Just came across this one, via @bruces over on <a href="“>Beyond the Beyond — a series of *design fancies created by Matt Brown which appear to be cleverly fictionalized designers to go along with these designers design fictions. Wonderfully inventive and I could see this sort of thing being quite therapeutic for normal, factual designers. You know — either imagine a colleague, or take a piss on the designer jackhole.
The image above is a book done by this designer — with two editions, one particularly rare.
Kurt Manchild was an author and inventor born in Jackson, MO in 1952.
From a fairly young age Manchild found that he had ridiculously vivid dreams of finished inventions. He spent his teenage years thinking that dreams like this were normal. It wasn’t until the ’72 National Sleep Science Association (N.S.S.A.) convention that he found out his dreams were unique. He spent the next few years talking with bartenders, clergymen, and designers about his deep sleep brainstorms and formed a whole new philosophy. Armed with this knowledge he wrote his first and only book, Silent Brainstorm: Ten Dreams That Every Designer Should Have at Least Once a Week. In the book he describes ways to trick your brain into certain dreams. He writes about the “Garage Sale Dream” where you go to a garage sale and see new products and then wake up and draw them. He also writes a lot about “Museum Dreams” where you would go to a design museum and it would be filled with amazing stuff that again, you would draw out upon waking. His book was a best seller in most of Europe and was available in two editions. The black version is semi-rare.
Why do I blog this? A very intriguing way of constituting an imaginary, design fiction concept. The strength of the imaginary thing — the design fiction — is elevated by the story surrounding it — it’s *backstory or moment of production, including the designer with a personality and a home town and so on. It’s a bit of an intriguing special effect of a sort that I should add to my modest catalog of design fiction genre conventions. Nice work.