Serendipity and Smart Dust

Exaptation is the when an innovation that was originally designed for one purpose, is redesigned for another. A good example of this is the invention of air conditioning. Willis Carrier was trying to remove humidity from a lithographing office in 1902 (Lester, 2015). His invention was able to increase or decrease the humidity in a room and it had the additional benefit of cooling the air in room as well.

Discovery by error is likely the most common form of accidental invention. This is when a mistake during research or development returns a positive result. During software design, this is usually called turning a bug into a feature.  For example, Gmail originally had a 5 second delay when processing email. Instead of fixing the delay, developers added an ‘undo’ button that would stop the email from being sent (Leggett, 2009). This way, the error in processing the email message turned into a feature that allowed users to quickly call back an email after hitting send.

Serendipity occurs when a positive outcome is the result of a chance event. A good example of this could be getting lost but finding a great new restaurant or book store where you end up. You weren’t intending to look for a restaurant, but because of going the wrong way you found it.

In October of 2003, a graduate student at the University of California in San Diego won $50,000 as the grand prize in the Collegiate Inventors Competition for her invention of ‘smart dust’. Smart dust consists of silicon partials that can be used to detect a variety of biological and chemical agents in different media (Link, 2005). Since its invention in 2003, there have been many more proposed and applied applications for smart dust. Along with sensing the molecular structure of different objects, smart dust can be used to sense minute levels of light as well. Smart dust is being adapted to carry signals, which could result in things like wireless sensor nodes that are a cubic millimeter in size. Jamie Link was in the process of making thin multi-layer porous silicon when the silicon chip snapped. The accident released small amounts of silicon dust that held the same properties as the chip. This serendipitous event brought about this invention that has a wide range of uses in medical and environmental diagnostics and research.

References:

Leggett, M. (2009, March 19). New in Labs: Undo Send. Retrieved August 22, 2018, from

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html

Lester, P. (2015, July 20). History of Air Conditioning. Retrieved August 22, 2018, from

https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning

Link, J. R. (2005). Spectrally encoded porous silicon “smart dust” for chemical and biological sensing applications. (3171107 Ph.D.), University of California, San Diego, Ann Arbor. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database.