Design to Reality Evolution of the Plastic Bottle In the dark nights of my soul, I fret about how inconsistently engineered my life is. The coffee table I made a year or two ago was intended to look like the dining room table I built a few years earlier, but in reality the two bear only a vague resemblance to each other. Open a drawer of my tool chest at random, and perhaps you’ll find a thematically-aligned collection of well-loved hand tools, meticulously cut into a nest of Kaizen foam, or maybe you’ll find a random assortment of half-forgotten specialty wrenches. My bookshelf is nicely sorted and stacked, but my magazines are dumped into a basket this way and that. We manage to invest embarrassing amounts of engineering and infrastructure into physical objects that are barely worth mentioning. So when I look out at the world outside of my own home, I am reassured to find that even our most disposable objects are the result of staggering quantities of serious and earnest engineering work.…