Radiation-Watch.org,
an open and non-profit project formed up in Japan, took an excellent approach
to develop and launched very inexpensive and smart radiation detectors to the
international market. The organization
is supported by a variety of people, such as scientists, engineers and
designers on a global basis. The
organization surprisingly enough to have designed, developed manufactured, and
launched the first model, Pocket Geiger Type 1 within just three month soon
after the team made its decision to get the thing done. All of the team members shared their own expertise
on purely good will basis using their off-times, weekends and nights in
weekdays.
Needless
to say, scientific, technological and engineering expertise the team members hold
are the first class while there were three key factors for the successful fast
launch of the high quality radiation detector.
Firstly, they used Kickstarter to get financial support for the
project. Using the system, Radiation-watch
team could not only get financial support on global basis but also was able to expose
the team in the global market simultaneously and in parallel to connect to so
many people in the world who had good ideas to fill up or improve parts of the
whole process. Secondly, they tried to have a manufacturer in the Tohoku
disaster area where the big earthquake hit on March 11, 2011. Actually, the entity the team contracted
manufacturing is located in the area. It
should be obvious that the contract manufacturing must have been so encouraging
the company to revive its business from the catastrophic disaster. Third point is that the product, Pocket
Geiger assumes computing capability of the other products, such as iPhone,
iPod, iPad and Android based.
The
combination of the three key factors brought the team successful results while
every participant in the project must have willingly shared each part of idea
to create the big picture of the whole process through delivery of Pocket
Geiger.
The
author of this article believes that Pocket Geiger must be one of the typical
model of Steven John’s discussion on “Where good ideas come from “
On
July 1, 2013, Pocket Geiger received the honorable RedDot Design Award, which
is an international product design prize given by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein
Westfalen in Essen, Germany. According
to the jury, “The Pocket Geiger is cost-effective and simple to use, so it thus
contributes the safety of people in the region affected (by the reactor
accident in Japan)”
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