The allure of Bubble Wrap was not the main point when Farrah Fawcett swathed herself in it for Playboy magazine a few years ago.
The actress was turning 50, and the Bubble Wrap provided just the right cushioning for a photo spread in her birthday suit.
This is a family newspaper, so we can’t reproduce the full effect.
The air-filled industrial wonder is one of the brilliant everyday designs in a neat new book from Paola Antonelli, design curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Called “Humble Masterpieces,” it’s a welcome departure from highbrow design. There are no mystifying avant-garde objects, no status-defining techie toys, no overpriced designer furnishings for children to quickly outgrow. Instead, the spotlight shines on omnipresent marvels of daily life. That’s the realm where good design really matters.
“Our kitchen drawers, our purses, our car trunks and our bathroom cabinets are vibrant museums full of masterpieces,” Antonelli writes.
Antonelli’s collection includes such old faithfuls as the incandescent light bulb, the brown paper grocery bag and Q-tips.
Colorful plastic Lego blocks share glory with burping Tupperware food storage containers and the amazingly dripless Kikkoman Soy Sauce dispenser.
The unifying characteristics are familiarity, utility and timeless appeal. Their designers often are anonymous but we owe them thanks for the near-perfect balance of form and function and economical use of materials.
My favorite is the lowly paper clip. This deceptively simple invention from the 1890s has an annoying way of getting stuck in the back of drawers and mating with its companions. But the bent-wire device, with its familiar double oval, managed to propel the act of compiling documents into the modern age. For the previous 600 years, papers had to be punched with a hole and gathered with ribbon. An unnamed wizard at the Gem Manufacturing Co. in Britain is credited with achieving the perfect functional shape. William Middlebrook dreamed up a machine to produce them in mass quantities.
The earliest innovation mentioned in the book is a boomerang, attributed to an unknown aboriginal designer 15,000 years ago. Not too many of us have a boomerang in the closet, but lipstick tubes (1915) and flip-flops (1940s) are ubiquitous. The Band-Aid Advanced Healing blister cushion (2002) deserves respect as a protective pad enhanced with pain reliever. 3M’s sticky Post-it Notes (1980) have transformed the way people organize thoughts.
Carryout coffee has inspired two exceptional designs that millions of people reach for without a thought. Jay Soren-
sen, a Seattle real estate agent, devised an insulating sleeve for cups after spilling hot coffee in his lap. His Java Jacket uses waffle-textured recycled cardboard.
“Humble Masterpieces” briefly bemoans the fact that design “still suffers from a general lack of understanding, both of its deeds and of its possibilities.” But page after page of common problem-solvers may encourage a reader to take fresh interest in, say, the way scissors accommodate the human hand. Almost every design contributes to the book’s argument that “even at its most lyrical, design is intrinsically constructive, hopeful, helpful and practical.”
As for Bubble Wrap, it was created in the 1950s by two men working in a New Jersey garage. Marc Chavannes and Alfred Fielding thought they had created a new textured wallpaper. Happily, the air-filled cells, which are created by suction, secured a glorious destiny as protective packaging.
