So what will it take to design a ‘best in the world’ cruising yacht? 

By John Channings

I agree that is a big question, as the sea is a demanding place and boats are complex. 
To have a profound break through in design requires a profound approach, a fresh paradigm.  I suggest that such a sailboat will not be born out of following a traditional process for designing and building sailboats.
Asking your favorite designer to design you a ‘best in the world’ cruising home, no matter how big your budget, will produce nothing more than something very similar to what already exists. 
‘Best in the world’ is not a consequence of money, but rather the consequence of ‘best in the world’ thinking. 
We are proposing such a fresh approach.
Let me comment on some of the assumptions that need first to be acknowledged before a fresh design paradigm is possible.  To start with, it is not so much our assumptions about boats that we need to recognize, but our assumptions about design thinking.  Here are my comments on the subject and I look forward to receiving yours.

Sharing ideas:
Designing from our experiences:
Designing beyond compromise:
Designing beyond the conceptual:
Problems aren’t solved just managed:
Thinking instead of copying:
Simple is best:
Team:

Conclusion:

Sharing Ideas

One of the greatest constraints to thinking and our ability to progress in any area of endeavor is the current obsession with ‘intellectual property’, the owning and withholding of knowledge.  All wisdom and thinking builds on what goes before; what is available for us to improve on.  As a world we are slowing down our own growth by putting a price on knowledge and withholding it.

To accelerate design thinking, we need to share and communicate with others who are prepared to share and communicate with us.  We belong to one of two camps; the 'scarcity' camp who wants to withhold information unless it serves their selfish goals and the 'abundance' camp who sees that sharing information works for the good of all and what goes around comes around.  We are operating from the abundance paradigm of freely sharing our ideas.

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Designing from our experiences:

All design; all creative thinking is grounded in our experiences of life.  This is obvious.  However, it is not taken into consideration when recognizing our strengths and limitations.  Boat builders complain that designs can’t be built, with out honoring the reality that designers (who don’t build) don’t have building experience.  Sailors complain that boat builders build 'unworkable at sea' solutions, without honoring the reality that boat builders (who don’t sail) don’t have sailing experience.  Rather than bad mouth each other, I say, let's honor the experience that each of us brings to the equation and seek out each other’s wisdom based on our respective experiences.  The opportunity then is to create experience based solutions, based on all the experiences we collectively bring to the table.  
Our design wisdom is as good as our experiences and our learning's from our experiences.  It is very useful to start by getting honest with the limits of our experiences and not be shy to declare our limits.

Final word on ‘experience’; no matter how much men may have studied women and their needs, men can never experience what it means to be a woman.  I say this, as a man, because I want to suggest that women (not men) are ideally suited to declare what women’s needs and preferences on a boat are.

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Designing beyond compromise:

It is so often heard, especially with boats, “everything is a compromise.” 
That is one way of looking at things, but not a powerful one. 

All things, including boats are subject to ‘structural coherences’.  Coherences that pertain to the structure and its relationship to its environment.  These coherences are just that; coherences that make the structure possible; they are not compromises. Compromise is an invention of human thinking and does not exist in real life.  For example humans have a structural coherence that allows us to walk but not fly; ducks have a structural coherence that allows them to do both.  Neither humans nor ducks are a 'compromise'.  The same is true of boats, they float but don’t fly, they are subject to 'structural coherences', that is all. 

Now when we say, “everything is a compromise” and use it to justify why something is not possible, we omit asking a better question.  It may be that we are dealing with a ‘structural coherence’ which is not a compromise, but a feature of reality.  On the other hand, it may just be lazy or ‘inside the box’ thinking and that we simply have not explored the issue fully enough.  To design beyond compromise is to understand the existence of ‘structural coherences’ and then recognizing that everything outside of those coherences is possible. 

I suggest; "When in doubt consider that it is possible and keep inquiring."

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Designing beyond the conceptual:

There are two ways to approach design, ‘conceptual’ or ‘practical’.

While conceptual design is a starting point, it is not the real world of boats at sea.  You may well argue with my point, and that’s okay, but I’d like to suggest that because of the way we have been educated, practical and conceptual design has been collapsed together in our minds so we don’t know the difference.  But their is a real difference in the end result.
Put simply, if it works, it is 'practical' design.
This is well understood by boat designers as they learn from their practical experiences.

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Problems aren’t solved just managed:

When setting out to solve a design problem, it is important to ask the question, "Are we solving this problem or are we managing it?"  Einstein nailed this distinction when he declared, “no problem can be solved at the level it was created.” 
For example the problem of running out of diesel for the engine can never be solved by having bigger fuel tanks, more efficient motors or more easily driven hulls.  All these things manage the problem but we will still eventually run out of fuel.  No solution at the level of diesel engines will solve the problem.

Look at the problem from another level; what would it take to attract and store energy as we went along?  The beginnings of a solution are showing up with solar panels, wind generators and propellers driving an alternator and when required using an electric motor to drive the boat.  While there are challenges at present with this solution, it does solve the problem of running out of fuel.
This is just an example of what I am getting at here.  It demonstrates that as long as we have combustion engines to drive boats, we will only ever manage the problem of running out of fuel. 

Another example; we can’t solve the problem of keeping water out of a boat.  Water moves freely in and out of a boat whether it is moisture in the air, human bodies, rain coming in open hatches, or water piped into flush the toilet, cool the engine or wash the dishes.  The only thing we can do is manage the problem of water in the boat, by minimizing condensation, maximizing air flow, sound construction and not having accidents etc.
However, we have solved the problem of hulls leaking.  Caulked wooden hulls would always leak as they were made up of many pieces (planks). 
Once integral building systems such as glued wood, welded steel or GRP hulls, were developed, the problem of leaking hulls was solvable.  But as I have just said it did not solve the problem of keeping water out of the boat.

Before solving a design problem, first recognize whether we are setting out to manage or solve the problem.

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Thinking instead of copying:

When presented with a design problem; we have two options for how to proceed.

One is to ask ourselves; what did we do last time or what has someone else done to solve this problem before?

If we offer this solution, then we are ‘copying’ not ‘thinking’ and this in fact is how most problems are solved and what most people think of when they talk about thinking.  Why? Because that is what we were taught at school.  We were taught to pass exams by offering up answers that agreed with the teacher’s answers and got us the mark.  While this is useful at school and in life, it is not a useful or creative process when we are looking for fresh solutions.  Needless to say this takes more time and has its own challenges.  To design a ‘best in the world’ boat, requires thinkers who think from the 'creative' paradigm rather than the 'copying' paradigm.

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Simple is best:

In so many areas of design ‘less is more’, and the best designs, that stand the test of time are disarmingly simple.  This is even more so at sea, as the consequences of complexity failing to deliver can have escalating consequences.  Because we have active minds we are tempted to design more into boats.  As most sailors realize, more does not necessarily mean better, just something more to go wrong.  To achieve a reliable, quality of life experience at sea, it is useful to embrace ‘simple is best’.

This is not to deny the opportunities of modern technology, but just to moderate the tendency to design in more because we can.

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Team:

Team can stand for “Together Everyone Achieves Miracles”, easily said but rarely practiced.  The breakdown with the way we play team and coordinate action these days is that we are in it only for ourselves, in spite of what we pay lip service to.  The catch line WIIFM, ‘What’s In It For Me’ is heard all the time.  It does not however deliver team miracles.  When New Zealand won the America’s Cup beating America in 1995, it was nothing short of a miracle.  New Zealand, with 4 million people and very limited resources was in no position on paper to defeat far better resourced American campaigns.  However under the leadership of Peter Blake, a masterful example of team play did deliver a miracle.   (When NZ lost the America’s cup on their second defense, Team New Zealand by that time existed in name only.  The team dynamic had thoroughly collapsed.)

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Conclusion:

Before we can design and build ‘best in the world’ boats, we need to assemble a champion team.
Whatever your experiences, your contribution is welcome.  If these ideas resonate with you we invite you to get in touch and introduce yourself. 

Do you want to find out more?
Ask us your questions          Email:  john@lifestyle-sailing.com

We look forward to hearing from you.

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