Surfboard design continues to go ahead on many fronts but one which, quite strangely, seems to have been neglected is the building of digital devices into the actual surfboard. If this seems like unnecessary elaboration then you may be right, although that's never been a barrier to product development. At this level it is easy to imagine built in GPS and camera features enabling surfers to automatically upload images tagged with their location.

Granted this isn't something everyone would welcome but, as any marketing graduate will tell you, you don't need to sell to everyone to turn a decent profit. Given the crowds and the level of (in)activity of some in the water 4G smartphones could probably reduce the stress level. Why surf when you can play a game or chat with your mate?

At a more serious level surfing can generate all types of data useful to improving both design and performance. Water speed sensors, tilt meters and accelerometers could turn visual impression into established fact. How fast was the board travelling? How much power was used in that turn? Was that cutback banked at the optimum angle to the wave face? Cameras could give exact data on the degree of turbulent flow around fins and changes to water flow patterns across the bottom and the rails. And all this could be linked to the same timeline so the interactions could be considered. The technology exists to go from the kind of tank experiments that have previously attempted to model the impact of various design parameters with all their inherent limitations, to real world data. 

At the moment designers can make all sorts of claims with little except the performances of their surfers to back them up. This obviously raises the question about the relative contributions of the surfer and the surfboard to the actual performance. A famous designer from an earlier era once remarked that everyone knew that 90% of what was said about design was bullshit. The only difficulty was working out which 90%. Things are certainly better now and there is such general agreement about the basics that a similar statement now might only need to nominate 10%. But that is still a substantial figure.  

No-one believes that we know it all and have already produced the ultimate designs. But as time goes on the improvements become marginal and difficult to distinguish from the background noise of varying surfer performance and varying wave conditions. Hard data is only as good as the methods by which it is gathered and the analysis that is applied to it, but it offers a way forward that we really have not yet, to the best of my knowledge, begun to investigate in any serious manner.  

What is necessary to make the most rapid progress are partnerships between high level designers and scientists to make sure that the data gathered is useful and correctly interpreted. The outcomes could be not only improved designs that would benefit us all but also a range of marketable products that could be installed in boards during manufacture. There are sections of the surfboard market that would happily pay a bit more for a board that stored the data of every wave so it could be converted into an animation. There is a future out there waiting for someone to take us there! // blindboy