Tetris Made Easy

Solving engineering problems is a little like playing Tetris – if you could bring in different shapes, you’d win the game every time!

A lot of engineering constraints are known, or at least readily discoverable. From physical constraints like space and material properties to project constraints like budgets, timelines and resources, we can see many of our limits.

But there's another set of constraints, less visible but just as impactful: the limits of the team's collective knowledge and experience.

The narrower a team’s experience, the narrower the overlap between these two constraint sets tends to be. Particularly when it comes to solving novel problems like developing new product lines or incorporating new tech: teams without broad cross-domain experience tend to struggle within their smaller perceived constraints.

Or, as director of engineering Brendan Hart says, “It’s like you’re playing Tetris with fewer shapes. You play the game as you know it – not like it could be played.”

This isn’t an indictment so much as it’s an observation: you can't reach for a tool that isn't in your kit. You’ll likely miss a workable approach, even if it’s commonplace in another industry, if you haven’t seen it before.

Broad, cross-domain experience adds to the kit: it brings new shapes to your Tetris game. A manufacturing process from a different field that compresses a six-step problem into one. A materials approach nobody in this space is using. A regulatory insight from a different product category. All new shapes we can bring to your game.  

Try it out. Play Tetris the way we solve new engineering problems: with a few new shapes. Refresh the page and click on the game space to play:

Controls:

• Arrow keys move pieces
• x key to rotate

Sigma Specials:

• s = big 2×8 Sigma block.
• i = 2×2 L
• g = 2×2 mirror L
• m = 2×3 block
• a = 2×4 block