Hasta La Ideas

At the entrance to the “ParaDesign” exhibit currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, visitors get to read a definition of the term. ParaDesign, we are told, is work that is “about, against, around, aberrant to, alongside, or not quite design.” The work we are about to see, the curators continue, “was intended not to solve problems, as professional architects and designers must do, but to pose keen, significant questions about the codes and habits that give built and designed objects their air of inevitability.”

Somewhat surprisingly, my reaction on reading this was not one of giddy joy and expectant excitement. Rather, it was one of grim foreboding. “Oh dear,” I sighed aloud, to the slight consternation of the man standing next to me.

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Travis Salisbury was an Industrial Designer who worked for various government agencies before his retirement in 1977. In the late 1950’s, Salisbury received an honorary degree in Design from the Montana Institute, and later took a job as director of design for the Montana State Legislature. This was an honorary position i.e. he didn’t get paid. His main goal as a designer was to “help people get along and have fun while doing it.” He organized a huge number of “supper days” events where opposing politicians would cook each others favorite meal and then eat them together. This helped Montana greatly. In 1961 he designed Chair #406 (named after Helena’s area code). This chair looked completely normal except for one small feature — a V-shape under one of the legs.

The reason for this “V” was to allow a game to be played with multiple chairs. People would play by hitting a ball through the “V” with some sort of mallet. Salisbury wanted people to be able to blow off steam in-between sessions. The “V” was large enough to let a croquet ball pass. All of the #406 chairs have since been sold off or scrapped — people got too caught up in the game and it became a distraction.

After multiple years of writing proposals to the U.S. mint, Salisbury finally hit the big time in 1965 with his Average Citizen Quarter Program (or ACQP). The idea was simple: put an average citizen on a quarter. For a year, applications were scoured over until Randy Young, a steelworker from Pittsburgh, was selected. The coins were minted in 1967. Less than two months after the coins were minted, Randy Young was arrested for armed robbery — the coins became known as “Jailbird Quarters.” The Mint immediately stopped production of the coins, and the ones that existed were given an acid treatment to hide their features and to shame both Salisbury and Young.

After the public disgrace of the Jailbird Quarters, Salisbury moved to New Jersey and began to write textbooks for elementary school students. The only one of his books that made it very far was Learn to Control Your Machine. The art on the cover was a drawing that Salisbury’s uncle drew of Travis at age ten.

The text of the book was simply “Learn to control your machine” over and over again, much like in the movie The Shining. At least five times per page there was a spelling error, 500 errors in the book. Students were graded on the amount of errors that they could find. Salisbury made sure that there were at least 100 variations of the book so that the students couldn’t cheat. Some students were actually helped by the book, others were scarred for much of their lives.

After finally making money with his book, Salisbury went back out west to Montana, and got his honorary Design Director position back. This was 1973. After noticing that many of the politicians were making embarrassing and even incriminating doodles in their notebooks, Salisbury made them a custom notebook that would solve the problem. They would have the usual-sized ruled paper, but there would be a bigger column left near the binding when they tore off pages. This notebook had an area for doodles and a doodle book that the politicians could keep for later once all of the pages had been ripped off. A doodle book from the Montana State Legislature recently sold on eBay for $1000.

Salisbury worked four more years in Montana and retired in 1977. Some say that he was a pioneer and others say that he severely hurt the chances of other designers with dreams of working in government. Salisbury still lives in Montana where he’s working on a new book about how the Jailbird Quarter fiasco was planned called Randy Young is Innocent.

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Design Fancy is a series of short stories about fictional designers who make fictional things. The stories (and the objects) are by Matt Brown. Special thanks to Greg Burkett.

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Cyprien Côté loved people, loved nature, and everything in between. “Especially everything in between” he would say. He was an explorer, an industrial designer, and more than anything else a friend to the natural world. As a designer he was known for his strange antics with clients. Routinely he’d lose fifty pounds for the first meeting, get the brief, only to show up four months later buff with fifty pounds of new muscle. In the early 60’s, when he got his start, he convinced more than one client that doing macaroni art was a critical part of the design process. He was from the town of Tadoussac in Quebec and from visits to his Aunt in Terrebonne he quickly gained an appreciation for plants and beasts early in his life. His first design/invention took 10 years to produce- the whalesong radio (CHANT DE BALEINES) – a radio that could tune in to the bellows of whales from around the world.

The radio was a collaboration with several colleges from all over the world. Special listening pods had to be sent throughout the world’s oceans to pick up the sounds. Sadly, only one of the listening pods still exists today and if you’re lucky enough to have one of the radios, you’ll only be able to hear humpbacks a couple days out of the year.
After a brief hiatus, Cyprien returned to the design world with his now famous CowCows (VACHEMENT VACHE ). Completely “fed up” with seeing cows unsuccessfully wipe flies from their eyes, he came up with an ear extender that could be used by the cow to fully remove any pest that was bothering them. They were made out of a super-soft material and cost about fifty cents (Canadian) per set.

CowCows were a huge success in Sweden and in the Midwestern USA. Although the cows couldn’t buy the extenders themselves, they could speak through their milk production. If one farmer got his cows the extenders, sooner or later his neighbor’s cows would stop producing milk in protest until they also had them.

In 1968 Côté took a trip to Italy that would change his life forever. One morning he was outside exercising when a small earthquake took place. He noticed a beetle near his feet that left his den while the earthquake was progressing. Intrigued by this Côté took the beetle back to his lab. As it turns out, this insect- the LoDuca Beetle- can sense earth tremors and always comes out to the light when he senses anything. Côté immediately took over a thousand of the Beetles back to Quebec and designed his earthquake warning system, INSECTES TREMOLOITANTS. The device was simple- one dark room, one light room, one tunnel. If someone would ever see the beetle, they would know that an earthquake would be on the way. Insectes Tremoloitants has saved over 800 lives and counting.

Côté died young at age 35 in a diving accident. In 1974, four years after his death, his brother Cypriaque realized and released one of Cyprien’s early sketches- a sea shell empowered white-noise generator. All proceeds went to an undisclosed charity.

Does Côté’s legacy live on? A quick google search will tell you that it doesn’t, but certainly this was a man that deserves to be remembered. There are huge gaps in his career history and any evidence of his existence is welcomed.
As Côt&eacute would say: “Fête fort pour les bêtes, fête fort pour toé.”

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Original cow image by Sunfox

Design Fancy is a series of short stories about fictional designers who make fictional things. The stories (and the objects) are by Matt Brown. Special thanks to Pierre-Alexandre Poirier and Jerry O’Leary.

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A few months back, on this forum, Don Norman wrote a great piece that drew back the curtain on the ever-expanding blur that is design thinking. Norman’s piece eloquently articulated a number of criticisms surrounding design thinking, but as I thought back on the article, I couldn’t help but feel dissatisfied. For all the chatter the piece solicited, there was something left unsaid; something insinuated but not pursued. This fact gnawed at me for months, but I think I’ve come to recognize the source of my discomfort. Buried deep within the messy cloud enveloping ‘design thinking’ is the ever so faint echo of design’s deep-seated professional insecurity.

So many design articles today seem content to throw the intuitive core of design under the train of its more rational self. They imply, by varying degrees that design fits neatly into two camps: aesthetic pursuit and intellectual analysis. Just as prevalent are the pieces that chastise design for purporting to own creativity. From where this perception arose—I have no clue. Perhaps it’s the unintended consequence of selling design process (aka creativity) detached from the pedestrian world of results. Design and designers may have a lot to apologize for, but their advocacy of creativity is surely not one of them. If design is guilty of annexing creativity more effectively than other professions, so be it. There are worse accusations I can imagine.

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