Locus of a Boat Designer 2 Paperback – 16 Nov. 2010

Love this book only just got it. First read is interesting and exciting.This guy is an inspirational and prolific inventor who not only had great ideas and vision, but got out there and built and tested stuff too.Loads of pictures, stories and sketches. Very informative. I was inspired by seeing a YouTube video of a fast leaning personal hydrofoil craft he had built entitled the amazing boats of Kotaro Horiuchi.

Kotaro Horuichi writes lucidly about his impressive portfolio of innovative designs. It seems that nothing escaped his ability to think outside the box, whether it was designing a faster rowing shell or a light aircraft. He is never shy of assigning the credit to his collaborators but one is sure that he must have been his amazing mind that came up with so many ideas.The only person I have come across with anywhere near the same inventiveness was Buckminster Fuller.Perhaps equally remarkable is that it is a great read, perhaps due to the translator as much as Kotaro himself.

If you have any interest in Research and development, this is a great story to read. Kotaro gets involved in many different projects and explains the problems and successes along the way in simple terms, you feel for the man when having spent months designing, building and testing the projects, they are often just dropped due to the economy or red tape.