Preface

Most of the ideas in this book came to me while I was a student of Gerhard Fischer over the years in his Centre for LifeLong Learning and Design. I had the enormous good fortune to have him as a dissertation advisor and spent five years in the lab soaking up our weekly meetings and being exposed to the widely disparate experts that flowed through—sometimes for the weekly gatherings to give a talk, sometimes visiting and working for months. Beyond this, I brought insights from the last ten years of research in Europe at the Fraunhofer Institute at Bonn under Dr. Carlos Velasco and currently at Tecnalia foundation in San Sebastián Spain. Prior to my academic and research career, I spent 12 years as a production and inventory control manager in manufacturing companies, and prior to that I was a cabinetmaker making custom furniture. I hope that the sum of experiences and teachers I brought to this book can be part of a useful foundation for “pushing back the frontiers of science” as my doktorvater, Gerhard Fischer, would exhort me to do.