DESIGN WONDERS

In our high-tech, designed world, it is easy to forget that at the core of the design process is that most innocent of impulses...a sense of play.  Creativity, after all, is based on wonder not software.  Besides a deep respect for apps and specs, all designers must also rely on the inner child to make new stuff.  I was reminded of this when I came a picture of the wind harp invented by Athanasius Kircher.

Athanasius Kircher was born in 1602 and admitted as a novice to the Jesuit order in 1618. This placed him at the beginning of the scientific revolution that would soon lead to the breakthroughs of Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibnitz, Robert Hooke, and others.  But Kircher followed a somewhat different pathway to innovation.

After years of wandering across Europe trying to escape the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, he settled
in Avignon in 1632 where his knowledge of exotic languages, astronomy, musicology, archeology, and the mysterious new study of magnetism, proved useful for his employment.  There, he became one of the pre-eminent intellectuals, inventors, and cataloguers of his day. 

Like many designers both ancient and modern, Kircher was obsessed with collecting.  Infinitely curious, Kircher gathered everything.  His enormous collection of artifacts became a famous museum in Rome called the Museo Kircheriano.  This was one of the first of the wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities) in which men and women of learning assembled vast stores of exotica from around the world to celebrate the diversity and richness of life.

He was also a prolific author and here is where the sense of play came into play.

The huge tomes that he wrote on the technology included his own odd and quirky creations like speaking heads, ear trumpets, magic mirrors, an image projector, chatty statues, lifelike automata.  The Catopric camera was a clever arrangement of mirrors and lenses that produced convincing apparitions.  He created a chart showing the evolution of alphabets beginning with the great Angelic language.  And so on.

In his major work of 1650 on musical invention called Musurgia universalis, Kitcher described a number of melodic gadgets like the Aeolean harp that worked by the wind and turned breezes into complex orchestrations, echoing mirrors that worked like funhouses for the ears, a celestial organ with registers matching the days of creation.

And then there was the Cat Piano.  Cats with squeals at the proper pitches were lined up in a device that jabbed them in the tails when the right key was struck.  You gotta love this guy.

Kircher is best remembered – if at all – for an invention that turned out to be a hoax…the infamous Sunflower Clock.  Well reviewed at the time, the clock was built around a sunflower that followed the sun and ticked off time on a dial.  The problem was that it worked on cloudy days and indoors and no doubt had a hidden mechanism.  But that would have been a minor point to him…it was the sense of wonder not the sensible explanation that mattered.

Unlike Newton and Hooke and the other bright lights of the revolution in progress, Kircher's goal was
not to decipher the laws of the universe but to demonstrate the mysteries of natural forces.  To insprie not instruct.  He was not an experimenter but an entertainer who was also exploring human physiology and creativity, and the baby sciences of acoustics, vision, and magnetism.

Above all, he was fascinated by the sheer joy of the new technology and science, something that often gets lost in the march of progress.  And something that we designers should not forget in our quest for
markets or money.

How could we fail to admire someone who coaxed the wind to sing?  Not to mention some irritated cats.