Really, seriously?

There was a series of adverts, back in the 1970s, for packets of powdered dried potato, made by Cadburys and marketed as Smash – with the brilliant strap-line, ‘For mash, get Smash’. They were funny too, featuring robot aliens who have visited Planet Earth and are reporting back to their superiors with their findings. Apparently, humans eat a lot of something called potatoes and, as one was held aloft its metal claws, the alien explains how ‘They peel them with their metal knives, they boil them for twenty of their minutes … then they smash them all to bits.’ Robot aliens fall about laughing, ‘Clearly they are a most primitive people!’

The idea was that this was a crazy way to cook, better to open a packet, add hot water and quickly enjoy delicious, nutritious food. If you wanted to eat potatoes and you were not bound by the past, the way you had always done it, then making a meal could be accomplished with far greater efficiency.

You could say the same about cars. If you were starting from scratch, right this moment, working out how to power a personal means of transportation, then you would never design a reciprocating engine which accelerated and then sharply stopped pistons inside tubes in which you ignited an explosive fuel. Designing an engine like this would present you with all kinds of difficulties. To prevent seizing the pistons to the tube, lubrication would be essential, resistant to the enormous heat generated, and you would have to change this lubrication frequently; then face the problem of disposing of a disgusting, toxic liquid. Every joint in this complex motor would need to be sealed tight to prevent leakage plus you would have to work out how to safely carry large amounts of highly flammable fuel right next to the occupants.

To create the fuel to power your vehicle, sticky, dead, primeval forests would have to be pumped from deep beneath the ground, in enormous quantities. You would then run the risk of transporting this substance in vast unwieldy ships, across turbulent oceans surrounded by fierce rocks, to huge refineries. Then the refined fuel would be transported in tankers around the country and pumped into underground storage tanks so people could pump it out again into their cars. Let’s not even start to think about how you would design a system to remove the dangerous particulates exhausted from the engine which would poison people if they breathed them.?Perhaps you could cheat?

So, sitting down with a blank piece of paper, making a list of potential ways to power your personal transport, you would quickly draw a line through the item headed Internal Combustion Engine.

It is a similar story with houses. Sitting in front of your blank piece of paper, you might consider a series of methods of construction. These would include digging up clay and making it into little blocks, which you then heat to such high temperatures that it became ceramic, taking 706 KWh of electricity to make just one ton of bricks and producing around 23kg of CO2 for every m2. Let’s get quickly geeky about this. Assuming 60 bricks per m2, you would produce 0.38kg of CO2 for each brick you made, so that is 1.15kg of CO2 for just three bricks and that CO2 would occupy 483 cubic meters of space. For three bricks.

With your paper plan you would need to come up with a way of sticking these small blocks together, which could be done by gangs of men mixing concrete by hand and trowelling it onto the bricks, though you would have to be careful not to build too quickly in case you squeezed the mortar out with the weight of the bricks above, or build in bad weather where the mix could be washed out.

Staring at your piece of paper where you had made notes about how to build walls from bricks, you might just conclude that there could be a better way of building house walls, if only you could come up with one.?So, you might park the problem of walls for the moment whilst you thought about how to make a roof, which would be done a more efficiently if you did not use heavy, overlapping tiles placed onto a complex series of battens and waterproof felt, laid under the tiles in case they slipped or were blown off in a storm.

At this point you likely decide to also set aside the roof conundrum and go back to thinking of a way of building walls without bricks. Perhaps heavy concrete blocks, laid by hand and stuck together with the same type of mortar as you had planned for the bricks? But they would still have to be double skinned, so you could put insulation between them as you went and you are still left with the issues of manpower and oh so slow construction. And the weather. And the maximum height you can build in a day. And cutting blocks to fit the edges. At this point your paper is screwed into a ball, hurled at the office bin and the wise decision made to have a cup of coffee, take a break and then a place a fresh, clean sheet on the desk.

A new idea.?What about a frame for the house into which lightweight insulated panels are slotted? What about modern materials in fresh designs and finishes to make the walls? Then you could make the roof from high performance modern materials as well, so you could make it flat to reduce costs, and far easier to mount solar panels at the right angle. Imagine your mind fizzing with the possibilities, the speed of building, the ability to plan ahead accurately without waiting for suppliers or workmen to turn up. Imagine the creativity, the fresh look of your houses once they were freed from the straitjacket of inefficiency and waste.

What if you then looked at how to build in cutting edge technology, such as the incorporation of graphene, which could deliver greater performance, speed and efficiency??What if it also meant you used fewer materials because what you did use was lighter and stronger.

Imagine if you could add imagination to your house designs by using modern methods of construction.?The way forward suddenly becomes clearer.

So now, returning to where we started, what lessons are the potato obsessed alien robots telling us??Simply, that there are more modern, efficient and faster ways of carrying out a process or delivering a solution – for them it was how to cook mashed potato quickly and easily, for us it is how to look at things with a fresh view and not be dragged down by the bad old ways of doing things.

What the tuber chomping robots were not telling us is that digging something out of the ground, then processing, heating and drying it takes energy and adds considerable cost, whilst leaving you with an inferior product; a bit like a brick really.