Really Looking

The beat cops should have known better. They should have figured the kids making rubbings of an ancient sewer cover in the middle of Fifth Avenue were just art students fulfilling an assignment. What person in their right mind would have a buddy directing traffic around them as they squat in the middle of a swirling New York street unless they had to? I mean, they knew Parsons was just a few blocks down.

To avoid any unpleasantness, I worked on a wall plaque attached to an old building myself.
“Don’t you know what you’re doing is illegal?” I turned my head to see a police officer glaring down on me.
“I was just making a rubbing.”
“That’s defacing property.”
“You mean I can’t make rubbings? I’ve got to do it for school.”
He shook his head slowly. He probably thought our teacher was a nut case.
“Just don’t let me catch you destroying property.”
With that he walked away.

Maybe Mr. Norado was unconventional, but this exercise and others like it taught us to see, to really see what was around us. From these larger assignments and the filled black sketch books we got the pump primed for actual design solutions, William Golden style. (The guy that designed the old NBC logo after seeing display of branding irons in a Tiffany window.)

Sure, none of us are Sherlock Holmes. We don’t go through life collecting minute observations of everything around us. I suspect that much volume would make us mad through synaptic overload. But it doesn’t hurt to really look at something once and a while for the sheer joy of it. To see how beautifully hand drawn letters interact on an ancient enameled sign, or appreciate the seemingly airbrushed colors of a Cedar Waxwing.

So look, and while you do, savor it all.

Outside the Box

He was dubbed “The Wizard of Weston” and enjoyed the allusion to Thomas Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park”. Stanley Mason may not be a household name, but his inventions are. It seems we’ve always lived with granola bars, microwave cookware and dental floss dispensers.

Let’s take a peek into how his mind worked. It was 1949. “My wife asked me to put the diaper on the baby. I held up the cloth diaper, and it was square. I looked at the baby, and it was round. I knew there was an engineering problem.” What resulted was a form fitting disposable diaper.

Mason taught innovative thinking at the University of Connecticut. He felt corporations squashed creativity and was fired several times for his unconventional solutions. In spite of bureaucratic lethargy, many big organizations turned to him for new product ideas through his eight man think tank, Simco.

When his daughter’s dorm room was burgled, he designed a doorknob mounted alarm system. He collaborated with a toilet manufacturer, an expert in ceramics, to develop microwaveable cookware. He’s the guy who invented the stringless Band aid package, plastic dental floss, baby wipes, a sonic method for sealing chip bags, Depends, and hundreds of other things.

So what does all this have to do with frugality? It’s seeing the need and figuring a way to solve it with what you have. It’s our brother in law Dave, who coming up north to face car inspections for the first time, rigged small Christmas lights over the dashboard to illuminate it. (Dave also “grilled” cheese sandwiches on his dashboard during a drive to California, but we won’t go there.)

So what are your needs? When tackling them, remember the Wizard of Weston.