Let us make useless things

Yes, you read it right.. let us make useless things.

When we start learning, we have to do little experiments. Nothing should stop our imagination. But unfortunately we are taught so much that we have to build all the time useful items. What is RoI, etc… stops us from building useful things. Sad part is by this approach of building only “useful” items makes us stop thinking at the end, we end up not doing both useful and useless things.

Simone Giertz is a Robotics Enginner. She made many such useless things

1. Auto Toothbrush
2. Automatic Manual alarm
3. LIpstick maker
4. Soup feeder
5. PopCorn feeder
6. 360 degree camera
7. Shampoo dispenser

LipStick maker

Clap Maker

Glass holder

Vegetable chopper

soup feeder

Manual alarm

Pop Corn feeder

When you look at individual items, they may seem useless, in current form no one may be willing to use it.

But Simone did not care, by making all the useless items, she gained more and more robotic knowledge. She put these in Youtube. She got so many views on her channel 

Also she was called to give TED talk recently.

Useful or useless are subjective and varies with time, person, zone etc..,

Advantages of making useless things
1. Validate the learning (making useless things is easier)
2. Errors can be fixed while making useless items itself (so time saved while making real useful item)
3. Making useless things is lot fun (as compared to making something really useful)
4. Creativity unleashes (Usefulness is boundary for creativity)
5. NO feedback, no one else can verify as it is anyway useless

Since I am from embedded field, I chose this example. Even in other fields one can try making some useless utilities (sometime back I posted an utility to store searched images in a folder)

Useless is defined as not fulfilling or not expected to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome. Imagine the power of building useless (how many adjectives are there in definition to make something useful)

What is your view ? Make some useless comments -:)