You need to make the step forward Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, ‘Given the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.’ In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he ‘used to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.’ Gordon Murray, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsMediocratopia progress
Drawing the bits That's what is great about race car design, because even though you've had the big idea - the “light bulb” thing, which is fun - the real fun is actually taking these individual things, that nobody's every done before, and in no time at all try and think of a way of designing them. And not only think of a way of doing them, but drawing the bits, having them made and testing them. Gordon Murray, Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
What's wrong with the rational model We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start We Usually Don’t Know the Decision Tree – We Discover It as We Go The Nodes Are Really Not Design Decisions, but Tentative Complete Designs The Goodness Function Cannot be Evaluated Incrementally The Desiderata and Their Weightings Keep Changing The Constraints Keep Changing Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., What's Wrong With This Model? Changing constraintsDeciding what to designThe situation talks back