Burning Man, sometime in the nineties. I was explaining to someone that I design products for a living. That was her entire answer. I registered this domain when I got home and have kept it for thirty years.
I don’t want to own products. I build the thing that makes them possible — and then I let it go.
That sounds like a pose until you look at what actually reached people. So here it is in that order: what got into someone’s hands, where the invention really happened, and what I’m building now.
A veterans’ hospital handed me a hydration problem: someone with quadriplegia needs a straw with three flexible joints. No manufacturer would make one, so I built a tool to join three straws. The device stayed a prototype. The tool walked into a toy company’s boardroom two years later.
A brochure holder was needed for a famous computer’s launch, and nothing would attach to the machine. So I stopped attaching things to the machine. A puddle-shaped mousepad with a clear tube rising out of it. Ten thousand made.
A machine everyone had relied on for years was wired wrong, because the person who built it left with the only manual and nobody read his handwriting. I listened to how it was being used. Rewiring it doubled what it could carry, and the fix went to the rest.
One rule runs through all of them.
Each is built so it cannot be corrupted in my favour. The audit tool cannot be talked into a better grade. The translator publishes nothing a person hasn’t checked, and that person is paid for the checking.
The question a reasonable person asks about any of this is why they would trust an answer from a system whose owner benefits from a particular answer. So none of mine can.
Four here are live, and so is the business above — which is still the only one that earns. One is close. The other two are finished and sitting there. I am better at building the thing than at owning it — which is the whole point of the name, and also its honest limit.