When working on a team project, it's important to understand how decisions are made in an organization, said John Morrell, lead dynamics engineer for the Segway Human Transporter at Deka Research and Development.

"If every decision is a ham and eggs breakfast, the pigs are committed, the chickens are involved and the cows are participants," Morrell quipped. It's important, therefore, to figure out who the "pig" is on each issue, he said, and to realize that making a decision means being held accountable for the decision.

The 1986 Yale College graduate described the often-difficult process of turning research into a product as the second speaker in the Yale Engineering Sesquicentennial Distinguished Lecture Series. His lecture, titled "Developing Segways: The Struggle for Smooth Transitions Between Research and Production," was presented on March 5 in the auditorium of Becton Engineering and Applied Science Center.

The Segway is a two-wheeled, battery-operated vehicle that can go "anywhere a person can go," according to Morrell. Riders stand upright on a small platform, and the machine accelerates forward or backward almost intuitively, depending on shifts in the rider's weight. The vehicle, code-named "Ginger," was unveiled to the public in December 2001 to widespread media attention.

"You may have heard people say on TV, 'Think forward, you go forward. Think backward, you go backward,'" said Morrell, who helped create the device. "It's not reading your mind; it's monitoring shifts in weight. It's engineering; it's not magic."

Throughout his talk, Morrell glided around Davies Auditorium on his own Ginger, to the delight of audience members.

In the course of developing the Segway, Morrell and his team came up with a number of strategies for taking new technologies out of a research environment and into a consumer product -- a process that he characterized as "not always easy." In his lecture, Morrell described a number of these strategies in detail.

One strategy they used was to think of product development as cooking dinner, said Morrell. Certain members of the team stocked the kitchen shelves with ideas, and other members took those ideas and cooked up a product, he explained.

While working on the steering for the Segway, for example, Morrell's engineers "stocked the shelves" with 30 different steering methods before one was finally selected. "We tried things where you steer with your feet, things where you steer with one hand, with both hands, things where you steer with your knees," he recalled.

Another tool Morrell and his team used was to keep in mind the vision behind the product they were developing. He pointed as example to the the visions behind the Macintosh computer ("A bicycle for the mind") and the Honda Civic ("Man max., machine min").

"You've got to remember that even though there are things that engineers can't measure, they can still feel them," Morrell emphasized. "When you say this machine 'makes you feel like a wing-footed god,' that means something."

When picking people to be on a project team, choose people who are smart and lazy, Morrell advised, "because they are constantly trying to figure out how to spend the least amount of effort to get the answer" -- an important trait when there is too much to do and not enough people, he noted.

To find these smart and lazy people for the Segway team, Morrell asked candidates questions like "How many shoes can you make out of a cow?" or "If I'm sitting in a canoe and I throw a cinder block out of the canoe and it drops in the water, does the water in the pool that I'm in go up or down?"

Other strategies for turning research into a product that Morrell touched on in his talk included: figuring out which problems needed to be resolved and which could be ignored; taking "baby steps" throughout the development process; and following the principle of "show all the data" when presenting technical information.

Commercial models of the Segway are currently in production and retail for $8,000-$10,000. Morrell is hoping that once the Segway becomes more commonplace, prices will drop to $3,000.

"You will have chances some time in the next year to get on them, I'm sure," he predicted. "And you will all start to understand what we're all excited about."

-- By JinAh Lee

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