Human Centered Industry - Emotional Engineering - page 41

Fig. 6 Wheelchair and P.U.M.A
(Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), Personal Urban transport from Seg-
way, and GM [ 1 ], we see easily there is no difference between wheelchair and
personal urban transport (Fig. 6 ). This will be discussed in more detail in the next
section.
3 Divergent Engineering
De-silo-ing works not just for integrating industries, but also for using the same idea
for other applications. The integration of industries is so to speak convergent
engineering. This activity of expanding the same idea across different ! fields may be
called divergent engineering.
3.1 Personal Mobility
Let us consider personal mobility. Segway, Inc invented Segway Personal Trans-
porter [ 2 ] (Fig. 7 ) . It is well known that iBOT [ 3 ], wheelchair led to this invention
of inverted pendulum personal transporter. Dean Kamen took off two wheels from
iBOT to develop Segway, because the government disapproved his wheelchair. As
everybody knows, Segway brought us a new lifestyle.
Let us take another example. Segway and GM developed P.U.M.A. (“GM,
Segway P.U.M.A”, 2009). As can be easily understood from the picture, P.U.M.A.
originates from a wheel chair. If such a personal transport can be developed, then
there will be no distinction between the outside and inside of the house. Like a