Joost Bonsen prides himself on having “snuck a fart machine
into a design museum.” But this was no prank: the curators of the Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum
in New York
chose to display “The Happy Hippo” as an example of hands-on science education.
The comic-book-style story teaches kids how to build a device that allows them
to “capture the acoustic aura of the mighty hippo” by sitting in a chair and
“shifting their mass.” It’s just one of 15 “Howtoon” comics collected in Howtoons:
The Possibilities Are Endless!
Howtoons, which feature the fictional siblings Tucker and
Celine, got their start at MIT in the spring of 2003, when Bonsen ‘90, SM ‘06,
and Saul Griffith, SM ‘01, PhD ‘04, were grad students. Bonsen, who had
learned to read by paging through comic books in Dutch and English, told Griffith that he dreamed
of making do-it-yourself cartoons for kids. Griffith reached up to his bookshelf for his
collection of century-old illustrated how-to books, saying he’d long wanted
to update them. Griffith
soon drew up some plans for a soda-bottle rocket, and the pair hosted the first
of what would be several parties where children tested their designs. Later
that year, they hired Marvel Comics artist Nick Dragotta to turn their
scribbled drawings and directions into professional-quality comics. Although Bonsen
is now a lecturer and researcher at the Media Lab and Griffith is a MacArthur
“genius grant” winner and entrepreneur, the three collaborators continue to
collect projects and create comics that show kids how to build them.
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Most of the cartoons are narratives rather than step-by-step
instructions, and they encourage kids to adapt the project designs. In “The
Infamous Marshmallow Shooter,” for example, a beaming Celine brandishes a
five-barreled version of the shooter and says, “You know, the possibilities are
endless.”
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“We really are trying to be the anti-textbook,” says Griffith. People “are
programming kids a little to do scripted play,” he adds. “We say, Here’s this
toy, and here are the instructions on how to use it. I think, really, the most
important thing is unscripted play.”
Howtoons’ creators routinely change their designs as they go
along. Dragotta, who describes himself as “all thumbs,” often serves as the
guinea pig. “Before I draw them, I build every one–and go back and yell at Saul
and Joost about how they could make it better,” he says. “I build them all 10
times,” Griffith
counters, laughing.
Their design process shows up in the story “The Righteous
Stuff,” where Tucker and Celine compete to design their own rockets. “Celine’s
launcher [made of wooden blocks] was Saul’s design, and Tucker’s [coat-hanger
launcher] was my design,” Bonsen says, “and both of ours failed in the ways that
are illustrated.” The characters go back to the drawing board and combine their
approaches.
The group’s adventures continue as they work on a second
book, due out in 2009.
Recent Books From the MIT community
The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction) By Junot Díaz, associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies Riverhead Books, 2007, $24.95
Managing Catastrophic
Loss of Sensitive Data By Constantine Photopoulos ‘77 Elsevier, 2008, $59.95
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Ropewalk: A Cordage
Engineer’s Journey through History A documentary film written and narrated by Bill Hagenbuch
‘40, SM ‘41, directed by Steve Fetsch www.storyofrope.org, 2008, $20.00
Dynamic Digital Representations in Architecture: Visions in
Motion By Imdat As, SM ‘02, and Daniel Schodek, PhD ‘71 Routledge, 2008, $53.95
Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in
Contemporary India By Parmesh Shahani, SM ‘05 Sage Publications, 2008, $32.95
Suburban Transformations By Paul Lukez, MArch ‘85 Princeton Architectural
Press, 2007, $40.00
Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society,
and the Imagination (new edition) By Rosalind Williams, professor of the history of science
and technology MIT Press, 2008, $19.95
Please submit titles of books and papers published in 2007
and 2008 to be considered for this column.
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