Monday, May 12, 2014
Video Review: Pegasus flies with TRIZ wings.
Regular readers
of this blog are familiar with Olga and Nikolay Bogatyrev, since they are frequent popular speakers at
the conferences that we review. I was
delighted when I saw a recent note that they have produced a video series
called Pegasus, and asked them to
let me review it for our readers.
Details: To order see http://www.triz.technology/index.html 7 topics on 2 DVDs, in either PAL or NTSC
format, each about an hour and a half, price £175
includes the 2 DVDs and Contradiction Matrix and supporting material.
A review is a
somewhat old-fashioned “technology” for deciding whether to buy a new book or
to view a new performance, since you can now preview the actual material
yourselves. To see a preview of the discussion
of innovation go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-gBnBfGVZk and for a preview of problem definition see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEJEawahJbg. These two episodes are typical of the
material on DVD 1, which has 6 topics.
DVD 2 is the classical TRIZ 40 principles, presented as an “alphabet”
from which you create the “words” of the innovation needed to resolve a
particular problem. This is a very
useful way of presenting 40 principles, and other TRIZ teachers will be interested
in the examples (mostly classical device-oriented examples) and the format of
presentation.
The topics are presented as “films”
not as “lessons” –the goal of the Pegasus project is to give the viewer some TRIZ-based
experience and familiarity and vocabulary, so that the viewer can decide how to
proceed with learning TRIZ, via courses or books or on-line learning.
The 6 topics on
DVD 1 are
1: Inventive Mind
2: Core of a Challenge
3: Ideal Final Result
4: Context
5: Resources
6: Contradictions and Resolutions
All of the topics are accessible to TRIZ
beginners, but I think that experienced TRIZ practioners and TRIZ teachers will
be a significant audience for the Pegasus videos. Section 5 on resources features a way of
classifying and organizing the resources that are available in the problem and
surrounding the problem that makes it very easy to identify how to use each
resource to solve the problem or to improve the ideality of the system. Olga’s demonstration of the evolution of
coffee cups as an example of the use of voids was both charming and thought-provoking.
Pegasus
has a wide variety of presentation methods—video on the grounds and in
the laboratories at the University of Bath in the UK, animation, brief
lectures, and table-top demonstrations—and a variety of voices of narrators,
with short lectures by Olga and Nikolay.
The entire production is very professional, although the British
spellings and pronunciations will take a bit of getting used to for US
viewers.
I recommend Pegasus to my readers and
colleagues who are looking for new ideas about how to teach TRIZ. Many of you will find creative ways to
incorporate Pegasus into your programs—think of the experience of reading a new
TRIZ book and suddenly finding that you understand some topic in a whole new
way! We should be grateful to Olga and Nikolay
Bogatyrev for doing the work to create these films and provide such stimulation
to the TRIZ teaching and TRIZ practioner communities.
