like hundreds of other spectators, they were waiting for Old Faithful to erupt. As the geyser went off, Sasson looked around. All he could see was people taking pictures using digital cameras.
“It’s happening,” Sasson murmured to his wife.
“What?”
That was the moment when Sasson told his wife that he had invented the digital camera.
PIERS SHEPPERD takes his instincts seriously. He swings seamlessly among the worlds of arts, entertainment, and engineering as he runs a London firm that offers technical expertise for high-profile performance events like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. “We realize the impossible. We make the exceptional. We build WOW,” says his company web page.
When asked about his prototyping process, Shepperd declared that much of his job involves asking stupid questions. “I don’t care about the details at all until I understand what the end point is,” Shepperd said. “Even long before I get to the engineering, I spend quite a lot of time understanding what the client wants.”
It gets tricky for Shepperd when his clients don’t know what they want. “Some clients will give me a 3-D AutoCAD model, and they may have a very good spatial understanding of what it is that they’re after. Other clients use only words. Some even give you a piece of wood or a sketch from their children saying ‘OK, this is what I imagine,’ ” he explained.
His clients present visions that are often vague and unrealistic. Shepperd’s challenge is then to introduce structure—first in his own mind and then in his client’s mind. “You’re trying to put them in a space,” Shepperd said. At the same time, “there’s a part of my mind that says I need to think like an artist to permit self-expression.” Artistic people assign great value to an object or an idea, and what it may mean to an audience. “It isn’t until we actually build the object as a prototype that we learn if the significance is justified,” Shepperd added.
Consider this hurdle that Shepperd faced during the planning of the 2012 London Olympics, for which he was the chief technical director: Film director Danny Boyle (the event’s chief artistic director) and his team had a vision for an inspiring opening-ceremony scene depicting Britain’s industrial revolution. Their concept included elements like chimneys, steam engines, and looms. All of the proposed elements in the scenery were to be delivered live and full-scale in front of the audience within a total allotted performance time of ten minutes.
Prior to this scene was an act featuring the bucolic English countryside—“green and pleasant land”—set with real meadows, grazing animals, and water mills. It was technically unfeasible to install the industrial revolution scenery within the countryside set up in advance. The transition between the two scenes had to be natural, smooth, and seamless. Shepperd encountered another practical challenge. How and where would the large hardware—like the chimneys—be stored when not in use before and after the scene? Trying to find a place for them while not affecting other items—especially the Olympic cauldron appearing later in the show—proved to be almost impossible.
Shepperd tried negotiating with the artistic team. Could the chimneys be digitally projected instead of being built as full-scale models? Another possibility was to have two-dimensional fabric rolls with chimney images that could be quickly pulled up for the scene. These would eliminate the transition challenges that concerned Shepperd. The artistic team didn’t budge. They were firm on having real 3-D objects that could be deployed in minutes. Moreover, for the whole scene to be effective, they needed at least ten chimneys.
Under these constraints, Shepperd’s team started to work on numerous software and hardware models for the chimney. Then emerged what seemed to be a tangible method. They fabricated a series of concentric plastic rings that could be pulled by a cable from the ground using an aerial winch. The rings stacked within each other and were almost invisible on stage. But the testing showed that they were vulnerable to wind. Further, the scene didn’t look very exciting when deployed.
At a time when he was desperate for alternatives, Shepperd somewhat randomly spotted the use of inflatable puppets for the Mary Poppins scene. It clicked. Shepperd could imagine an inflatable chimney. In practice, this was an ingenious method because it would require only a small winch inside the inflatable envelope that could deploy the chimney more gracefully.
The artistic team couldn’t quite see the full potential—probably because the tower at that point didn’t look much like a chimney—but Shepperd wasn’t discouraged. He thought the inflatable approach was worth investigating further. There followed a long period of prototyping to develop a more realistic chimney. A few months later, Shepperd demonstrated to the artistic team a full-height inflatable chimney supported by a winch cable from the top. His team had cleverly printed a brick-pattern fabric for the tower to make it look like a chimney.
Shepperd and his fellow engineers then worked robustly to develop the internal winch system and the blowers capable of keeping the chimneys looking solid as they lifted into the air. They added some foam rubber finishes near the base of the chimney to create what looked like a more substantial brick base. For an aesthetic touch, they also added a small smoke generator near the top so that the chimney could have wisps of smoke rising from it. Shepperd also deployed an aerial artist alongside the chimney as it rose into the air. “This made the chimneys more realistic, as the artist could pretend to be working on the masonry,” Shepperd said. “It also allowed the camera to really understand the scale of what was being deployed.”
This process of quick iterative design is really important for theatrical effects because it enables the whole team—both technical and artistic—to understand whether the end result will be worth the budget and effort. “Some things look and sound very good when described in a model, but are underwhelming when delivered at full scale,” Shepperd pointed out. “The deployment of the chimneys ended up being one of the key iconic moments for the opening ceremony.”
For Shepperd, the engineering process is different every time. His goal of providing mesmerizing multisensory experience is orchestrated with stopwatch precision. As with the case of the chimneys, Shepperd’s basic design consideration is whether the structures need to be real or feel real? For all this work, rain, wind, and gravity provide Shepperd the constraints.
These challenges are different from building a bridge or an airport—projects that have firm, frozen objectives and specifications and rely on a cornucopia of standard case studies and learned experience. There’s a well-defined design journey to prevent failure or liability. “If technology fails, man is the backup option,” Shepperd said. To come up with something novel that triggers an emotional effect involves a lot of trial and error—and often far more error.
TWEAKING AND PROTOTYPING are basic human habits. Anyone who cooks knows a little bit about both. They are also powerful professional tools employed by engineers. Steve Sasson’s work was founded on a steady, stepwise stream of tweaks. The successive refinements were carried out with the knowledge that there’s always another layer of onion to peel. It was an exercise in functional prototyping.
The digital-camera prototype was an important crutch for Sasson. He could show the prototype to his company executives without having to explain much of the technical details. They could look at it. They could touch and feel it. They could see their instant photograph on a television screen. As Sasson was challenged in that conference room, the spirit of the discussion was about a world of new possibilities—even as his colleagues were completely unprepared for the digital revolution.
With the digital camera, Sasson had no formal, planned specifications. No requirements were set in place. He was doing what we could call blind engineering: the final outcome was unknown. He was searching a wide range of solutions and didn’t start off knowing that the charge-coupled device could lead to a digital imaging system. Nobody was complaining about film-based photography, nor did Sasson start out with the idea of building a digital camera. He was exploring an application for a new technology that his supervisor thought was interesting. For him the notion of the digital camera was as simple as “why not?” It was as if he was baking a cake, and making up the recipe as he went.
Prototypes are easier to react to. As Martin Cooper put it, “If my wife shows me a dress and asks, ‘What do you think of this?’ I can’t tell much until she puts it on.” Cooper’s invention of the cell phone emerged from conceptual prototyping. It started out with a specific vision. It required forward reasoning. Like a sculptor, Cooper had to chisel out the concept of DynaTAC while getting rid of useless elements and filtering out fragile ideas.
This design concept is also integral to Piers Shepperd’s line of work. In aesthetic prototyping, functionality of the product becomes almost secondary to the sensory effect it will have on the viewer. When you see the Empire State Building, what does it make you feel? Does it fill you with a sense of pride? Does it move you? Then come the technical considerations. Can the prototype of the amazing skyscraper be 1 foot tall or does it need to be 80 feet?
THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE between Sasson’s functional prototyping, Cooper’s conceptual prototyping, and Shepperd’s aesthetic prototyping is the principle of test-driven development. Testing relies on data. Testing also generates data. But data are not always available to support design decisions. Nevertheless, these decisions need to be made. That’s probably why engineers rely on prototypes as reasonable substitutes for data.
In the case of Sasson and Cooper, people might have thought about the concept of a digital camera or a cell phone, but no one had effectively prototyped one before. These technological changes represent transformation—systems built from existing tools in the same way that the genetic characteristics of bacteria are shaped through the assimilation of DNA supplied by the environment. These changes also confirm the broader fact that there is no “perfect” design. As the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi makes clear, everything is imperfect, everything is impermanent, and everything has room for improvement.
Prototypes are also helpful in highlighting the potential threat of design fixation. Locking in on a path prematurely begins to thwart innovation. Risk aversion creeps in. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the trap of Einstellung—a set bias that impedes better solutions by staying glued to knowledge that’s familiar and favored, or adhering to an experienced frame of reference. This outlook initially hindered Kodak’s business strategy—just as it blinded Vallière from recognizing the explosive potential of Gribeauval’s agile, lightweight cannons. Similarly, Kodak’s fixation with film photography crippled its capacity to see the power and prospects of Sasson’s digital-camera technology.
Prototypes create new capabilities. Prototypes foster adaptation to new forms, new expectations, and new offshoots of technologies. Prototypes are the starting points toward our ultimate creative destinations. If you consider steam power as a prototype application, it took about 120 years—that is, four working lifetimes—to reach a saturation point. From the days of the earliest mechanical (verge escapement) clocks, the errors of accuracy in clocks have diminished by six orders of magnitude in six centuries. At one point in their evolution, clocks used to be off by thirty minutes a day, but now their error rate is down to a fraction of a second. Land and air transportation technologies have evolved similarly.
Technological performance seems to double roughly once every thirty years until the technologies themselves become saturated or obsolete. Estimates suggest that efficiencies of some technologies have improved by fourfold to eightfold if not more during every generation since 1840. The performance of powered balloons has risen remarkably from the very sluggish rates of the late nineteenth century, achieving an almost tenfold improvement in a single generation to reach the current levels of commercial and space transport. In the case of Sasson’s digital camera, it took twenty-odd years for the resolutions to go up from 0.01 megapixel in black and white to 1.2 megapixels in color—a 120-fold improvement. More recent camera models are emerging with astounding capacities, including superior lenses, digital and optical zooms, and high-definition video resolution. These dramatic improvements have occurred in just the past five to ten years. Other systems—for example, the capacity of the telecommunication spectrum supporting cell phone networks or the density of the semiconductor chips—have peaked at exponential rates.
These increases are a “strange human rhythm,” says John Lienhard, a cultural historian of engineering. New technologies are now created in months, sometimes weeks. “It’s unconscious. It’s inexorable. The inventive mind seems to be animal instinct as much as volition,” Lienhard observes. “Invention flows from our inner being. It is a powerful river that cannot be dammed or deflected . . . it’s the way we insist on life. Invention is the primary means by which we rage against equilibrium and death.”
IN THE FALL of 2009, some of the world’s prominent leaders in science, technology, and business gathered at an awards ceremony in London. It was a black-tie gala organized by the Economist. Two shy engineers attended this event. They had never met before. They grew up and worked in very different circumstances. On the surface, their works were unconnected. But their efforts culminated in a fusion that probably neither of them predicted.
When they greeted each other for the first time, others took pictures of them with their cell phone cameras. Their names were Steve Sasson and Martin Cooper.