The idea for this article came to me while I was sitting in a two-and-a-half hour class, fiddling with my Fidget Cube. The Fidget Cube is a small six-sided device, and each side has a different stimulus: buttons to click, a joystick to move, gears to roll, a switch to flip, a dial to spin, and a flat side with an oval indent to encourage mindfulness. The object of one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history, the Fidget Cube became a sensation amongst fidgety people. How did such a small cube capture the public’s attention? It all began with two brothers, a small company, and an Internet campaign.
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| All six sides of the Fidget Cube |
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| Matthew and Mark McLachlan |
Matthew and Mark McLachlan have been inventors since a young age. Both brothers enjoyed creating new things, but they always had a mental block, thinking that they would never be able to actually implement the ideas they conjured up. In 2015, Matthew and Mark challenged that idea and founded Antsy Labs, a company dedicated to fidgeting. When the brothers decided to begin the Fidget Cube campaign, they were unsure of what the response would be. Before launching, when they explained the concept to people, nobody seemed to understand it. However, when they posted their product on Kickstarter, a website dedicated to helping entrepreneurs raise funds for new inventions, the campaign racked up $6,465,690 in donations to fund production of the Fidget Cube.
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| Spider-Man Fidget Cube! |
So what’s next for these innovative individuals? “We both are continually discussing the dozens of ideas we have in our sketchbooks. Even if we launched one or two of them each year, I'm not sure we'd ever run out with how quickly we add new ones to the list,” said the brothers. If you’re like me and can’t stop moving those hands, check out Antsy Labs. A Fidget Cube may just be what you’ve been looking for.
Sources:
Forbes Magazine
Adweek
Kickstarter.com
Antsy Labs
https://www.antsylabs.com/
Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, by Howard Gardner
I remember hearing about the fidget cube a while ago, back when it was just a Kickstarter Campaign, and reading people's comments and reactions to it as a brand new product. I too am, as you aptly put it, a "cuticle picker," but had never really had a name for the restless energy seemingly ever present in my hands, until I was suddenly presented with a product meant to help calm it. Like you mentioned in your post, it struck me as a unique, creative product, in large part due to its nature as a solution to a problem many people either didn't realize they had or had never considered there might be a solution to.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I completely agree with how the fidget cube provided a solution for a problem most people didn't even know they had. I also thinks it helps with the distraction to others that normally comes along with fidgeting. This might be self centered, but i find it incredibly annoying and distracting when someone next to me in class or a lecture keeps clicking their pen or shaking their leg and making my seat shake. The fidget cube solves that issue and allows the fidgeter to continue fidgeting which is a win win.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point so much. As a child I was one who could not sit still and it annoyed my parents to the max. When the fidget cube came out I thought the design and concept was so interesting and amazing. The creativity for someone to create six different actions to easily perform subtly while sitting in an informal or professional setting astounded me. When I brought this up to my parents they disregarded my wants for this, thinking it was a silly invention. A could months to a year later, I found a fidget spinner at the bottom of a lost-and-found bin in the locker room, took it, and used it to calm my nerves. The fidget spinner came out after the cube (I believe) but I personally think the cube solves the issue of fidgeting in a professional setting much better rather than the spinner.
DeleteI think that this is a really good example of someone who found an item that in retrospect is incredibly obvious. For the number of people who chew gum or find something to play with in class, it is pretty clear that there was a market for this kind of thing, although no one was able to take advantage of this market (which is apparently at least $6,465,690) to the extent they did. It is even more surprising since the creatives that I would think are the most likely to come up with this type of thing are also usually fidgeters themselves!
ReplyDeleteI had always believed that the best solution for individuals prone to fidgeting was quelling the very anxiety that induced the nervous habits themselves, rather than embracing them. Clearly, learning to manage a problem rather than cure it (often unsuccessfully) proves much more fruitful, and the brains that can pick up on that idea are almost certain to profit off of it, as these gentlemen did.
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