Things that would be cool, no matter what they are

Curious Displays from Julia Tsao on Vimeo.

Now like most people, I find design concepts extremely annoying – but not as annoying as those vacuum cleaners that are basically the same shape as brooms rather than the elephant-nosed type… so you wind up having to heft the entire lump of machinery around every time you want to do the corners etc. Basically someone has thought. “It’s a thing that sweeps the floor like a broom, so we should make it look like a broom”.

This is deeply retrogressive and stick-in-the-mud thinking. It’s a bit like back in the Web 1.0 days where entrepreneurial types were always trying to get me to build “shopping mall” websites that looked like an actual shopping mall, where you could wander about and look at shops etc. This is where “Virtual Reality” went wrong back in the day – a term popularised by Jaron Lanier, who has just written a book in which he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

So here are these prosthetic arms.

(click for massive version, with descriptions etc)

from http://joehenney.com/ (via)

Things don’t need to look like the things they’re replacing – and they might even work a lot better if they don’t.

If I needed a replacement arm, I wouldn’t really want one of those tan-plastic ones that looks like it’s sculpted out of wax – I’d like something like the thing above, but with a dremel attachment and rocket launchers. Laser beams. A TV remote. A metal detector. A thing for squeezing oranges. A fishing rod. An MP3 player. Some sort of plugin thing so you could make weird attachments of your own. Lego maybe. Simply having a hand that could rotate at 30,000 RPM would be pretty impressive though.

Something that would make people think… not “Oooh, he’s got an arm missing. Mustn’t mention the arm” or even “Oooh… that’s cool”, but “Jesus, that’s so much better than my arm, that I’m never going to catch up, and I now realise that I’m a doomed species, permanently stuck in the past etc”.