Reverse Engineering
Engineering curiosity and how to use it effectively, your “ace in the hand.”
The elephant in the room:
Isn’t this all about stealing ideas?
Reverse engineering is the very simple principle of learning from what others have done, both from other humans or the natural world, animals, plants and geography. It can be applied to things, processes or events and is driven by a curiosity to understand why and how something is how it is.
Imagine trying to design a toaster without having ever seen one, you might be free to develop wild new ideas never before seen, but it will also take you a long time to do and will likely not work well compared to the alternatives that are already out there. Reverse engineering is about learning from others, but that doesn’t mean it’s all about stealing and espionage.
Yes it can be used for unethical purposes and there are some incredible James Bond stories of secrets being stolen and then similar looking products appearing soon after. But that is a very small number of instances that spoils the reputation of the term.
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
Issac Newton
Your (not so secret) design head start.
What if you could start half way up someone else’s idea curve? What if you didn’t have to do everything yourself from base principles?
It can be used to learn, repair, improve, copy or discover how things work and whilst the common understanding is a negative one of stealing and copying others ideas, it should probably be every entrepreneurs or engineers go to first step.
Reverse Engineering is a head start like no other. Speeding up your development time and shortening your idea life cycle.
There are 4 types of design:
Original - The blank sheet of paper
Adaptive - Market pull for a changing need, typically improvements in function
Development - Technology push such as a new material, manufacture or process
Variant - Changing parameters, might be size, cost and scaling
Since original ideas are probably less than 1% of all ideas, reverse engineering what has come before you could be considered critical to successful design.
“Experience is a hard teacher, she gives the test before the lesson.”
Vernon Law
Uses and Purpose for Reverse Engineering
Learning
Ever taken things apart just to see what was going on inside? For many people this is simply the best way they learn and understand something. There doesn’t need to be a motivation other than being curious with how something does what it does.
Bench Marking
One of the more significant uses for reverse engineering in industry, comparing what you are doing with what all your competitors are. Testing, analysing and comparing. Who performs better and why? Who is cheaper and why? Etc…
Repair & Maintenance
Lots of products or machines are no longer supported by their producers. Old Victorian tools are still often found in workshops around the country so it’s important to be able to work out what’s going on in case you need to fix it.
Archaeology
Historical artefacts and constructions are often left without any explanation as to what they were used for or why they were made that way. Uncovering the real reason for something follows the same principles whether it’s in a shop or a museum.
Inspiration
Looking at the things around us is a key factor in creating new fresh ideas. Combining the “adjacent possible” has been a cornerstone of innovation since Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Failure Analysis
Why did something go wrong? Can we put the pieces back together and figure out what happened leading up to this event? It’s a fascinating area of study and can come in many shapes and forms. If you want to avoid the mistakes of others, learn from them before they happen to you.
Car Industry Examples
Tesla (everyone’s favourite company to diss it seems) is perhaps attracting an unfair amount of scrutiny at the moment. The new kid on the block is constantly being shaken down by everyone else, either privately or publicly. But car companies are famous for their teardowns of each others products.
GM's “Vehicle Assessment and Benchmarking Activity Centre” buys one of every competing car released and takes them apart (in a process that takes 6 weeks) to work out how they are doing it, what it would cost, and thus the likely profit margins so they can adjust their strategy accordingly.
Super nerdy takes downs of electric car parts. Weber State University in the US has produced an amazing set of car videos for anyone to watch. Just beautifully done. If you’re a engineering nerd, you’ll love them and learn a huge amount.
Antikythera Mechanism
Reverse engineering a 2,000+ year old lump of fused metal and rust (sorry I’m a total history geek).
Discovered by accident by some divers sheltering from a storm, they uncovered an eroded and rusted metal lump. It’s taken over 100 years or research, experimentation and the development of new x-ray technologies to uncover what it was and how it worked.
What they discovered completely changes how we must think and consider technology in the ancient world.
A device so advanced that it can accurately predict the position of the moon, the moon that orbits around the earth not in a circle but in an ellipse, and an ellipse that ‘wobbles’ every 9 years. All this based on stone records of the movements of the moon, sun and planets recorded in 650BC.