Chindōgu: The Japanese Art of Useless Inventions | Hacker News Reader

Chindōgu: The Japanese Art of Useless Inventions

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I think designing "useless" things is actually a really great exercise that forces you to challenge a lot of your biases/assumptions and really flex your muscles.

I help teach some people intro-level coding and we practice on "useless" code all the time, like text mangling to do meme-posting, writing some data-moshing tools, etc. It's practical in that it teaches some fundamentals, but the output is ultimately silly but observable. (e.g., there's not much value to the program but a successful output is clear)

Useless inventions are pretty fun for a lot of things; theatre/home movies are filled with such things as CG is typically too much work for an individual, so practical effects need to be used. For a movie I made for a friend, we had to figure out how to make a puppet "blow" into a party noise maker, and came up with the strangest contraption involving straws and a lot of tape; a overall "useless" invention, but turns out there's a lot more going into making noise with a party noise maker than you'd imagine.

Useless inventions are a great exercise of creativity and logic, blending the practical side of our minds with the emotional/fantastical parts that just want to make such fun and fantastical things work.

I now know there's a name for the category of my Zoom pull cord.

https://twitter.com/lanewinfield/status/1339257875034566656

I've never sold it and I don't plan to sell it. And it's definitely because of Chindogu rule 5 and definitely not because hardware scaling is very hard.

This isn't a rebuke at all or a request to post your content elsewhere, but it seems that a lot of regular Twitter users may not realise that you can't access links like yours without being logged in to Twitter.

Not saying you should care, just pointing it out.

Works for me, I'm not logged in.

Oh, ok sorry. Better to say that for reasons known only to Twitter, some people may need to be logged in to see this.

use nitter.net ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie_stick was once such an invention

Seems like a bunch of people (tried to at least) patent the selfie stick at one or another point. You wouldn't try to patent something you have no interest in earning money from, and is therefore not Chindōgu

Not back then when it wa first mentioned for cameras

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/10/chindogu-japanese-art-...

That site has some cool stories. I didn't know about "The London Beer Flood of 1814" until just now.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/12/the-london-beer-flood-...

> The Horse Shoe Brewery was the site of an unusual tragedy. In 1814, several large vats of beer broke releasing a tsunami of fermented porter in the streets, that killed eight people.

> A wave of porter beer 15 feet high swept into New Street, destroying houses and inundating basements.

Oh, looks like we have our very own in the US via Reddit: https://reddit.com/u/rightcoastguy

I'm not sure they qualify to be called "Chindōgu", two of the rules are "It must be a tool that solves everyday life problems" and "It is not for sale" while some inventions of theirs don't solve anything at all, and some of them seems to be for sale in their shop.

It's just normal "Unnecessary Inventions".

Reminds me of Bonk Business:

” Bonk Business is a fictional corporation created by Finnish artist and sculptor Alvar Gullichsen. The "products of Bonk Business" are absurd machines, such as the paranormal cannon, that have no apparent use, and which are built by Gullichsen. The story is that Bonk machines are powered by anchovy oil. The works parody corporate and marketing cliches in a retrofuturistic style.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonk_Business

If anyone hasn't seen HEBOCON, the Crappy Robot competition, do yourself a favor and give it a watch :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ivFpsmEVQ&list=FLJQD_w9-um...

There used to be a U.K. TV show (CBBC) based on this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27ll_Never_Work%3F

They have lots of gadgets, I saw a karaoke microphone with a cone you sing into so not to disturb the neighbors when you are singing, just like the bowl on ears on the article but applied to a microphone.

Sounds something like a steno mask https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenomask

> The Japanese, however, believe otherwise. There are just some things that need to be invented even when people don’t really need it.

> Finding it difficult to spread butter on your morning toast? There’s an invention for that. Have a terrible cold and constantly need tissue to blow your nose? The Japanese have exactly what you need.

Is this particularly "Japanese"? We used to have a magazine in the US called Skymall that was full of these kinds of inventions. Hammacker Schlemmer is one company in particular that sells a lot of them.

I would always take the SkyMall catalog when I was a kid. It was a comedic gold mine.

Personal favorite: Safe-T-Man

https://www.gusworld.com.au/rotd/9610/safe.htm

This is really cool. Another Japanese concept is Wabi Sabi, which has really helped me overcome perfectionism in my code.

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

We really enjoyed the book "101 unuseless japanese inventions" with our kids when they were growing up, which was the first time I heard about chindogu. It might still make a nice gift for some people, especially adolescents. It seems like the book is available on archive.org https://archive.org/details/101unuselessjapa00kawa

The shoes for stealing pachinko balls are amazing. I thought I could see it coming but I thought he had magnets in those chunky soles.

In “The Book of Thinkage” (which I heard of on HN), one of the characters practices “cozy” - making his space fit his exact needs, by adding a shelf here, a lever there. There’s something universal, and quite satisfying, about the instinct to shape the world around us to match our individualisms. It’s like all of our random automation scripts, but physical.

chopsticks on clothespin seem very useful (at least from the point of view of the two thirds of humanity).

Those eyedrop funnels glasses look really useful. As someone who has a very hard time using eyedrops they might actually help me.

Given that they need to be sterile and dust-free when you use them... I don't think so. Otherwise you are just causing more problems for your eyes.

"Strange how much human progress and achievement comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim

Is this how SkyMall started?

I simply love every Japanese term starting with "Chin".

I recommend glancing at a Japanese dictionary sometime.

Would a Chinese one do?

I follow unnecessaryinventions guy to get my Chindogu fix

This speaks to my soul.

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