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Nonsensical Inventions
The Unuseless Competition finds purpose in bringing together graduate students
By Katharine Dunn

The setting for the first-ever Unuseless Competition was arguably the most "unuseless" aspect of all. The submissions for the April event were exhibited in Frank Gehry's Stata Center on two uneven mezzanines--a design that, as architecture graduate student and event organizer Luis Berrios-Negron pointed out, required Gehry to add an expensive elevator for the sole purpose of navigating the four feet between the floors. Berrios-Negron awarded Gehry's elevator an honorable mention in the competition, which was inspired by chindogu, the Japanese art of unuseless invention.

An unuseless invention, according to the practitioners of chindogu, is a tool that may appear to solve a problem but isn't quite worth using. If a product is so handy that you want to use it all the time, get a patent for it, and sell it, it is not chindogu. Nor is it chindogu if it is explicitly silly or stupid, though the product can be incidentally funny if it creates more problems than it's worth or solves a problem that doesn't exist.

Many students at MIT hope to "deliver a patent, to invent something, to become rich and famous through the idea of invention," says Berrios-Negron. "I wanted people to get rewarded for doing something that in real life you wouldn't get rewarded for." The competition, which was sponsored in part by a Graduate Student Life Grant and open to all graduate students, also brought together students from different departments, which doesn't happen enough at MIT, says Berrios-Negron.

The submissions from the five finalist teams include HairyBike, a suit covered in long hair that a cyclist wears to create a safety zone; Boomerun, a stick that doesn't come back (a time-saver compared with the traditional boomerang); the Catsup Crapper, a bottle of ketchup that walks up to your plate to "excrete a pleasant mound of condiment"; and the Will-Powered Chair, which moves an inch away from the table for every ounce of food the user eats. "We haven't figured out yet how we'll build it. But we will," says David Hu '01, an applied-math doctoral candidate who, with his roommate Brian Chan '02, SM '04, a mechanical-engineering graduate student, submitted 10 ideas to the competition.

The finalists of the Unuseless Competition were each given $100 to build prototypes of their inventions, which they presented for judging by audience members at an awards ball in May.