Tony Zhou
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi. I’m Tony Zhou, and I will be your host today.

In this series, we explore the concept of beauty within our work, spanning disciplines from science and engineering to various other fields. When we describe something as beautiful, it often reflects our deep appreciation and value for it.

In this episode, our guest Brett Phaneuf is the founder and chief executive of the Submergence Group and M Subs; sister companies that build submarines and autonomous vessels for marine exploration around the globe.

I had a chance to speak with Brett in 2021 for our podcast episodes 79 and 80 about the Mayflower Autonomous Ship. At the time they were about to launch the Mayflower from the UK for its journey across the Atlantic, opening a new era for autonomous ships in ocean research.

Brett returns with a few updates on the Mayflower before sharing his thoughts on how beauty influences engineering.  Let’s get started.

Brett Phaneuf
Well, Mayflower made it across in 2022 finally, and she went to via the Azores through Halifax, to Plymouth. And she’s in a shipyard right now we’re doing a lot of work with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. And there, we refit her last summer and refreshed all her software and hardware and instruments. And she’s going back to sea in about a month actually, and she’ll work, hopefully, consistently now in the North Atlantic with Woods Hole and other organizations doing environmental and climate science for the next 5 – 10 years. And we’re actually building a dozen new, fully autonomous, 12-meter vessels slightly different than Mayflower, but informed by her work. And those will start launching this summer, and they’re specifically for oceanographic research and exploration.

And then next summer, we are embarking on a mission, that you’ll be the first to hear about it outside our little clique of people called Challenger 25. And it’s more or less the 150th anniversary of the Challenger expedition, which I’m sure you know, was the first early oceanographic research exploration mission launched by the British. And it discovered vast amounts about our oceans, that we’re still learning from even today. And so, we’re going to go to all the Challenger locations in the North Atlantic and redeploy instruments and see what kind of comparative analysis we can do. So, we’ve got some interesting stuff on the horizon.

Tony
Next, Brett describes the role of beauty in engineering and how it differs from science. We explore how beauty can arise from the tension between form and function, particularly through the example of autonomous vessel design, which prioritizes stability, efficiency, and functionality.

Brett
So, what’s the role of beauty in engineering? I guess I should say that I see engineering sort of separate from science in a way. So, one is applied. And the other is sort of, I guess, it’s not the right word, but I’ll say esoteric, right. But from an engineering perspective, I see beauty in the tension between form and function. So, I like the idea that highly functional things tend to be beautiful. But not because they conform to any specific agreed set of beauty standards, which of course, evolve anyway, and it’s such a hard thing to put your thumb on. So, I think that I always see tension between function and form and purely functional things have a unique beauty. And maybe that’s the answer is there’s lots of different kinds of beauty. Right?

We could look at Mayflower. So, when you start designing autonomous vessels, you realize very quickly that the vast majority of the things you design, when you build a ship, are human centric, right? How do we keep people alive in a hostile environment, and I suppose it’s the same for spacecraft or aircraft although they have different constraints. And then when you start to remove those things, you start to very quickly move to it’s a class of vehicles that tend to be long and thin and multi hauled because you start taking out things and you say, oh, no, I have lots of displacement. And it’s sort of lots of empty void. And I can’t just put fuel in there, it won’t be very efficient. And then I’m going to have to move all this water around to maintain my stability, and then Oh but now it’s, it’s very thin, and it’s very unstable so I’m going to give it outriggers. That’s why a lot of autonomous vessels are catamarans or trimarans because you’re driven down this path of a function, the functionality. There really is a strong function or a component that’s function driven for things like Mayflower. And of course, it might be the medium, I mean the ocean dictates a great deal of how things have to be shaped.

Tony
Next, you’ll hear a fascinating exploration of the aesthetics and functionality of engineering design. Brett discusses being introduced to the idea of allometry through the books of American biologist Stephen Jay Gould. It’s a glimpse into the mind of an engineer who battles with the constraint of physics at each stage of product design and development.

Brett
I read a book many, many years ago, it was a book by Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist who wrote several really innumerable brilliant books about evolution and statistics. He wrote a brilliant a statistical analysis of the Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak that he used as a teaching tool for statistical analysis of complex systems. It’s unbelievably brilliant. And he died some years ago, but he introduced me to the idea of the principle of allometry. It’s the relationship of a thing’s size to its form. And I guess the easiest way it was described by him, and I’m paraphrasing was that, given all the necessary constraints, an elephant is, can only be elephant shaped, a mammal that had to live in that environment and be of a certain size and fulfill the requirements of an elephant, whatever those might be, could only be like an elephant. It couldn’t be something else. It couldn’t be shaped like another animal. And so, I often think about whether that’s at play when we think about functionality, and beauty.

Tony
Brett explains the challenges of biomimicry in engineering design, highlighting how machines often fall short of mimicking nature’s efficiency. He shares an intriguing anecdote about a Baptist minister’s unique perspective on heaven to illustrate the functional purpose of human bodies.

Brett
You know, nature is a really good engineer, to say the things we design, are a pale comparison, is giving us too much credit. So, we tend not to be bioinspired, although there’s a whole area of research around bioinspiration. When you build a machine, it’s hard to do what’s called biomimicry with a machine and have it be effective. Because the thing itself is not a biological organism. It’s a machine. And it goes a little bit to what I was saying I guess, about allometry.

I had a fellowship many, many years ago, that supported international travel for grad students and once a month, they had guest speakers come in, and probably the most interesting guest speaker we had was a Baptist minister, which always surprised me, I still think about it today. He was really remarkable and very interesting. And he talked a lot about people’s idea of heaven, which I think is, I guess, a parallel or metaphor for what we’re talking about. This idea of perfection and eternal life and this idea of heaven. And for some reason, people saw themselves as people in some, you know, fluffy, clouded place with beautiful hills and valleys and rivers and anything you could imagine everybody you ever knew or loved, everything was there for you, but you were a person, a human. And he always thought that was strange. He said, you know, because heaven, by definition in his mind was the place least like where we are now. And that the most useless thing to have in a place that was least like where we are now would be a human body. And I always thought about that in terms of design, too. Which is why we don’t go for biomimicry because of the things we build, we’re not biological. That’s weird to it’s a conundrum, right? That biological beings create digital computers to try to approximate a human mind, or to build a device that mimics a biological propulsion like a fin on a fish. And it does it very badly, in all ways by comparison. And yet, it seems like we’re compelled to try to do this. And it’s also forever out of reach. But the beauty in this scenario is in the pursuit, I guess.

And I guess it’s the same argument about form and function. I don’t know how to resolve it. But I think about all this when we start sketching up things that we design, because there is something about, I can’t tell if the thing is beautiful, because it’s highly functional, or it’s highly functional, because it’s beautiful, or both. Because I don’t know where we start from, I’d like to think I start from a functional perspective.

Tony
In our next clip, Brett and I discuss how education, mentorship, and failure can nurture creativity and shape an aesthetic eye.

I think in order to become creative, or to develop an aesthetic eye, I think a person has to go through a period of time where the things that they’re doing don’t seem creative and seem maybe a bit formal and oftentimes, even boring. But that’s kind of the time where you’re like, in the lab, forging your sword and your technique.

Brett

Also, you know, one of the other things that maybe we think about, beauty is kind of an odd thing is, you know, when we think about younger people in engineering and their perception of beautiful, what’s beautiful, and how they’ve been taught, or not to appreciate beauty, would come into the ability to fail. I mean, sounds cliche, I know that going out and trying things and failing, helps you sort of understand what works and what doesn’t. And understanding fundamentally, you know, having a good education, a broad education, so you can understand why it happened, or why it failed. And you can adjust from there. When you get to that point that you can design something effectively, that’s very beautiful.

And there’s something beautiful about the process, too. I know I’ve said that I think at the beginning of that discussion, I mean, I don’t create things. I suppose my role is, I try to orchestrate the thing that I want to happen into being. But I don’t have the skill set to design the pressure vessel or do the stress analysis on the structure or do the power and propulsion calculation or design the micro electronic circuit that’s going to control a motor or write all the software. I mean, I know a little about a lot of different things and I’ve done lots of things in my life, but my role is in orchestration. And so, where I derive the satisfaction is when the things come into being.

I describe the process often as, you know, you’re given a box of puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle. And it’s comprised of pieces from a dozen other puzzles, there are no corners and no edge pieces, and there is no picture to guide you. You have to make any coherent picture that approximates the result you desired from the components that you have. And I sort of think of my job that way, working with all the different people, the personalities, and the skills and talents that they possess, to drive to an outcome. I don’t mean to say what I do is beautiful but there’s a great deal of satisfaction in participating in that way, in orchestrating an engineering outcome that is highly functional, but also beautiful.

Tony
Brett discusses balancing individual responsibility with collaborative efforts. He highlights the challenges of encouraging younger team members to take ownership and not fear failure, emphasizing the need for a supportive environment where creativity and accountability can coexist. It’s an insightful look at managing diverse personalities and promoting effective leadership throughout innovative projects.

Brett
I take a different leadership style. So, I don’t expect perfection. I’m okay with things being a little sloppy, because what we do is prototyping largely, and so it’s highly creative. We rarely make the same thing two or three times. And so, it’s a bit different. If I was making widgets, you know, cranking out a million of them, it’d be different. But one of the problems that we have now, with this, where we’re running into it, and where we’re really spending a lot of effort is a lot of the younger people have, because there’s generally so dependent on the technological aspects of their work, and a lot of the projects that they do in engineering tend to be collaborative now. Whereas somebody in my generation was looking for the responsibility to lead, what I find now is a lot of the people want to be in the lead but want collective responsibility. They don’t want to be seen to have failed. And so, we’re starting to spend a lot more time with people talking about leadership and failure, and responsibility, how authority and responsibility go hand in hand. And that no decision is a decision, and generally the worst one to not act. And that it’s okay, if you don’t get it right now, if you don’t get it right over and over and over again, then we have to start asking, well, why are they not getting it right? But generally, the thing we’re running up against now is people don’t want to take on tasks if they think they might not get it right and will be blamed. So, setting an environment forward now with this added complexity around sort of collective responsibility and say, no, we don’t want that we want you to be responsible and we want you to take ownership, and we want you to take authority. You, singular you. And you to lead your team, but not demand perfection and that’s not even the problem. It’s just a lot of people really haven’t been told that they didn’t do a good job or that somebody didn’t like something and I’m pretty forthright, but you do have to be a lot more careful but considered with your words. And that’s a real challenge. So, creating a space where people can be creative and collaborate and also individually excel and take responsibility – it’s challenging.

[music]

Longitude
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