Simple Ideas Are Best

Dec 4

Complicated doesn’t equal smart.

Working in tech can be exhausting. The profession is littered with smart people trying to sound smarter than the next smart person.

Complicated ideas are often a veneer for fuzzy thinking, laziness, insecurity or all of the above. So it’s refreshing to find simple, ingenious innovations and thoughtful ways to describe them.

Today’s exhibit is the Hump Back Station. The no-explanation-required visual is by Sketchplanations.

Hump Back Stations elevate train stations with a small hill. Gravity helps trains conserve energy as they approach the station and adds energy on the way out. This simple innovation is used in the London underground. The Victoria line is said to consume 5% less energy than a flat track and run trains 9% faster than unhumped lines.

All thanks to a little hill. Simple! Brilliant!

Don’t be seduced by seemingly smart, complicated ideas; dig for simple instead.

Resources

Data from “Victoria line data from Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air,” by David JC MacKay.

Illustration by Sketchplanations

Italy’s smart analytics infrastructure and video on LinkedIn.

Techno-Sapien