GENOMICON

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Another solution to a problem that nobody has.

What is it with these people? How much did they spend developing that? Hadn’t they noticed that Segways haven’t exactly taken off? Just because you get pretty girls to demo the things doesn’t mean you won’t feel like a total prannet trundling down the street on your $5000 (or whatever it is) “walking aid”. It’s like wearing a hat with a great big arrow pointing downward and a sign saying “Look at me everyone. I want attention”

I used to know this guy who would visit the big art galleries in London… pretend to be disabled, so he could trundle about in one of the wheelchairs they provided. Now that’s a good idea… and less embarrassing than tootling about the place on a mobile-shooting-stick that causes people to forget about the paintings and look at you instead.

Tell you what Honda: give me a couple of million dollars and I will develop a machine for you that will change the world, and that loads of people will actually buy.

From NZ, apparently – though I’ve never seen one:

how the… blinkerty… blue-blazes… god-damnitt…

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It’s got lights and indicators and whatnot in the handlebars… which are at seat level… those are a pretty neat innovation. It folds up etc, goes 7-8km on a 30 min charge and has a 20km inbuilt-electronic-emasculation.

There are a couple of videos in the gallery part of the site… there’s one on the front page as well… which is basically an advert, and adverts are facile, manipulative. I’m not interested in advertising.

So there you go. Neat little motor etc. Unfortunately it costs $5k which means it will be about as relevent as the… err… those things with wheels that you stand on… can’t remember the name.

Oh. Yea. I can. Whatever.

The thing with any transport innovation… unless it’s a disruptive innovation, it’s basically just more of the same, and the thing about disruptive innovations is that they pull the carpet from under the incremental-innovations of the status quo…

… by radically changing the economics.

Longbows changed the economics of warfare. This ain’t a longbow. We need a longbow.

Combining two of my favourite mis-directed-technology preoccupations : Segways: Solutions in desperate search for problems, and the fastidious compulsion that electric vehicle designers have for making their cars look like teapots, thus fucking themselves in the eyes of the motoring-otaku, upon who they depend for mainstream acceptance.

Lovely:

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Looks as though they’ve cottoned onto the idea of getting them to talk to each other so they can form little trains etc… and they’re also fondly imagining that they’ll have their own little roads… we’ve tried that with bikes. It will never ever ever happen.

Still, kudos for trying.

Although this one also looks a bit like a military-issue wheelchair from some parallel universe where the Nazis won. Like a cross between a wheel-chair and the nose-cone of a Heinkel 111… and before you go all scoffy and indignant… recall that Heinkel went from making warplanes to these things in the 50s:

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Which is actually pretty cool.

Scarier than a ghost in a machine is a machine without a ghost.

I don’t know what it is about artificial humanity that’s so creepy… it is though.

Anyway – this is one more thing down the Segway track [1][2]… There’s a couple of vids of them here at www.marathonrobotics.com from whence they spring. Reminds me of The Avengers off the telly for some reason.

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This is a classic example of what I’m always going on about… about what I find interesting about the phase we’re going into.

Theo Jansen makes these

If you haven’t seen them before, check them out on youtube.

A segway is this…

Which is an invention that came out with a load of hype, and… well, sortof fell flat on its face really. It became an instant dorkmobile, although it would be a hell of a lot of fun, on carpet, when drunk.

Again, it’s one of those things that doesn’t really become interesting until the innovation side of things is thrown to the crowds.

Apropos of nothing, this also caught my eye

What could possibly go wrong?

And behold, a new Segway variant and every inch a fantastically over-engineered and innovative solution to a simple problem, that isn’t really that much of a problem in the first place. Apparently these things cost up to $50,000

So there it is. Segway Syndrome: The misapplication of technological genius, carried off with such panache that the resulting piece becomes a design classic in its own right, though nobody actually uses it. A bit like a 21st Century Heath Robinson.

The Segway was of course forseen… in the Heath Robinson era, as depicted by this cartoon:

(Brown County Democrat, December 28, 1900.) – The “Footomobile” of the future!

Which inspired me to make the somewhat criptic comment on twitter (come on, it was about 4am) last night “If you wait long enough, eventually everything sooner or later, becomes true, but hardly ever in the way you imagined”

This came via this wonderous site, which has (yup, you guessed it) what essentially amounts to a home-made Segway… a one wheeled, self-balancing skateboard.

And of course what with this being the memetic age, it isn’t just presented as a fait-accompli, but also has it’s own instructables page, youtube videos and on the site above, a version history.

Where there are (already) a fairly large number of others.

Was Segway patented? Who cares? An object doesn’t really become interesting until other creatives get to play with its genotype. A patented idea is like a really amazing plant that can’t produce seeds… which is of course exactly what the likes of Monsanto do, but then they are fundamentally evil.