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Just because we like to keep you on your toes, this week we have a second round of the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: Congratulations to our winners, Noah, who suggested “Colostocamp”, and Hannah for “Loitering Within Tent”. Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
Honorable mentions: CB Dragon “The Tuggie”, Old Geezer “The Sleep-walker Outdoorsman”, Deathbyawesomeness “Porta-Tent”, Michael Hicks “Roam Dome Tent”, Trevor “The Burkamper”, Trevor “The Eskimove”, and John P “Dome of the Walk”.
It’s time for another edition of Name That Weird Invention! -this time with a decidedly Halloween theme. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: Congratulations to our winners! T-shirts from the NeatoShop go to Barking Bud, who called it a Mortalcycle, and John P, who came up with the name Moto-Crossbones by Bone-Daddy Bikes (which comes in “his and hearse models”). Honorable mentions: Elizabeth
(Bone Chopper), Hannah (Tyred of Life), Saudia (Nutcracker), Heather B (Dirt Nap Bike), deathbyawesomeness (diecycle), Sasha (BMXoskelton), and ladybuggs (The Grim Chopper).
The present drying up of jobs available to low- and middle-income Americans is leading to a drastic and largely unexpected phase change in the way we live and get around. Imagine what would happen if an ever-increasing percentage of the population could no longer afford a roof overhead or basic transportation. Norms for what are now considered “acceptable” lifestyles would be revised downward. Being homeless might be considered somewhat “normal”!
Yet Americans are famous for their ingenuity. They like to believe that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Perhaps a new class of mobile dwellings called motorless homes will evolve. They will be muscle-powered!
Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts, but something’s missing from his strange gadgets: names. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: Congratulations to winner NathanBBlu, who named the invention “Stalaglites,” and explained why. And also to winner lolamouse, who came up with “Light in the Loafers” (used to tell interested observers which way you go). Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
This Friday’s Museum of Possibilities employs several themes that are found in many of my pseudo-inventions: Hiding, duplicity, pretending and concealing. Today’s ideas are offered as solutions to the problem of storing and using exercise equipment in a small home or apartment. Some of these concepts will seem coy and cute, but at the same time odd. Who in their right mind jumps on a trampoline inside a fake China closet in the dark, while listening to headphones? Who would not worry that a fine living room lounge chair that contained a hidden rowing machine might eventually become grimy with sweat?
Yet I can imagine some – though perhaps few – situations in which such concealed exercise equipment might be just what is needed!
Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts, but something’s missing from his strange gadgets: names. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: We have winners! First place goes to Craig, who suggested the name “Glockets”, and the second place name is “The Smitten”, suggested by Abby. Both win t-shirts from the NeatoShop!
For this Friday’s Museum of Possibilities, I’ve decided to spare readers from having to read a lengthy text – occasionally longwinded and self-referential – by offering my concept in comics format. The reader will only need to scan a very few sentences to get the point.
While I may not possess a perfect understanding of all the factors contributing to the ludicrously high cost of auto insurance – jacked up in part because of the nation’s car chassis worship – I am glad to suggest a solution: Automobiles could be pre-wrecked at the factory. Auto manufacturers already have the necessary expertise to design robots capable of pounding, denting, “keying,” and scratching a new automotive finish without compromising functionality or safety. Engineers would be able to design underlying structures so that wiring, airflow and access by mechanics remained intact.
Would I buy a pre-dented car? No, not unless it became the new standard for automotive beauty. Until then, I would let others be early adopters.
Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of wacky inventions in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts, but something’s missing from his strange gadgets: names. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenter suggesting the funniest and wittiest name (along with proposed use of such strange object – the weirder the better) will win a free copy of Steve’s autographed first edition book What The World Needs Now. Two runner-ups win free T-shirts from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update 10/9: Congratulations to first place winner redfi5e who suggested we call this invention “Flures.” Second place winners are Carolyn Bahm (“Dive-Thrus”) and ernest (“Flap-jerks”). Carolyn was the only one who followed stated a t-shirt preference as per the contest rules, so she gets a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!
The artist, Steven Johnson, said, “I was blown away by the cleverness of many of the names. I also noticed that a well-conceived name made my art seem funnier!” So he wanted to recognize these entries as Honorable Mentions: The Flopcatch, Masterbaiters, Toe Tacklers, Self Contained Underwater Baiting Apparatus (SCUBA), Flipplures, Trollfins, FlipperDippers, SCUBait, Flip-o-bait, Flip Service, Kickbait, Flipping Hookers, Toe-Bait-O’s, and Stuck in pro-bait.
I hope I’m not the only person on the planet who cannot understand why dining at one’s home or apartment has to be so complicated. Personally, my favorite meal situation is when I am sitting on a large boulder near timberline looking at chipmunks and pine trees, while eating a sandwich, an orange and a candy bar. The flat part of the boulder makes for an adequate table. That is my idea of dining “out”.
The act and process of preparing food, dining, and then cleaning up seems to entail too much work and too much equipment, like it was designed for the needs of a regiment of soldiers, or for a family on a large country estate in England which employs kitchen servants. Typically, a standard kitchen with cupboards, drawers and refrigerator includes redundant and special-purpose items. There are large knives, small knives, large-size stainlessware items for serving food, small spoons, forks and knives for personal dinnerware, tiny stainlessware for olives or cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinners; there are various sizes and shapes of pots and dishes, microwavable containers and refrigerator storage containers; there are table mats and napkins; there are scouring pads, sink drain cleaning chemicals, dishwasher and/or dishwashing soap, sponges (ranging in texture from smooth to multi-surfaced artificial pads for coarse scrubbing), metal polish, stainless steal pan cleaners, sink scrubbing powders or bricks, dishwashing gloves, storage racks, bins, drawers and cupboards. And there is food: Condiments, mayonnaise, salad dressing, olive oil, vinegar, jams, jellies, frozen foods, canned foods, microwaveable foods, fresh fruit, dried fruit, milk, diet drinks, cereals of many types, coffee or tea, alcoholic beverages.
There is often wine or beer to help deal with the stress of dining.
At times, I have wondered whether food itself should be made simpler. In a gag, comedian Steve Martin once referred to an imaginary uni-food, a single substance that is all one would eat day and night, year after year. The simplicity of such an idea appeals to me. Above, I have depicted a future dining event involving seniors who eat either refurbished or uni-substance foods.
But seriously, I would be happier if the process of eating and cleaning up after a meal required as few steps as possible. Eating is, after all, simply a body function necessary for its maintenance. If I could don some type of hat and suit that fed me, wiped my mouth, caught my crumbs and drools, I imagine I would be happy. Or, instead of having a dining suit, I would be happy having an automatic one-stop dining machine.
Let’s try something new and fun. You’ve seen Steven M. Johnson’s whimsical and ridiculously weird inventions (whimventions? weirdventions?) in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts, but something’s missing from his strange gadgets: names.
So here’s where you come in, Neatoramanauts: can you name the strange object drawn above? Funniest and wittiest name (along with proposed use of such strange object – the weirder the better) win a free copy of Steve’s autographed first edition book What The World Needs Now. Two runner-ups win free T-shirts from the NeatoShop.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don’t select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize, mmkay?
Good luck and have fun!
Update 9/29/10 – Congratulations to Evan who won the first prize for “Chomper Stompers”. Congrats to Runner-up Trevor (“Artery Clogs”) and heaterc (“The McStrappy”) who got the T-shirt prizes!
At one time the car bra was a popular automobile accessory. I don’t see so many car owners buying them lately. But in the late 1980s, this cartoon of a matching set of car panties and bra that I drew for Road & Track magazine was topical.
Yet this is not the kind of car drawers I am thinking about today. Rather, I am interested in discussing possibilities for new types of pullout drawers, cabinets, trunks and beds for cars and trucks.
As cars have become an essential component of our 24/7 lifestyles – only in a few places like New York City is it feasible to live without owning or driving a car – it should theoretically be possible to make them more accommodating to our needs, with some of the features we expect in a home or apartment. For instance, our homes have drawers and closets. In the early 1980s I showed what closet cars might look like. Admittedly this was one of my more sexist drawings from a present-day viewpoint; it made more sense 30 years ago than it does now.
Closet Cars would look like roving closets. Clothes could hang nicely, without having to be folded flat on a back seat or hung from a hook, obscuring the driver’s view. The car would provide numerous handy drawers for storing shoes and clothing. Jewelry and valuables would probably be kept at home and not in the top drawer of a Closet Car, however.
A pickup bed can be viewed as just another kind of drawer that can be designed in different configurations. In the Double Bed Pickup Truck, a redesign of the standard pickup truck is imagined. The height of the car seat is raised and the hood is made into an ancillary box that is actually a pullout pickup bed. Access to the engine bay is still possible when the “hood” is pulled forward. Perhaps readers who are car buffs will point out that such a design would disturb a vehicle’s balance, which in modern vehicles would seriously affect the delicate power apportioning of the power brake system, as well as the airbag settings. The truck would ride differently depending on whether yard clippings or sand filled the front bed.
Though this drawing was created in the early 1990s, I believe there now exist systems similar to this that allow for extension of the pickup bed by some means. Recently, several car manufacturers offered four-door passenger vehicles with a short pickup bed in place of a trunk.
I have studied possible ways of adding drawers and cabinets accessible from the exterior of a passenger vehicle. The main flaw in these drawer ideas, as I see it, arises if a drawer becomes jammed or broken. This is a potential design weakness. A drawer that was not properly shut, and that has swung out when the car turned a corner, could be a problem. Minor accidents, which would be dubbed “drawer-bender” accidents, could permanently jam a drawer, blocking access to its contents. It would be a big concern, for example, if a laptop with files needed for a PowerPoint presentation within a half-hour, or a decaying salmon bought fresh at the fish market, were rendered inaccessible. The services of a Body, Fender and Drawer repair shop would be required immediately.
Yet in spite of weaknesses that I have enumerated, I am not yet ready to give up on the idea of car drawers or cabinets. Utility trucks have exterior cabinet doors for tools and supplies, so why couldn’t a family sedan?
Consider the Picnicar, for example. Rooftop solar panels would help power small, insulated coolers and refrigerators accessible from the side of the vehicle. A handheld remote would unlock the cabinet doors. The elegant convenience of the exterior cabinets would be a selling point for this car. Perhaps there would be problems from wine connoisseur-car thieves who might try to pry open the exterior wine cabinets to see if rare wines are hidden inside. There is plenty to think about here!
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.
There are a few good reasons – and many fairly silly reasons — why one might wish to convert a washing machine to pedal power. But perhaps the rationale for doing so is building lately. Many of us in the Western industrialized world have suffered shocks to our self-esteem and sense of security as we have watched our intricate systems of work and task distribution teeter. So many citizens are unemployed, with limited prospects for finding work. Work itself, we increasingly realize, has been precariously distributed among specialists, while we have become dependent on complicated machines that are powered by energy sources conveyed from a distance by means of cables and tubes. This has happened at a time when vital survival skills known to earlier generations have been lost.
For a variety of reasons, some now look appreciatively at crude home-power devices, like the bicycle-operated water-pumping device used in rural India. However inefficiently such systems function, they work even when the electric utility bill hasn’t been paid! Admittedly, not everyone finds the crude, tiring chores of earlier pioneer generations worth emulating. But for decades, philosophies of Simple Living have found adherents in the U.S. Once solar panels became a viable source of home power, off-the-grid living became possible. Individuals, as well as communal groups, have experimented with alternative power sources including windmills, hydro pumps, solar panels — as well as human and animal muscle power — to perform everyday tasks. A search of Google Images for “bicycle-powered washing machine,” for example, shows many home-built contraptions, some laughably awkward, others ingenious.
I am not sure why human-powered appliances intrigue me so much. They amuse me. I have designed, but never built, several such devices.
The AutoPak is a non-electric “appliance” for compacting home trash and garbage by means of the family car. The concept, which I conceived in 1983, might be difficult to appreciate for many readers who learned to drive or first owned a car that offered a fragile painted bumper made of a single large painted piece of easily-destroyed plastic, cushioned internally with chunks of Styrofoam. When the AutoPak was conceived, bumpers had evolved from sturdy chromed steel to composite devices that included a hard rubber impact cushion on the outside. These sturdy bumpers were perfectly designed for push-starting a friend’s car (or for compacting trash).
In place of electric timers for home yard watering tasks, I conceived of a “natural”, non-electric, gravity-feed timed soaker hose system. No doubt the design seems to add an unnecessary level of difficulty to the task of watering a planter bed.
When What The World Needs Now was published in 1984 I felt I had tapped into a streak of American cultural insanity – or, to be more honest, my own insanity – so successfully that no future designs in any field could out-crazy mine. Wrong! Instead, I see now that my work was just a timid first step in a worldwide mix ‘n match innovation binge that would make my odd designs look almost staid and boring. In 1984, these women’s shoes, for example, were my idea of nutty-crazy.
Yet, if you follow fashion design these days, some of the designs for dresses, coats, hats and shoes for women seem over-the-top insane. Today, no strange idea is allowed to remain unexplored.
I have tried my best to be ahead of the curve. Here are some truly meaningless and awkward shoe-hat combo designs. This clothing line is part of my As Above So Below collection. These, I hope, are crazier than current clothing designers would dare offer to the buying public.
In women’s wear, funky and colorful tennis shoes have become a fashion item and are sometimes worn with a formal dress or business suit.
When I look back at my files from 1982-83 I find odd hat designs that touched on the shoe-hat theme. They have never been published. They are shown on Neatorama for the first time.
Back when families felt secure enough in their jobs to take two-week vacations, my wife and I would drive to the Sierras with our son every summer. We would leave early in the morning when it was cool, and head east out of Sacramento climbing hot, winding and steep grades. We would reach our favorite high altitude camp at Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park by late afternoon. What has always puzzled me is why I would ask for a snack (an apple or trail mix) as soon as the car door was shut and we had barely left our driveway. Why was I suddenly so hungry?
I’ve never figured out the reason for that habit. I know that most people eat inside their cars, though there is a special class of folks who insist on maintaining a pristine car interior and disallow eating. I never had such a rule, even in my nicest cars.
I wish it were the case that the acts of dispensing and consuming food inside a car was better supported and acknowledged by the auto interior design community. On more than one occasion I have tried to design devices that address the need for eating while in a moving automobile. In Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-a-mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century (1991) I presented a system for passing food between front and back seats, called the Automobile Snack Conveyor. I noted:
Households have so little time for bonding and closeness that even a moment passing food with an automobile snack conveyor seems special. The conveyor has forward and reverse directions and can also be used for passing notes or maps.
It is my habit to work away at an idea for a long time, sometimes for decades. In 2006 I updated the food exchange belt, making it look less like an aftermarket accessory. I integrated the belt into a center console that included a snack drop bin, trash holder and forward-reverse toggle switch. Backseat passengers, especially children, would be assigned the duty to ask for candy bar wrappings or orange peels, which they would place inside the trash bin.
Sometimes when I attempt to solve a design problem I discover that the solution has created new problems. In the nifty two-seater convertible below, a picnic table is automatically lowered in place, but both driver and passenger must stand outside the car while it is dropped into place, and later when it is returned to its place. This is a flawed design!
Another idea that I came up with is the Inflatable Dining Tray that inflates to a convenient table height when placed on the lap. The Tray could be used by passengers but not by the driver.
In 1991, star trend tracker Faith Popcorn wrote The Popcorn Report. The book was a best seller that offered a catchy list of future trends she foresaw. Included in her list was a trend she named “cocooning” which reflected “…the need to protect oneself from the unpredictable, the stressful and often hostile, outside environment.” In the Glossary she added an extreme form of cocooning, “burrowing”. Burrowing would be “..the ultimate expression of Cocooning in which consumers dig in, ever deeper, with a bunker mentality.”
While Faith was writing The Popcorn Report, I was burrowing at home in Sacramento, California, creating Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century. The book was published the same year as The Popcorn Report. I was essentially tracking the same trend.
I depicted a future product called the Television Life Support System:
Cautious Americans, sensing danger at every turn, may seek the passive, indrawn personal life of the television spectator, or “couch potato.” Superchairs are sold that can be customized to meet almost every need.
In the same chapter I showed the TV Sleeping Chambers, a cocoon-shaped piece of furniture specially suited to the needs of selfish teenage boys and juvenile males in general. I wrote:
Addiction to television, a disease, can lead individuals to buy bullet-proofed, sound-deadening television-watching cocoons.
In the 1990s I continued to think up home furnishings that incorporated aspects of cocooning. The Potato Couch Room Group allowed one to get comfortable inside a snuggly, split-open baked potato while at home watching TV.
During the short seven months (August 2, 1990–February 28, 1991) that the Gulf War raged in the Middle East, I was at work on a book, Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century. The book, published by St. Martin’s Press in September 1991, featured my half-serious predictions for the coming decades. At the time, I could not help but notice the popularity of the U.S. military’s Humvee, so it was not much of a stretch to imagine that versions of those rugged, menacing truck-sized vehicles would become a successful consumer item. I predicted the arrival in the not distant future of Mean Cars. I wrote:
Auto stylists, ever sensitive to shifts in the collective mood, detect an angry, defensive attitude in Americans and offer them the road-hugging, angular, “tank” look in mottled, spattered, or camouflage colors. Cars have narrow slots for windows, body armor, bullet-proof glass and teargas guns.
My prediction was substantially accurate. Not only would car models start looking meaner, they would get larger and heavier. The Hummer became an instant commercial success even if the few who bought them, including California’s Governor-to-be Arnold Schwarzenegger, had no need for such a mammoth vehicle for grocery shopping or commuting to work.
The chart shows the steady growth in sales of SUVs after the Gulf War until around 2005, when demand began to sputter. In 1990, what I had failed to imagine was how the future mix of vehicles, which offered a more extreme range in the size and mass of passenger vehicle models, would co-exist on the streets and highways of America. I had not foreseen how the success of the Light Truck vehicle segment (mostly SUVs) would create a dangerous disparity in weight and mass compared with compact cars. And then there was the problem of seeing over these tall vehicles! Lined up at an intersection, a compact car could now be stuck inside a “canyon” of tall cars.
I proposed a variety of ways to enable the small car driver to see over and around SUVs. My first concept was the Rooftop Periscope Sedan, shown in pink. It seems crude and comical to me now. In the inset above, a goldenrod-painted vehicle has an improved design, with a video camera atop a telescoping mast which slides inside a vehicle pillar.
Cartoonists have a crazy streak. They can’t help themselves; it’s how they are made. As a cartoonist-inventor, I sometimes cannot resist the temptation to illustrate a concept even while knowing it is crazy, stupid or at least poorly conceived. For instance, I have invented silly toilets solely to keep myself amused. I have also spent time pondering whether there might be non-traditional locations within the home where a toilet might be placed. Is it merely for reasons of tradition that toilets are consigned to bathrooms? Could toilets be placed in hallways, in dining rooms, or in the middle of the living room? Why not outhouse-like facilities (of modern design) on the porch, deck, or in the garden?
There are likely many good reasons for not locating a toilet in the middle of a kitchen. I understand that. But why not locate a toilet inside a shower stall? In fact, I can imagine extreme situations where water and space are so scarce, as on a submarine, where toilets might be incorporated into showers. But admittedly that is not the case in a home or apartment. But to see what it might look like, I drew a toilet inside a shower and I succeeded in amusing myself. I admit the concept is somewhat disgusting and disturbing given that dampness is the perfect medium for the spread of disease, contamination, smells, and so forth. I will give my idea an F for practicality but an A for whimsy.
Where else in a home might a toilet be placed? In 1983, I proposed The Living Bathroom, a space-saving concept for small apartments and cabins. I like my cute and clever execution of the idea, though I worry that the issue of odors was not addressed.
In 2007 I revisited my Living Bathroom concept, making it more stylish and adding a chimney. The chimney contains a built-in fan that sucks vapors from the toilet toward a roof vent. Both the chimney and the toilet come in polished stainless steel and look very modern. Note how the Toilet Concealment Chair slips over the toilet. It rolls forward on wheels when there is urgent need to use the toilet.
The April 20, 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reminded me that thirty-seven years ago I drew cartoons for the Sierra Club that pointed to the dangers of drilling for oil in Gulf waters. Back then I was a monthly contributor to the editorial page of The Sierra Club Bulletin, which was later renamed Sierra magazine. Recently I dug into a box of my cartoons from 1973-74 and located five on the subject of oil drilling in the Gulf. Two of the drawings were published in the magazine, and three had been held in reserve and never printed.
The danger of oil spills in the Gulf is not new!
In 1937, when Pure Oil company planted a fixed oil drilling platform in fourteen feet of water off Louisiana’s Calcaisieu Parish, they took the first baby steps that resulted in a growing assault on the Gulf, with increasingly sophisticated fixed and floating oil drilling platforms deployed in ever deeper waters. By now, according to the July 7 AP Report, there are 27,800 abandoned wells and 10,500 active wells in the Gulf.
The Florida Everglades and adjacent tracts of land to the north called The Big Cypress are extraordinarily sensitive to environmental threat. This July, the United Nations added the Everglades to its list of World Heritage sites in danger, citing the large amounts of water diverted to cities. It had been on the list from 1993 to 2007 for the same reason and then taken off.
For more than 70 years there has been a tug-of-war in the Gulf, especially in Florida, between oil companies and land developers on the one hand, and groups representing the collective concerns of environmentalists, fishing and hunting interests, and the tourist industry on the other. In 1973, the Gulf shoreline was under added pressure from oil drilling and land development interests after President Nixon declared Operation Independence in October. The Operation was a call to action and plan for developing energy resources at home to offset the effects of a recent oil embargo by OPEC nations. By December, 147 new drilling tracts were offered for leasehold sale in the Gulf of Mexico as part of a five-year plan to aid American self-sufficiency. Seventeen of those tracts were located about 40 miles west of Tampa and St. Petersburg.
That year, the danger from oil drilling directly off the West coast of Florida was noted in the above cartoon.
In several editorial cartoons in late 1973, I suggested that while oil companies were eying the tempting drilling tracts opening up in the Gulf, they still needed to persuade the public that they intended to do no harm. I showed how drilling platforms could be disguised to look like something they were not. Such an idea is not entirely unthinkable, since in some urban areas today one sees cell phone repeater “trees” decorated to look like actual trees, with fake pine-tree-like branches.
The above cartoon, showing drilling platforms disguised as bizarrely-outsized islands sporting a single palm tree, was published in the December 1973 issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin.
Another version of the same concept, shown above in color, was drawn but not published.
For decades, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have lobbied aggressively and occasionally successfully to stall or halt oil-drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. The cartoon, published in The Sierra Club Bulletin in May 1974, shows a gasoline tank-filling hose as an elusive and restless sea monster off the Florida coast.
In 1972-4, the Club focused its attention on an area in Florida known as Big Cypress, directly north of the Everglades, one to two feet higher in elevation, that is the source of fifty-six percent of its fresh water. In 1972, Florida Governor Reubin Askew had appealed to the U.S. government to save and acquire the Big Cypress Preserve. The Club’s lobbying efforts aided in the successful establishment of the Big Cypress Thicket Preserve in Texas, and Big Cypress preserve in Florida in 1974.
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.
Summer 2010 is not over yet, and some among us are still making plans to head to the woods. We cannot wait to sleep out under the stars on a cabin deck or rocky slope above timberline. Even now in late July, backpackers among us are spreading out provisions on the bedroom or living room floor, pondering which items are essential, and which must be left behind. To save on weight, should I leave the ultra-light, self-inflating sleeping pad at home? Should I follow the advice of best-selling backpacker-author Colin Fletcher (1922-2007) and cut my toothbrush in half as he advised in The Complete Walker? Lots to think about! Though the need for reducing weight on back country trips cannot be regarded lightly, it is unfortunate that backpacking equipment has tended as a result to favor minimalist, spare, and humorless equipment designs.
Car campers never have to worry about how much equipment to carry. They usually don’t need to search Google.com, looking for backpackers’ forums that discuss whether a mountain mummy bag should be filled with down or if synthetic stuffing is okay.
Though I have designed backpacking equipment since the early 1980s, neither Northface nor Coleman has phoned me asking for advice. Is it because my designs don’t seem serious?
Granted, the experience of lying on one’s back communing with the stars seems like an opportunity for feeling spiritual and transcendental, and for mulling over the path of one’s life. Do I really want to be lying in a silly-looking sleeping bag at that moment? Would my caterpillar bag and tent combination – which do not weigh an ounce more than similar, conventional-looking equipment, take all the seriousness out of my wilderness experience?
When I was a Boy Scout pup tents were the rage. Later in life I thought up a tent that would literally look pup-like. A matching sleeping bag would look like a spotted dog, and be sized for adults and children (child’s size is shown above).
Where I live in the suburbs of Los Angeles there is a small – admittedly very small – chance I will be shot at while driving or riding in a car on the freeway. For reasons not clear to me, some young men enjoy shooting at other young men. Some even enjoy shooting at strangers. I am getting pretty tired of all the violence in our culture! One of my solutions for the freeway shooters is to give them their own freeway. This would be a toll road where one pays for the privilege of smashing and damaging other cars and even harming the cars’ occupants. It is likely that my fussy rules – “No Smashing or Squirting Above 30 MPH” – would be ignored by drivers who are already prone to breaking rules. The toll booth operator would look for the words “Road Violence Certified” on the driver’s license and require the driver to sign a waiver exempting other drivers from responsibility for property damage to his car, bodily injury or death to his person or passengers. The toll road would be walled off from nearby bedroom communities, though the sound of screeching tires, and violent thudding would be audible from backyards at all hours. Perhaps at times gunfire would be heard. If this sounds like science fiction, I can attest that while I live in a “good” neighborhood of Los Angeles, one that is relatively safe, it adjoins a “bad” neighborhood where the sound of gunshots, especially at night, is not uncommon. 
The existence of this special freeway would of course stimulate a small industry devoted to the design of protective grating, cladding, and roll bars, as well as offensive weapons that would be guaranteed to dent vehicles or ruin paint jobs. 
The least offensive weapon would be the squirt cannon. Some cannons would be oversized versions of a child’s squirt gun, while others would be powerful and might be capable of shooting liquids that peel car paint. 
Perhaps there would be participants – new to Car Wars – who would naively think it fun to bring the entire family along for an afternoon at the Car Wars Toll Road. That would be the last time they brought the wife and kids! Here the car owner is shown filling his squirt cannon for the first time. 
Designing a vehicle that could inflict harm, yet remain relatively unharmed itself would be a challenge. My sketches explore both offensive and defensive modifications. The latter include window bars, cladding, heavy armor and spiky projections from a car’s body. 
A Bonger Car, named for the sound it makes when its “bonger” arm smashes a car’s reinforced metal roof, would dent or smash in the roof of a nearby vehicle, but unless it was protected in some way, it would be easily damaged in a retaliatory attack. The protected Bonger Car may look silly, but it sustains less damage than when unprotected. Exiting the car following an afternoon at the Car Wars may require outside assistance.
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website.
Most articles of apparel are subject to what might be termed style churning. Consumers are accustomed to seasonal modifications, new variations, and occasional eruptions of stylistic insanity. Women’s clothing is especially subject to these sudden changes, which can render the previous season’s outfits obsolete. What is much less subject to style changes is business clothing, especially men’s business clothing. In my July 13 blog in the Museum of Possibilities, “Cutting Edge Office Wear,” I offered some unusual design possibilities for business wear, though I concluded that the current economic climate is not favorable to wild-looking office clothing. I did not look at men’s neckties.
If one examines two variables in a man’s apparel — the shirt and necktie – their permutations and variations have been few. They have evolved very slowly during the nation’s 234- year history.
For example, when studying the necktie choices of four U.S. presidents, one can see the stubborn and sluggish evolution of their shape and form. For clarity, these neck embellishments are colored red. From left to right, John Tyler (1790-1862) sported a loose, extravagant, cravat (a predecessor of the necktie and bowtie), while Chester Arthur (1829-1886) wore a loosely-gathered fabric, tidily tucked beneath his vest, similar to an ascot tie (another evolutionary branch that preceded the necktie). Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919) wore a fat necktie that hardly differed from current styles, and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) favored a thin tie that would not look out of place today.
Today, in almost all areas of culture and behavior, one finds a relaxation from earlier, fixed standards and rigid codes. Has the time arrived for men’s necktie styles to break out from tradition, and undergo mutations in shape, form and function? In theory, men should be able to start the day searching through a closet full of an assortment of necktie types, each for a different occasion or mood.
For a time in the late 1950s while I was an undergraduate in college, I studied architecture. I wanted badly to be an architect. Yet the world is a better place than it might have been had I taken up the field! The field of architecture is no place for persons like me who run too easily after strange ideas.
Take my Punk Roofs for example. Please, someone, take them! It is not all that difficult to conceive of a neighborhood where “keeping up with the Joneses” means having a weirder roof than one’s neighbor. Yet can you imagine the upkeep and maintenance issues? How does one clean such a roof? How much insurance would roofers need before they climbed up a ladder to re-shingle a roof, or re-sharpen a roof’s spines? What would happen if a balloon full of tourists, operated by a nearby hot air balloon concession, lost power and sank into this neighborhood?
America is a strange place. It is a great and wonderful place that allows odd fads, cults, communes and crazy Utopian villages to thrive. It is a place where adults live basically without supervision much of the time. Since Americans are so into their cars – the rest of the world will never be able to compete with the U.S. in automobile fanaticism – I reasoned that an entire village could be built that would simulate the experience of being in one’s car or motorhome every day of the year. The concept above shows a happy couple inside their Auitohome, waking up to the recorded sounds of cars at rush hour. A mist-spraying device emits a non-toxic perfume that mimics the smell of exhaust fumes and motor oil. The village that I imagine is on a pleasant, sunny hillside. The occupants do not actually need to go anywhere. One of their rooms, fitted out like the interior of an automobile, would provide a Naugahyde-lined office space with computer and Internet, perfect for fulltime telecommuting.
I have always believed that no dumb concept is worth leaving unexplored. Here, I tried turning useless attic space into an upper-floor garage. It could be argued that this concept, which requires steel girder construction to support the attic garage and ramped driveways, simply creates new, and even more useless, spaces. It could be argued that the entire house would vibrate when the breadwinner pulled into the garage after coming home from work. It could be argued that this idea has few virtues.
Surely among the keen followers of Neatorama there must be some like myself with a tendency to hold onto obsessive thoughts, fixed ideas and strange schemes for decades. I have entertained this idea for at least thirty years: It should be possible to exercise while you drive or ride in an automobile. Never mind that this idea runs up against a zillion objections, with driver distraction being only of them. But ideas that one obsesses about cannot easily be dropped, any more than it is easy to quit cold turkey a lifelong addiction to alcohol (which is not one of my problems, thankfully).
This idea first came to me in 1977, at a time when U.S. automakers were making little headway competing against the onslaught of small, economical cars that had been arriving on U.S. shores from England and Europe. In the 1970s, models began to appear from Japan like the Honda Civic, a very small sedan that was in 1973 shockingly efficient and got great gas mileage. What to do with the oversized U.S. gas guzzlers was a question discussed nationally. My first idea was that U.S. carmakers could simply remove the gas-consuming engine and replace it with a 30-speed bicycle. Its top speed might be one-mile-per hour, but it would get very competitive mileage!
Thirty-one years later, in 2008, I drew this car, the GYM Pedal. That old guy in the drawing is not I, but that’s how old I feel on some days. He is pedaling in order to keep in shape, and he feels he is being useful by keeping a few small battery-powered devices in the car charged up.
The idea of exercising while you drive has some immediately obvious flaws, but exercising while one is a passenger seems quite possible and somewhat easy to accommodate. Before any commenter on Neatorama raises the objection that there are no seatbelts in my Trampoline Cars, I will defend myself by saying that this was drawn in 1983, a year before the first seat-belt legislation was enacted in the U.S., in the state of New York. So it’s not like I was ignoring a law. Yet common sense suggests there might be some problems with both of the concepts shown above. Very sudden braking would pitch the exerciser violently forward. It’s not like I don’t understand that fact. This drawing was merely a concept sketch. A more refined design would require the trampoliners to wear halter-like “bodybelts”, helmets, and inflatable, crash-mitigating clothing. Certainly, the view from such a high perch would be amazing, and the feeling from bouncing on a trampoline in a moving car would never be forgotten.
The title of this article, Cutting Edge Office Wear, is intentional word play. It ties in with the fact that thirty-five years ago, I predicted that there would be a fashion trend of clipped, torn or ripped clothing in the future. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was not hard for me to imagine an unstoppable, outward radiation from the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury district across the U.S. of hippy lifestyle habits as well as clothing styles. Here in grey are original drawings from 1975 showing future office employees wearing patched and ragged businesswear. Colored drawings are from 1983.
Of course, everyday clothing has been marketed looking faded, pre-worn, and pre-torn for quite a while now. But ripped dresses, sports coats and trousers as office wear, as I predicted decades ago, have not yet shown up on the racks of Macy’s or The Emporium. While office wear has not succumbed to the “torn” trend I feel it is close to succumbing to it. For example, expensive business and evening jackets for young women are now sold with rough edges and fringes.
There are conflicting factors now that affect office wear style trends. The adoption of Casual Friday policies in many companies tended to relax office clothing standards in general, and some high tech companies in Silicon Valley during the High Tech Boom even went so far as to endorse an office apparel policy that could be described as Wear Whatever Is Comfortable. You could basically wear at work what you would wear at home, above and beyond underwear or pajamas.
Yet fear of job loss, which has accelerated rapidly as the ranks of the unemployed has continued to swell, has undercut any feeling of being relaxed at work! Many employees, as described in Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent book, This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (2008), remain at jobs that they dislike, in fear of being fired and losing what increasingly matters most in their life – their health benefits.
Thus, some of my old predictions of ever-increasing laxity and casualness in work wear standards may have been halted in their tracks! A new office outfit that morphs sweatpants with formal office wear seems less likely to happen now than it did a few decades ago.
Nonetheless, I still stand by my prediction of the eventual adoption of the office jumpsuit (1983), because of the idea’s extraordinary practicality.
Ideally, the spectrum of acceptable office wear should expand, not contract. Clothing that tends to feel cool and fresh during hot summer weather like cutoffs, short pants, and miniskirts could in theory offer style cues to designers looking for ideas for sophisticated office wear.
It would be nice to think that nothing should prevent the design of imaginative, bold office wear statements by top fashion designers. A frankly whimsical clothing line, As Above-So Below, could be a big seller. Or perhaps not.
Maybe I need to acknowledge that in 2010, American office workers are more often than not hunched down, cowering in fear inside their cubicles, not wishing to stand out. They do not want to even think of making a single mistake on the job, and prefer to toil quietly without upsetting their boss. A frank and bold office clothing style – one that earlier seemed possible at least in my imagination – cannot as easily be pictured today. Plus, since the early 1980s when I designed my As Above-So Below clothing line, numerous humorless and puritanical laws have been passed – for good and understandable reasons — to deal with sexual harassment problems at the office. An employee would not wish to show up in court to defend him or herself against sexual harassment charges, wearing one of my suits!
Visit Steven M. Johnson at his website..
Sleeping while at work is generally considered to be unacceptable behavior by most U.S. employers. With some types of work falling asleep can be dangerous, while with other types such as office work, falling asleep implies one’s failure to be available for productive work during a specified time. There is no tradition in this country of a post-lunch or afternoon Siesta. Yet dozens of studies agree that the U.S. is a sleep-deprived nation. A National Commission on Sleep Disorders, 2003 reported: “Sleep deprivation costs $150 billion each year in higher stress and reduced worker productivity.”
In the early 1980s I tried to imagine desks that would accommodate an employee’s need for a quick nap. While I was working on these designs, the American office itself was changing. The purpose and design of the desk was being redefined. The Computer Revolution had arrived.
Here, an employee takes a break from working on her Mac Plus. She climbs into her soft, comfortable and soundproofed File Cabinet Sleeping Quarters for a quick nap.
more …
Every time I read of a home invasion robbery, or an in-the-window abduction of a sleeping child, I feel angry and also frustrated. Why should we be so vulnerable in our homes? I’m annoyed with architects. Why aren’t they designing homes in which we can at least relax and feel safe?
If architects won’t do their job, I’ll volunteer to step in and do it for them. Here’s an inverted, upside down single-family home. Do you see a problem with this? Do we really need windows on the first floor? Burglars, rapists and child abductors will not find it easy to get in! The tapered walls on the building shown on the left could even be coated with grease. Not shown are support pillars, embedded deep into the subsoil, that support the building and also afford space for a small basement. In case of fire, occupants either exit from the front door or jump from second-story windows into soft, deeply-tilled soil covered with ice plant or similar soft bedding plants. Note how bushes, potential hiding places, are few and kept trimmed small.
If living in an upside down home seems restricting or strange, there are other design solutions that can at least minimize one’s interaction with strangers, especially ones who might have criminal intent. Just as gas stations and mini-marts provide slide-out trays and bullet-proof glass to protect their employee-attendants at night, so can a Home Solicitor Interrogation Room be added to a single-family residence. A plus feature, not shown in the illustration, is the electronically-lockable front door. The resident, safe inside the home, is able to lock a criminal or criminals inside the tiny entry room, creating a holding cell until police arrive.
Another type of holding cell can be located underground directly in front of a fake front door. The real front door is located elsewhere, its location known only to friends and family. If the resident doesn’t like the looks of a person, he or she presses a button causing the porch to collapse into the cell below. Not shown is the ample padding that lines in the floor and wall of the brick-lined holding cell.
A deceptively simple yet effective design is the Home Perimeter Dog Run. Rather than setting an alarm when leaving the home for the day, or when retiring to sleep at night, the resident unlocks an interior gate, giving the dog full run of the entire balcony. Dogs are very sensitive to sounds and vibrations, especially those made by strangers. Should a criminally-inclined stranger step anywhere on the metal walkway, a large dog would leap out of its house and attack.
I worked on the problem of home invasion over several decades. The solutions that are shown above, drawn in the mid-1980s, seem silly today, but that was before there existed sophisticated home security systems with night-vision cameras, body heat detectors, and web cams.
A Swimming Moat would offer an opportunity for residents to relax in their pool, do laps or invite friends and neighbors over for a pool party. But at night, or when homeowners are away from home, the pool becomes a moat. Drawbridges are raised. Unauthorized entry is effectively discouraged, since burglars do not wish to contemplate climbing slippery walls in wet running shoes, balancing delicate electronic appliances overhead. Posted signs suggest the added possibility of serious electric shock. The sign would be false. If it were not, cats, dogs and squirrels – or drunk revelers who climbed the fence – would be electrocuted.
My favorite solution is the Underground Bedroom. The bedroom, located anywhere on the property, is approached through a secret passageway. In this example, residents enter at night through the door of a stacked washer-dryer machine (fake) and crawl down a sloped ramp. The bedroom is stocked with food, television, computer, VCR, phone and a very small toilet. This room is the quietest in the house.
It has always been my habit to give an idea – any idea – a fighting chance to percolate in my mind for a while, letting it have full reign to explore its own possibilities. The flip side of this liberal and undisciplined attitude towards my own ideas is that they may seem irresistible and attractive even after their flaws are already apparent. Take my idea for Inflatable Swimwear. Was it really an idea worth elaborating, wasting my time on? The disadvantages of inflatable swimwear were immediately obvious! It is not only the opposite of sleek looking, but it presents an obstacle, even when not inflated, to rapid and efficient swimming.
Yet it seems I did not know when to stop once I got this idea. Wishing to improve on it, I worried about the way an inflated top of a two-piece swimsuit would likely ride up around the neck while swimming, possibly exposing the breasts. I addressed that flaw by creating a full body inflatable suit, as shown in yellow.
Thinking further, I wondered how such a suit might be inflated quickly and easily, given that blowing it up by mouth – as anyone who has blown up an air mattress by mouth on a camping trip can attest – is tiring and takes seemingly forever. Here, I adapted several items, commonly worn at the beach or swimming pool, as air pumps.
Naturally, an inflatable swimsuit would be cause for snickering and derisive laughter. Yet if a life were saved, who would be laughing then?
The style choices for a man’s inflatable swimsuit would, according to present standards of allowable public nudity, allow for two options. The suit could either be worn as trunks or as a single-piece, full body suit, similar in appearance to the modest style favored by male and female swimmers during the Victorian era.
More study is needed. If the inflatable chambers were placed mostly on the front side of the suit, such a design would tend to pull the swimmer over onto his or her back, which might make it difficult to swim, or to keep the head raised. Thinking more broadly, if getting an all-day sunburn – a burn on the front side of the body only – is desired, it would be easy to create a swimsuit that includes an inflatable raft on the back side that also supports the head. It could even include a hole for holding drinks. Excuse me, while I head to the drafting table to work on it!
In the fall of 1983 I experienced a prophetic flash: At some time in the future, automobile chassis design would no longer be constrained by a rule that dictates that a car body be bilaterally symmetrical. Of course, I knew that almost all living creatures are bilaterally symmetrical – with a few exceptions like the flatfish that has two eyes on the same side of its body. But with most fauna and even many flora, the two sides are identical, arranged along an axis in mirror fashion. I wondered if there would come a time when auto designers no longer felt the need to mimic nature but instead could try out new forms. I drew several examples of car models that I foresaw.
Traditionally, automobiles were designed to be symmetrical from left to right side, and asymmetrical front to back. Thinking about this, I realized there were several problems with my vision of asymmetrical cars in the future. First, cars move faster through the air when their exterior body is shaped smoothly. Complex air currents that are caused by an uneven surface tend to slow a vehicle. Second, while consumers like novelty, they are conservative in their attitudes about what they consider beautiful or graceful. The Ford Edsel, for instance, was mocked and shunned by most car buyers because it was viewed as ugly.
But times are changing. For the 2008 model year, Nissan introduced the Cube, one of the first production cars offered for sale in the United States that included an asymmetrical design feature. Darkened glass hid the right rear pillar, which was painted black to further conceal it. This was a car intentionally designed for rebels, Slackers and the younger generations, persons who have a taste for irreverent, post-modern and whimsical design. To many elders, the lack of a D-pillar might seem disturbing, as if the car is off balance.
The Nissan Cube broke a design taboo! Now there is an opportunity for auto designers to mount an all-out effort to design cars that are cheerfully asymmetrical, unusual looking and painted in distinctive, randomly-applied colors on unusually-shaped body panels. I believe that trends have converged to make it possible for my 1983 prediction to come true. These trends include just-in-time manufacturing, computer-aided car body modeling and strong but ultra-light materials. Cars that older generations would regard as horribly misshapen just might become the new standard for vehicular beauty. After all, in some urban areas –Los Angeles comes to mind – motorists long ago concluded that driving a car is an act of madness, a surreal commitment to willingly perform a dangerous act, but an act that for much of the time involves driving at no more that 3 miles an hour during the miss-named “rush” hour. Why shouldn’t cars celebrate each owner’s uniqueness, and offer the possibility that the freeway itself will become a slow-moving, crazy, mardi-gras-style car fashion show?
We know that for most days a typical car is driven for as few as 40 miles, at speeds of less than 25 miles per hour. Where, then, is the need for all those sleek, aerodynamic cars that are designed as if they must move through the air as fast as bullets? Many folks now express an interest in slowing down. Restaurants have appeared that offer Slow Food in a relaxed and peaceful dining atmosphere. There are even restaurants that offer an opportunity to dine in total darkness! Some cities in Europe are advertised as Slow Cities. The new whimsically-designed, asymmetrical automobile would mock the need for speed. The brochure could proudly claim that it failed all wind tunnel tests, that it was literally resistant to speeding! You read it here first: Slow vehicles are the next car trend.
When I first saw futurist Steven M. Johnson‘s "inventions" (and believe me, the word "invention" under-describes what Steve produces), two thoughts popped in my mind.
The first is that they remind me of "chindogu," the Japanese art of useless inventions, except that Steve’s brilliantly whimsical (or is it whimsically brilliant?) creations are like chindogu on steroids. And the second is that we absolutely must have him on Neatorama.
Allison Arieff of The New York Times’ Opinionator Blog describes him as "a sort of R. Crumb meets R. Buckminster Fuller":
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.”
Steve has written two books, What the World Needs Now and Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century
PERSONALS T-SHIRT
A brave new generation indulges in unabashed self-advertisement, sporting personals T-shirts
BEDSHEET-ON-A-ROLL
The automatic self-making bed, a dream of many adolescents and some adults, is produced. All that is required is periodic forward winding of the take-up sheet roll, which draws a fresh sheet segment around a roller to create a "pair" of clean sheets. The used sheet roll is picked up for cleaning by a mobile laundry service, which leaves behind a fresh roll.
TOILET FOR TWO
Installing a duplex toilet would be considerably less expensive than constructing an additional bathroom to accomodate a growing family.
VACUUM SUIT
Wearing the vacuum suit, one feels free to move around the house, developing a skating or dancing motion while listening to stereo headphones. Vacuum motor can be reversed for yard leaf blowing. "Sauna" suit helps one to lose weight.
The bad news is that those books are out of print, though we do have a small stock of these rare books for sale. The good news is that he’s never stopped inventing (he’s got boxes and boxes of ideas jotted down for posterity) and that yours truly managed to coax the 70 72-year-old inventor to come out of retirement and produce a new regular series on exclusively on Neatorama.
Here is the inaugural blog post of Steven M. Johnson’s Museum of Possibilities: Link – Enjoy!
(Image credit: Aaron Logan)
Some of us simply have trouble accepting things as they are. Apparently I do. There is hardly any sight in Northern California more beautiful than that of the Golden Gate Bridge. With its distinctive orange-vermillion paint job, faithfully maintained year after year, it can be seen for miles. I have no problem with the bridge as it is; I love it. But sometimes I get an urge to see what something might look like if it were different. In late 2007 I began to redesign the Golden Gate Bridge. I tried various schemes, and prepared enough drawings to satisfy my curiosity. I had fun, but my designs were pretty ugly.
Whimsically-designed public works are relatively rare in cities around the world, but not entirely absent. In Rome, tourists may occasionally encounter silly and amusing public sculptures and fountains. Working on my designs for the Golden Gate Bridge, I tried shapes that might be amusing to a child. But honestly, a design like the one depicted above might not seem so funny to commuters who had to drive between its legs twice a day.
For sure, I lack the engineering expertise that I would need if I were to actually redesign the Golden Gate Bridge. My funky, wiggly and organic bridge support structure lacks gravitas and seriousness. An international competition would be needed for such an important project. The competition would offer an opportunity for talented bridge engineers to show off their unique plans for the bridge. Allowing engineer-sculptors to submit designs would be an exciting event, though emotions would run high, given the public’s sentimental attachment to the bridge’s dramatic and straightforward design that has attracted admirers during its entire 77-year history. Judges would need to assess entries to make sure they met standards for public taste and morality, engineering integrity and ease of maintenance.
Even though it would be possible to match the existing strength of the Golden Gate Bridge’s suspension system by using materials and structural members different from the original cable system, the public would likely rebel at a structure that is unpleasant to look at.
If my designs were built, the focus of the discussion would shift from the bridge’s virtues to a public debate concerning the designer’s sanity!
Bridge supports could become tourist attractions. Here, a ship that is loaded with tourists docks alongside one of the Robot Man bridge supports and lets off passengers. They ride the elevator up to Robot’s Chest Restaurant, or all the way to the top to Robot’s Head Bar.
Seriously, I am distressed by the dangerous condition of the aging bridges, highways, railroad tracks, and trestles that make up the nation’s transportation system. With declining or absent budgets, there is less room for public discussion about the need for high-level aesthetic input. Perhaps a general appreciation for the work of star designers and big thinkers is waning right along with shrinking budgets. And while humor is known to be an indispensable concomitant and byproduct of human intelligence, it is not listed as a design criteria in public works budgets.
For decades I have believed there is a need for whimsy in publicly-funded works such as street furniture and urban signage. Here’s my idea sketch for 1983 that included a note: “What would happen if engineers in the Public Works Department had a bigger budget and an opportunity to express a sense of humor.”
No doubt, not all parts of the public infrastructure system are amenable to or improved by the application of whimsy. My 1990 drawing of a future public transportation system, dubbed Municipal Light Entertainment Rail, showed a system that would likely be more disturbing than comforting! For example, the experience of being mugged while riding inside a tunnel – one made to look like the rib cage and intestines of a monstrous fish – would be deeply unnerving! An individual might need years of therapy to recover from the event.
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