Solutions Outside the Box

By Chen Yonglong & Wang Zheng

The mixed vegetable roll,also known as a spring roll,is a traditional snack popular in Southern Fujian,the Chaozhou-Shantou area,and Taiwan.It is quite similar to the pancake in the North—a wrapped up snack with fillings made of various ingredients and an extrathin skin of cooked dough in the shape of a pillow before dipping it in different sauces catering to different tastes.It is a traditional custom to eat the roll every lunar year on the third of March,as well as before and after the Qingming Festival (Tomb-sweeping Day).

Surprisingly,this traditional folk cuisine is somehow linked to the “Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards” this year,not because of its cooking craft,but because of its inter-disciplinary inspiration.Researchers were inspired by the process of making the roll and applied their new idea to the work of screen innovation,rendering the screen soft,thin and bendy like a folded dough skin,which won the Gold Award.

The traditional screen panels we know of are hard and thick.Thanks to the effort of researchers worldwide,screen panels are now getting thinner and thinner,yet the hardness has remained more or less unchanged,which has greatly limited its application on many occasions.

The question of how to improve the materials and techniques so as to reduce the hardness of the screen panels has baffled researchers.One day,one of the researchers found himself thinking of the vegetable roll in his hometown: the wrapper of the roll is thin as paper,yet it peels off the baking tray in an intact piece because a layer of oil is smeared on the skillet surface.This intermediate substance allows the thin dough wrapper to be easily removed from the bottom of the high-temperature surface without damaging the wrapper and the stuffing on it.

The process of making a spring roll is similar to the development of soft plastic substrates.Inspired by the oil on the baking tray,the R&D staff added an easyto-separate intermediate material to the process of screen panel production,so that the plastic substrate could easily be detached.In this way,the foldable 0n-Cell Touch AMOLED panel was successfully developed,which is different from a traditional glass substrate in that it is no longer hard,but soft and bendy—scrollable and foldable like dough,and resistant to cracking or snapping.The design of soft screens will undoubtedly bring more application prospects to the fields of digital reading,wearable devices,and navigation devices.

As one of the judges of the “Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards” commented: “This is a simple yet elegant way to solve screen manufacturing problems.Innovation has brought about changes and developments in the manufacturing and application of screen panels.What we see behind this innovation is an inter-disciplinary approach.”

This is the beauty of interdisciplinary mindset,which enables one to find the answer to a question in other areas one has never imagined.

(FromSolutions Outside the Box ,Democracy and Construction Press.Translation: Lu Qiongyao)