Prediction is both an art and a habit. The art is based on your understanding of the laws governing the behavior of the thing predicted. Newton's laws govern the motion of physical bodies and enable you to predict them. The much vaguer laws of psychology enable you to predict the behavior of people, although much less accurately. (If you can figure out the laws governing stock prices, you can become very rich.) Therefore you should study the world to understand its laws as well as you can.
Prophecy, which is prediction, has used the positions of planets, the entrails of sacrificial animals, the random throwing of bones and sticks, the shuffling of cards, and the motions of an Ouija board with the same statistics as consulting a table of random numbers. Learning and applying empirical laws of nature do a lot better.
Prediction is also a habit, and one which it will benefit you to cultivate. Regardless of how well you do or do not understand a particular set of laws, you will be better off on the average if you make predictions and act on them than if you simply ignore the future and react to what happens when it happens.
Products only have problems which were not predicted. Problems which are predicted are solved ahead of time and do not materialize as problems. There are predicted uncertainties, which may materialize as real problems. Usually when you predict an uncertainly, however, you prepare for the problem which might appear.
Predicting What?
What aspects of the world are useful for you, as a design engineer, to predict?
Your competitors are designing products, right now, to compete with your products. If you can predict their designs, you can make the products you are presently designing more appealing than theirs to your customers when both come out. How to predict? You can extrapolate the trends in their designs. You can learn all you can about them.
Your markets are changing, and their tastes, budgets, and sizes are useful subjects for prediction so that you can tailor your designs for future desirability.
Predict the effects of age, dirt, corrosion, wear, neglect, and abuse on your product. Your predictions will enable you to improve your design to compensate for these effects and to make it easier for your customer to practice preventive and corrective maintenance.
The technologies which will become available, both for product design and for manufacturing, will influence your current designs if you read the technical news in your journals and plan to take advantage of your predicted availabilities.
When you deal with people, either inside your company or outside, if you predict their responses to what you say or write or do, you will fashion your words and actions to get the most successful results.
In your personal life, you will make investment decisions. Remember that in placing money no decision is, in effect, a decision. The better you predict the future of alternative investment opportunities, the more money you will make (or the less you will lose). Developing and practicing the art of prediction, is self-discipline, but one with a very large payoff.
