Embedded Processing

I was thinking about a video I recently saw about candles. Before seeing the video, I had never given candles much thought. They did what they did, and they seemed trivially simple in their structure. I always took for granted that the candlewick was consumed during the process of burning the candle. Until the invention of self-snuffing wicks, a scissor-like tool called a candle snuffer, was needed to trim the wick precisely because the wick did not burn and to avoid excess smoke.

As I thought more about this topic, I realized the wick could be considered an example of the passive or structural processing I introduced in an earlier post. In this case, the structural characteristics created during the manufacture of modern wicks take advantage of how making the candlewick bend toward the edge of the flame allows it to self-trim the wick.

The point here is to recognize that examples of passive or structural behaviors are all around us and can be sources of inspiration for ever more efficient ways of implementing old and new functions in our designs.