Review: I Miss My Pencil

Design Dis­sec­tion: Exper­i­ment­a­tion is the path to true know­ledge at IDEO.

I Miss My Pen­cil, Mar­tin Bone and Kara John­son; Chron­icle Books. 272 pp, full-colour pho­tos through­out, hard­cover, RRP $130.

Richard Buckminster-Fuller once said, “There is no such thing as a failed exper­i­ment, only exper­i­ments with unex­pec­ted out­comes”, and that seems to pretty much sum up I Miss My Pen­cil. This canary-yellow cloth-bound tome is based on a series of exper­i­ments con­duc­ted, you might sus­pect, for no reason other than the sheer pleas­ure of con­duct­ing experiments.

The authors of this book are Mar­tin Bone and Kara John­son from the well-respected multi-disciplinary firm IDEO. Bone is a design dir­ector at the firm, and John­son, who describes her­self as “a mater­ial sci­ent­ist, almost”, leads ini­ti­at­ives explor­ing the inter­sec­tion of mater­i­als, design, and brand.
So, what’s Pen­cil all about then? It’s hard to go past the authors’ descrip­tion: “12 design exper­i­ments con­ceived by design­ers at IDEO. Each exper­i­ment is made real through col­lab­or­a­tion, sketch­ing, pro­to­typ­ing, fab­ric­a­tion, and pho­to­graph­ing to go bey­ond the con­cep­tual to the curi­ously concrete”.

Bring­ing new mean­ing to the expres­sion “cus­tom print­ing”, these rect­an­gu­lar felt pieces of mater­ial were part of exper­i­ment to adjust the appear­ance of a humble printer.

And, what sort of exper­i­ments do John­son and Bone con­duct? It all seems to be about see­ing com­mon­place things dif­fer­ently. Smell­bell, for instance, is “a door­bell that auto­mat­ic­ally assigns a unique fra­grance to any­one who rings it. Over time the home becomes filled with the com­bined per­fume of the people who’ve vis­ited.”
Trade­mark aims to counter the ste­reo­type that “Made in China” equals cheap. The authors sought to apply the tech­niques of tra­di­tional crafts­man­ship to mod­ern indus­trial design, in this instance mer­ging the intric­ate handi­work of fili­gree boxes with an audio speaker.
As expec­ted from a design firm of IDEO’s stature, I Miss My Pen­cil is immacu­lately presen­ted. Its text more often than not takes the form of a con­ver­sa­tion between the authors – and each voice is assigned a font that remains con­sist­ent through­out. When you pick up on that, the banter becomes imme­di­ately more enga­ging. For those who might not get around to buy­ing this book, the web­site is also worth a look – it seems that new exper­i­ments will be con­duc­ted, and old ones, per­haps, updated.

- Michael Barrett