elon Musk
Tesla Motors; SpaceX
Elon Musk comes up with
design ideas in the shower.
That may be his only free
time. In 2010, Tesla suc-
cessfully IPO’d, and SpaceX
became the first commer-
cial company to recover a
spacecraft from the Earth’s
orbit. As a designer, Musk
says, he tries “to imagine,
from a physics standpoint,
what an ideal solution
would look like and how
practical it is.” He rarely
draws them out; he is in the
shower, after all.
alisdair MCgregor
Arup
“As engineers,” says Alis-
dair McGregor, “we find
something that works, so
we’re finished. But if we
take the time to creatively
think about it, we can do
better.” McGregor, an Arup
fellow, has been thinking
about sustainability for
decades. He has worked on
buildings large and small,
retrofits and ground-ups,
including ultraefficient
Walmart stores and the
über-green California
Academy of Sciences.
“Projects generally have
one or two big moves that
can dramatically affect a
building’s performance,” he
says. “When it all clicks into
place, it’s very satisfying.”
How Kipman’s
Kinect captures
motion
1 / The human figure
is separated from the
surrounding room
and furniture.
2 / Kinect discerns
body parts, regardless
of the player’s height
or weight.
3 / Finally, Kinect
creates a virtual
skeleton to control the
video game.
Bridgette shannon
Corning
When Bridgette Shannon
was in high school, upper-
classmen advised her,
“Whatever you do, don’t take
chemistry.” She ignored
them. “It was a breeze—mix-
ing things together, creating
different compounds,” she
says. In Corning’s environ-
mental-technologies divi-
sion, she helped develop a
honeycomb material that
nests in a car’s catalytic
converter; the honeycomb is
coated with a thin layer of
precious metal that neutral-
izes toxic exhaust com-
pounds. “Every time I see a
vehicle,” she says, “I’m
looking at the pipes and
seeing what’s coming out.”
“My faMily has a
farM in BraZil.
Most, if not
all, of My
ideas have
originated in
this Magical
location.”
Creating a deviCe that turns anyone
into a human game controller for the
Xbox began with one surprising task,
says Alex Kipman: “I had to get
wicked, wicked smart people to
assume stupidity from day one.” The
Brazilian-born director of incubation
and his team needed to account for the
near-infinite ways (“ 10 to the 23rd,” he
estimates) that people look, speak, and
move. Since its release in November,
Kinect—which consists of a depth
sensor, microphones, and a motion
camera tracking 20 points on the body
in three-dimensional space—has
inspired not only sales (some 10 mil-
lion units) but also excitement among
tinkerers who will soon have a Kinect
software-development kit to advance
their pet projects in, say, robotics or
3-D mapping. “This is a new era,” says
Kipman, “and it’s going to require a
ton of pioneering, a ton of innovation,
and a ton of incubation. That’s not
going to happen all within Microsoft.”
