Hello everyone, the holidays are over, as is the semester. I didn't manage to keep the blog going last semester, but I'm determined to keep up with it this year. Resolution? Yes. Five days a week. Monday through Friday I will post something. Even if it's just a sentence.
The things that roll around in my head would really be better off out in public. I keep having ideas, and in the past, I've felt very secretive about them, but the reality is, I'm in no position yet to take advantage of any of these ideas, even school projects have enough constraints to keep my sketchbook from ever really applying to any projects. I've started to finally realize that there will always be new design problems and solutions, so I'm going to start giving mine away. I think perhaps if I can get my ideas down before they come into fruition, I can at least feel a bit less ridiculous when I see something I've been dwelling on for a week, or a couple years.
I've heard others claim they thought of something before it happened, sometimes it's an obvious solution, sometimes not, but either way it's hard not to roll your eyes at these comments. An idea without application is nothing. My dad mentioned once that he thought of inline skates, ya know, before the 90's. I think it was Scott Adams that said he witnessed different people come up with the joke "roadkill on the information super highway". Of course, the innerwebs was really just an "information super walkway" when people used terminology like that, but it's the same combination of obvious ideas. In-line skates are of the same kind of idea, you see, real skates have blades. The reality is, inline skates appear during the friggin' Enlightenment. The reason people thought of in-line skates is because it's the obvious land-oriented version of ice-skates. Quads came one hundred years after because they were easier to use, and even that design has already been around for 150 years. Ok, so the 90's happen, Rollerblade makes a decent pair of inline skates using a hard-plastic ski-binding style boot to keep you from breaking ankles, and poly wheels of course, but the reality of this is more to do with marketing, and some simple recombination of ancient ideas and existing technologies. It's taking a concept like this and devoting your life to it that turns an idea for summer hockey practice, into a theme powerful enough to float an epic 91 minute feature film that focuses on the bitter realities of downhill in-line skating. We all thought of inline skates. It just took some decent redesign and good hype to make money.
Anyway, I'm going to get my brain babies out on this canvas, so I don't look like an idiot next year when I open up the token "Popular Mechanics" magazine I get every year at Christmas, and see two or three things I thought were my super secret genius plots, just to have them outed for everyone to see (usually having already existed for a number of years). Perhaps, my ideas will eventually go from "someone's already on that" too, someone is going to do it now that you thought of it. Eventually, I'll have the last laugh. And by last laugh, I mean, someone is going to become fabulously rich by reading my blog and stealing my ideas.
GeorgeP
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