<aside> 🚩 Every design has certain assumptions “baked” into it. Find them and challenge them to possibly discover new ways to solve existing problems.
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The design of every artifact makes certain assumptions. It’s inevitable. While such assumptions may be valid, at least for a time, they do tend to age badly as technology, scientific knowledge, and people’s needs progress and evolve.
Challenging those assumptions does not mean you simply ignore or discount them.
To challenge an assumption means to ask Why? and to then go find an answer.
Sometimes, the answer you find is perfectly valid, and the assumption will still hold. Not much to do there.
Other times, however, you’ll find that the assumption just doesn’t hold true any more. In that case, you’ve just found an opportunity to possibly improve the design - by relaxing the assumption.
For decades, conventional wisdom (and science) informed us that aircraft benefit from wings that are swept backward to travel at high speeds (such as the Boeing 747 in Figure 1).
A fundamental assumption in this design is that the aircraft must be (a) flyable manually and (b) extremely stable in flight.
Figure 1: Boeing 747 (Wikimedia Commons)
However, some aircraft (particularly military fighters) need to be highly maneuverable (the opposite of being stable) and can avail themselves of cutting edge electronics that are too risky to use in commercial aircraft. This led engineers to recognize that backward swept wings increase efficiency only in a regime where stability is paramount.
As a result, various aircraft were developed with forward swept wings (like the X-29 in Figure 2).
Figure 2: X-29 aircraft (Wikimedia Commons)
Aircraft with forward swept wings are inherently unstable and cannot be controlled by a human pilot. The inherent instability makes them far more maneuverable than conventional aircraft - so long as there is a powerful computer making thousands of adjustments each second to keep the aircraft under the pilot’s control.
The angle of the “V” between the two sets of cylinders in a V-8 auto engine is 90 degrees. Why? What's so magical about 90 degrees? Why was a 90 degree V chosen to begin with? What was the original problem that the V solved? Are there any other solutions? Are there any new technologies, materials, or methods that make those other solutions better than the actual one?
The primary reason for using a 90 degree angle of “V” is to control vibrations from the engine, and allow the engine to fit in the engine compartment constrained by the requirements of the automobile’s “style”.
The assumptions here are that user preferences are constant (they’re not), and 90 degrees is the only value that limits vibrations (it isn’t).
If we relax or change the style constraints, there are other angles that can be used: 0 degrees, 120 degrees, 180 degrees….
As technology and user preferences change, new engines could be developed.
(Of course, it would be even better to get rid of IC engines entirely to lower our dependence on petroleum-based fuels….)
