Hasta La Ideas

With additional reporting by Erika Rae Owen

In 1990, Ian Frazier published a fiction piece in the New Yorker, casting an antagonistic yet universally beloved Looney Tune as the plaintiff of a court case against a corporate entity for its seemingly nonexistent QC standards. No doubt you are already familiar with the laundry list of complaints enumerated in Coyote vs. ACME. Time and again, we took pleasure in witnessing the episodic pratfalls of the pathetic Mr. Coyote (given name Wile), as the nefarious ne’er-do-well nearly obliterated himself on multiple occasions in his attempts to assassinate his long-standing rival, the Road Runner. Each and every time, a dangerous piece of equipment would malfunction at the worst possible moment with suspiciously predictable consistency, rendering the aggrieved as a veritable case study in schadenfreude.

The suit alleges that ACME is at fault, but new evidence suggests otherwise.

Glitches aside, the various instruments of death and gravity-defying wearables employed by Mr. Coyote in the cartoon are much more than mere stretches of the imagination—they are, in fact, prime examples of design fiction. We just didn’t realize it until a designer from Pentagram took a stab at bringing the cartoon to life in a new way for their annual Christmas card.

Unlike the fictional plaintiff, designer Daniel Weil succeeds in his efforts: From the iconic spherical bomb to the more obscure Burmese Tiger Trap, these concepts may be more utilitarian than his previously-seen “Clock for Architects,” but the inner workings of the five ACME products are certainly no less considered.

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