We can generalize the impact of regulations on companies to include engineering firms. If you spend resources to develop a product that does not meet requirements stated by government regulations, then in the capitalist point of view, your product is essentially useless because you cannot sell it to consumers and profit from it. Government regulations are especially burdensome to pharmaceutical and medical device companies that make devices such as artery stents and valves, because virtually all their products must receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before hitting the markets. Such government bureaucracy exists with good intentions in mind. In this case, the purpose of FDA regulations is to protect the end consumer from potentially harmful products. In the case of FINA’s ban of high-tech swimsuits, the purpose is to protect the integrity of the sport of swimming.

Swimming might be transformed into a purer form of the past.

Going back to the story of swimming, I have a personal interest in the issue of high-tech suits because I was a swimmer throughout middle school and high school. So-called “full-body suits” emerged at the 2000 Olympic Games around the time when I started swimming. During the seven years that I spent swimming, I never went further than wearing a Speedo Fastskin 2 “jammer” (suit that covers from waist to knees) in competitions. Some may say that I didn’t care enough to drop a few hundred bucks on a full-body suit used in a few major competitions each year, but in the end I believe that it’s the swimmer that makes the swimmer, not the suit that makes the swimmer (and yes, I love the sport of swimming). Skill and experience in the water can only be acquired through putting in the effort during training, but even swimmers who hold steadfastly to this belief will feel at a disadvantage in competition if they don’t follow suit (no pun intended) and invest in high-tech racing gear like their peers. Hopefully the FINA regulation will remedy this.

Marine animals have naturally smooth skin due to their lifestyle.

What is the big deal about so-called high-tech swimwear (such as Speedo’s LZR racing suit that created a buzz last summer during the Olympics)? The main idea behind the design of such swimwear is to reduce the forces that oppose the swimmer’s motion through the water, which effectively makes it easier for the swimmer to move through the water and therefore allows him/her to “swim faster.”

One of the main features of high-tech swimwear is the ability to repel water from the swimwear fabric. This is advantageous for competitive swimming because if the water tends to be absorbed into the fabric instead, then a drag force is induced on the swimmer. This drag force opposes motion through water, similar to how friction opposes motion of an object on a surface. Therefore, by repelling water instead of allowing water to be absorbed into the swimwear fabric, these high-tech suits help reduce opposition to the swimmer’s motion. Many companies claim to make competitive swimwear that repel water much better than natural human skin in water, which makes it advantageous to have the suit cover as much of the human body as possible (the “full-body suits”) in order to fully take advantage of this technology.

One side note about the design of high-tech swimwear: the texture is similar to the skin of marine animals, such as dolphins. Marine animals have smooth skin naturally because their lifestyle revolves around moving through water efficiently. From this, we can see that sometimes we can learn about human technology through nature.

(Image from Wikipedia.)