It's 1947. A young Soviet wins a rather remarkable competition and becomes a hero. He is an unlikely sort. Originally from Altai Krai, his father is a kulak, exiled to Siberia where the family suffers in great penury. Our young hero eventually finds himself involved in Russia's Great Patriotic War where he serves in a tank brigade. Mechanically inclined, he begins to fix tanks, eventually creating a gizmo that effectively measures tank mileage.
And then his military career takes an unlikely turn. He designs a submachinegun, but not a very good one, and spends months in a railway workshop trying to perfect it. Through an improbable series of events (confusingly recounted in Soviet propaganda), he ends up in a design competition for a new kind of weapon. His team is the underdog but, ultimately, they prevail.
The Автома́т Кала́шникова or Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 (AK-47) is born. Mikhail Kalashnikov becomes a state hero.1
A different inventor in a different country in a different era. Kenji Kawakami is a reformed revolutionary who is inspired by Dada. He's also an inventor, either a very good one or a very bad one depending on who you ask. An editor refers to him as a "designer, anarchist, pathological mail-order enthusiast."2
Kawakami is the father of Chindogu -- odd Japanese objects that have the distinction of being well-crafted and serving a very particular function. The value of that function is, however, somewhat suspect. Take, for example, a pair of chopsticks that include an electric fan for cooling the noodles. Or a pair of shoes made rainproof by the inclusion of tiny umbrellas over each toe.
Kalashnikovs and Chindogu are both examples of designed objects. They also serve admirably as exemplars of different stages in design efficacy. I propose that there are four different stops on our journey from effective design to poor design. The Kalashnikov is our first station. Then we come to Chindogu before passing through The Homer. Finally, we arrive at our last stop: Slush Booger.
In fairness, the Slush Booger isn't a designed thing at all. It's simply an agglomeration of stuff, a material remnant of human activity. And yet, so many of the knowledge artefacts that we work with daily are more akin to Slush Boogers than they are to engineered objects.
The components of effective design
I posit that effective design has three different components:
Purpose. Any designed object must present some degree of value to its community of users. It's not enough for that object to just do something or to serve a function. It must present some relative benefit.
Function. The object must do what its designer intended to do. It has to do something.
Execution. The item must be well-built or, at the very least, intentionally built. Even if the function or purpose of the object is unclear, it could be beautifully executed.
The four stages of our design effectiveness hierarchy illustrate each of these components:
Kalashnikovs present all three elements. They served a very distinct purpose for the Soviet government and people. Their function is quite evident and highly specified. Execution is evident in both their popularity and their longevity.
Chindogu have a very clear function and are generally well-executed. However, they lack purpose. Indeed, one of the underlying tenets of Chindogu is that they intentionally lack a purpose -- "They represent freedom of thought and action: the freedom to challenge the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility; the freedom to be (almost) useless."
The Homer is a car that appears in the second season of The Simpsons. In the episode, Homer's long-lost half-brother asks him to design a car for the everyman. The resulting product is well-executed but so lacking in function and purpose that it fails commercially.
Slush Boogers aren't designed at all. They're simply the detritus of human endeavor. They're not well-executed, nor do they serve any particular function or have a recognized purpose. They simply are.
The Kalashnikov
Mikhail Kalashnikov won a design competition for a new Soviet assault rifle in 1947. It was not, however, the singular creation of a lone genius. The inspiration for the now-ubiquitous AK-47 lies in an earlier weapon. The Germans had developed the M35 cartridge, a smaller and lighter cartridge than was typically used in rifles. This new cartridge, combined with insights gained from the Maschinenpistole MP-43, led to Hugo Schmeisser's creation of the sturmgewehr StG44, the immediate inspiration for Kalashnikov's efforts.
https://pixabay.com/photos/ak-47-kalashnikov-rifle-gun-weapon-872500/
After WWII, the Soviets emulated Germany's efforts to create both a lighter cartridge and a suitable weapon to fire it. Kalashnikov was involved in the trials of 1947 where designs were put through tests and compared to the performance of the PPSh, a submachine gun developed to defend cities against Nazi sieges, the captured German sturmgewehr, and the leading Soviet candidate -- Sydayev's AS-44. There wasn't a clear winner. The three finalists were sent back with detailed recommendations for revision. Kalashnikov's final design was informed by his own experiences, his investigation of other weapons, and the lessons of the design competition. Really, it was a group effort.
As an artefact, Kalashnikovs represents all three components of effective design. They are well-crafted and reliable. They serve the function for which they were created. And that function served a very particular purpose for the Soviet state, not just to project military power but as a representation of Soviet capability. As Chivers notes:
"The automatic Kalashnikov was the result of state process and collective work, the output not of a man but of committees. And its wide distribution and martial popularity did not occur just because the rifle is, as General Kalashnikov often says, 'simple, reliable, and easy to use.'"
Chindogu
Japanese inventor Kenji Kawakami has a distinct appearance. "Let’s be frank. Kawakami Kenji looks a bit barmy: hooded eyes staring unnervingly beneath what appears to be shaved eyebrows, topped by an unruly mop of spindly hair. And this is before he happily poses for photographs with a toilet-roll dispenser on his head."3 He is the inventor of the Chindogu movement:
"The Japanese word Chindogu means an odd or distorted tool -- a faithful representation of a plan that doesn't quite cut the mustard."
Kawakami's inventions all have a very specific function but don't actually do anything particularly useful. He explains:
"I introduced the term Chindogu in Japan in 1985. Coined from 'chin' meaning unusual and 'dogu' meaning tool, it refers to a most universal concept: a gadget that appears to be useful but on closer examination isn't."
A great example of a chindogu is the "Hay Fever Hat." It serves the very specific function of ensuring that someone suffering from seasonal allergies always has tissue at-hand. Of course, the design -- while well-executed and in some ways fashionable -- isn't something that most people would particularly value.
Chindogu are almost useful by intentional design. They are as much resistance-art as they are technology. They are, however, illustrative of our second category of design effectiveness. There is clear function and execution, but they lack an overall purpose for being.
The Homer
In S2E15 of The Simpsons -- O brother where are thou -- Homer discovers he has a half-brother. Herb Powell runs a car company and he's desperate to design and build a vehicle for the common man. He recruits Homer who eventually pushes aside the so-called design experts to create the car of his dreams. It features both an outrageous price tag and a collection of rather eclectic features:
Two bubble domes, one for the front seat and one for the back to contain quarreling children. Options include child restraints and muzzles.
Three horns that play "La Cucaracha." There are several horn controls because, according to Homer, "you can never find a horn when you're mad."
Gigantic cup holders
Shag carpeting
Tail fins
A hood ornament featuring a bowler
Homer markets the vehicle as "powerful like a gorilla, yet soft and yielding like a Nerf ball" and "designed for the common man."
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer?file=Tapped_Out_The_Homer.png
https://www.fandom.com/licensing
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Homer is an immediate commercial failure and bankrupts Herb Powell. It's not that the car was poorly made. It simply had an unclear function and little purpose. An object can be remarkable and completely useless at the same time.
Slush Boogers
Some of you may be asking: "What the heck is a slush booger?!?" Clearly, you're unfamiliar with the joys of driving in the snow. Slush Boogers are icy collections of snow that accumulate between a car's tire and the wheel well, often hanging down behind the tire as a kind of malignant winter mud flap. I don't think that these things have an agreed-upon name lionized by the OED. Instead, they are described by colorful regional vocabulary. In these parts, we call 'em Slush Boogers.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pickles_pics/2254579429/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
The Slush Booger is simply a thing that has resulted from human activity. It has no purpose, no function, and no execution. It really isn't a designed object at all. And yet, so many of the knowledge artefacts that we work with on a daily basis are actually more like slush boogers than they are Kalashnikovs or even Chindogu. They just are and we have to work with them.
The Kalashnikov-Slush Booger spectrum in professional life
Modern knowledge work forces us to interact with all kinds of engineered objects. Many of them are very formal: computers, mobile phones, notebooks, and pencils. But lots of them are relatively ad hoc. I think of the myriad forms, templates, and presentations that we work with every day. We curse their limitations and the people who created them. Yet we use them.
It's important to think of these objects as belonging somewhere on the design spectrum. If they're not Kalashnikovs, what are they? And how can we make them more Kalashnikov-like? There may be a place for the efficiency-theatre of Chindogu or Homer cars but there is no excuse for using slush booger tools. Get -- or build -- something better.
Bottom Line: Build better. If the objects and tools that you're creating aren't Kalashnikovs, ask yourself: "What are they? Where do they belong on the design spectrum?"
My primary point of reference on the Kalashnikov is CJ Chivers's remarkable book The Gun (2011). It is ostensibly a social history of the Kalashnikov series of rifles but also considers the rise of the machine gun in modern warfare, including the Kalashnikov offshoots and competitors such as the American M-16.
Kawakami's work has been published in three different collections, the third being an omnibus of the first two. See Kawakami et al. 1995 and Kawakami and Papia 1998. Kawakami et al. 2005 is an omnibus edition of the previous two books.
McNeill 2005
References
Chivers, C J. The Gun : The AK-47 and the Evolution of War. London, Penguin, 2011.
Kawakami, Kenji, et al. 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions : The Art of Chindogu. New York, W.W. Norton, 1995.
---. The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions the Art of Chindogu. New York [Etc.] W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.
Kawakami, Kenji, and Dan Papia. 99 More Unuseless Japanese Inventions : The Art of Chindogu. New York [U.A] Norton, 1998.
McNeill, David. “The Art of Chindogu in a World Gone Mad.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 3, no. 8, 3 Aug. 2005, apjjf.org/-David-McNeill/1929/article.html. Accessed 5 May 2021.
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