Allison Arieff has a wonderful column today in the New York Times highlighting the work of Steven M. Johnson – a man with whom many of you will be at least peripherally familiar. An inventor in the most whimsical sense, Johnson’s creations range from the absurd to the gloriously sublime.
In discussing his often fantastical, sometimes silly, sometimes visionary concepts, he has said, “If I could use two words to describe what it is that I enjoy it is that I love to be sneakily outrageous . . . [It may be that] I have decided an idea has no practical worth and would never be likely to be adopted seriously (like most of my ideas), but I like it anyway.”
However lighthearted, Johnson’s own investigations of the creative process are highly insightful, I think. Consider this approach to rethinking the design of a chair, from his recent (and brilliantly-titled) post Sometimes it’s useful to think of an object/product as alive and able to evolve along lines of its own wishes and desires:
When designing objects, one can take clues from Nature. See how within a few minutes of drawing, moving from left to right, I allowed a chair to evolve new shapes:
Please avail yourself of the opportunity to read the entirety of Arieff’s profile, as it’s well-worth your time.
*****
Of related interest is this post from yesterday on Serial Consign by Greg Smith, outlining the assembly of a prototype drawing machine. As part of the Hacking as a Way of Knowing workshop this past weekend in Toronto, Smith and three others collaborated in a manner not altogether disparate from the spirit of Johnson’s endeavors:
The idea was that this device would act as a “news seismograph” and make marks on a spinning canvas when certain keywords showed up in two custom RSS feeds (built in Yahoo Pipes). Each stylus would begin the day on the same edge of the platter and over the course of 24 hours incrementally creep to the opposite side. This drawing machine would map the frequency of two contrasting keywords (such as pandemic and containment) culled from feeds that aggregated dozens of major media outlets and information sources. When a desired keyword appeared in one of our feeds the solenoid on the appropriate gantry would be triggered and drop the stylus to the canvas for a half second. Each of the two keywords would be articulated as a distinct colour.
Related posts:
- Two Toys: Trading Up vs. Trending Up
- Linking up with the Pneumatic Amplifier
- Dotted Lines Surround You (It’s OK, Because they Surround Me, too)
- Inventing a Market: Tubular Bells
- Two Interviews: Piers Fawkes and Gerd Leonhard