Adrian Bejan | The easy and the difficult, from Design in Nature

Jul 18, 2025

In this video, Adrian Bejan reflects on teaching and learning as an active, in-person exchange rather than a top-down process. He likens it to a boxing match. He encourages his students to participate, as he comes alive when they speak up. Moving beyond textbooks, he shifts his focus from cooling design to the deeper lessons of technological evolution. Bejan explains that although life becomes easier with new technologies, difficulties never disappear. While the easy may be seductive and widespread, the old and difficult remain essential and are practised by fewer people. They are also often more valuable over time. The lecture becomes a meditation on diversity in design, serendipity, and the power of historical understanding.

Bejan defines the evolution of technology as progressing from natural convection to forced convection and ultimately to conduction cooling, with each stage offering improved performance per unit volume.
He argues that progress in life and science requires changing direction when the current path becomes dull, even if only temporarily.
Easy things, such as communication, movement, and computing, improve our lives, but difficult things stay alive in the hands of the few, forming a lasting diversity of approaches.
He illustrates this with examples: photography did not eliminate portrait painting, steam locomotives did not replace horse-drawn carriages, and software has not replaced those who can still do maths by hand.
Bejan highlights email as a modern example of the easy, but reminds students of mailing's layered history: from handwritten letters sent to Cape Town, which served as a relay hub for ships exchanging mail, to the linking of navigation and Protestant history.
He concludes by saying that technology is a flow and that innovation often comes not from the obvious but from unexpected turns where the difficult is preserved and the easy is multiplied.

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