Читать книгу Hacking Innovation - Josh Linkner - Страница 20

Back at Not Impossible Labs, a new “impossible” challenge is being attacked. A jazz vocalist named Mandy Harvey was dealt an unimaginable setback at age 18. A rare disease attacked one of her primary tools – her ability to hear – putting her career and future in grave jeopardy. Within nine months, the disease took its toll; Mandy was completely deaf.

We can only imagine how Mandy must have felt. Hopeless, depressed, defeated. But somehow, she summoned the inner strength to continue her musical journey. Still possessing perfect pitch and timing, she decided to continue singing despite the fact she couldn’t hear a single note. “Hope must never be lost,” said Mandy. “In it we find strength. And it is our duty to show and give it to others. Hope keeps life moving because it pulls us out of any dark situation.” With this powerful sense of purpose and determination, Mandy has been performing professionally for the last seven years as the only completely deaf jazz singer in the world.

Mandy gave her message of hope to all of us, but who is proving hope to her? The hackers at Not Impossible Labs set out to develop a way for Mandy to “hear” her music once again. To discover the hack, Not Impossible Labs went wide. Instead of working insulated within their organization, they put the challenge to the entire hacker community. They enlisted the ideas of scientists, research geeks, artists, and of course...software hackers.

Since a core hacking tenet is that many minds are better than singular genius, they wanted to cast a wide net for ideas from a diverse set of thinkers. The answer emerged not as a single lightning bolt of inspiration, but as a small concept that was built upon by many minds over time. As they explored the concept of hearing altogether, these creative hackers wondered if they could help Mandy “hear” in a completely different way. Since her auditory capacity could not be restored, what if they tapped into one of her other senses to allow her to embrace the music?

Their ingenious solution was put to the test in November 2015. Mandy was outfitted with a series of small motors, attached to various parts of her body (wrists, ankles, waist). The motors created small vibrations, triggered by computer sensors that did the hearing for Mandy. They vibrated in different ways for different periods of time depending on a number of factors in the music, including tempo, pitch, and volume. For the first time in seven years, Mandy played with her band and “heard” the music in a rich, multi-sensory experience. Tears ran down her face, along with the cheeks of the camera crew and the Not Impossible team, as she connected with her music at a level she’d not felt for nearly a decade.

Not Impossible Labs, like most good hackers, seeks input from a large number of diverse sources to uncover the most elegant solutions to complex problems. They leverage the power of numbers compared to the traditional approach of only seeking solutions from within. Small-thinking managers dismiss concepts with the not-invented-here mindset while sophisticated hackers solve the world’s biggest challenges by proactively seeking external insights.