The Power of Useless Things

In 2015, journalist Simone Giertz posted a video on Youtube entitled "The Toothbrush Machine".  In it, she showed off her makeshift robot, a helmet that supposedly "brushes your teeth".  It's absurd and clearly doesn't work, a piece of engineering that was entirely useless, but the video quickly went viral, and in the years since, Simone has made an entire business around making entirely useless machines.

In her TED talk, Simone talks about how she decided to make useless machines as a way to deal with her performance anxiety. Instead of trying to make things that work, she decided to make things that would intentionally not work—that way, failure was a success. She used her robots and her videos to work on her anxiety and as a way to teach herself about hardware and engineering; in the talk, she says:

So as much as my machines can seem like simple engineering slapstick, I realize that I stumbled on something bigger than that. It's this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me it was a way to learn about hardware without having my performance anxiety get in the way. I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will. But the way I see it, I already have because I've built myself this job and [...] It's something that I could never have planned for. Instead it happened just because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing, and I was sharing that enthusiasm with other people. 

To me that's the true beauty of making useless things, because it's this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is. And it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question.

Simone is not an engineer.  She never went to school for it, and everything she knows is self-taught, primarily through the robots she makes for her channel.  She describes her process as "creative chaos".  She says that "identifying a problem is the first step in my process of building a useless machine."

But when you’re sitting at home and not doing anything, you might start thinking about different problems you have or practical things you want to improve. That’s what my strategy has become. It’s not glamorous — people think it would be a very creative, sticky-note-intensive kind of process — but it’s basically just me sitting and thinking, "Brushing my teeth is boring, is there a more fun way to do it?"

Another large part of her process is the importance of failure.  "[...] it’s better to build things than not build things," she says. "[...] in some cases, building things is a part of a 'Yes, and' approach. It’s asking, 'Why should we do this?' instead of 'Why shouldn’t we do this?'"  Like what is described in Wired article "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing UpAccept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up", failure is not always failure.  Sometimes failures are successes when you're asking the right questions.  And even if failure is just failure, Simone puts it best in saying, "The build process has a purpose in and of itself, especially when you’re trying to innovate and create things."  Sometimes its about the process itself, not the result.

Failure is part of Simone's brand.  In her "I built a hammering machine that destroys everything" video, she attempts to make a robot that moves two hammers up and down.  Throughout the video, she shows her initial failures, seeking help from a friend, and ultimately building a machine that destroys more than it creates.  But in the end, she decides to "embrace its true nature" and just let it destroy things.

She doesn't just build bad robots; Simone builds things that work, too, including her recent Kickstarter for a habit calendar.  But it's in her failures and her useless projects that she makes a great impact, showing off engineering to those who may not have otherwise been exposed to it, providing hilarious entertainment, and building a community that values failure just as much as success.