You might already know David Friedman's work: To design fans he's Ironic Sans, a charmingly deadpan commentator on visual culture. Or you may know him as the guy who invented the word keming, his coinage for bad kerning. (Get it?)
"I never take it for granted that anyone knows who I am," Friedman says. "A lot of people know what I've done but don't know it's all done by the same person." So you might not know that he's also the photographer shooting portraits of American inventors as part of a series that's taking him across the country, putting him in the living rooms of the country's most intelligent -- and kooky -- personalities.
Friedman is now working on both an app and a book to bring the series to a wider audience, while continuing to profile scientists, engineers, and thinkers who have invented everything from the Practicello to the massage chair.
We caught up with Friedman at his home-office in New York to find out what inspired his latest project.
Wired Design: I'm looking at your very first portrait from 2008, of an inventor who created a videogame controller with some Legos and a trampoline, and all I can think is, how did you find this guy?
>I realized I do like invention, I do like creativity, and maybe I can come up with a project that merges the two.
David Friedman: I started Ironic Sans when I was a staff photographer for Ralph Lauren, and in 2007 I quit to freelance full-time. One of the things that people knew about Ironic Sans is that I often posted my own ideas for funny, impractical inventions. I realized I do like invention, I do like creativity, and maybe I can come up with a project that merges the two. So I had in my mind that I'd do a project on inventors.
That year I was a speaker on a panel at SXSW and I decided to bring my camera. I had never been to Austin before, so I thought maybe I'd meet someone who would fit the bill for my inventor project. I happened to meet this guy at a maker event. We got to talking, turned out he lived in Austin, so one morning I went to his house and we did this photo shoot.
WD: Is that how you meet most of your subjects? By chance encounter?
DF: I started going to local meetups on Long Island, in New Jersey, and in Manhattan for aspiring inventors where there's an established inventor and a patent attorney and maybe a conversation moderator who answer questions and help each other out based on their experience.
I'd ask to speak to the group, give my little spiel, and pass a notebook around, so I found a few people locally to photograph. After I did a few of them and realized that the project had legs, then I started to travel.
WD: Do you have any kind of parameters for what kinds of inventions you want to include?
DF: That's a great question. At first I wasn't picky. You had to let me come over, and you had to have some kind of invention — not just an idea. As I added more and more people to the project I became more selective.
I don't want too much overlap. So if three people who reach out to me tell me about their great garbage-can deodorizer, there's no reason for me to have three of those. I tried to give it a broad range of the kind of invention and also the kind of inventor. For example, I would like to have more women inventors in my project.
WD: I was going to ask about that.
DF: The vast majority of the women who I've communicated with have inventions that are domestic, for the kitchen — things that make it easier to raise a baby. I don't want to give the impression that that's all women invent is stuff around the house. So that's actually been a little hard because I do turn down some women.
I do have Esther Takeuchi, and I was very fortunate to get her. She is a great role model. One reporter determined that she holds more patents than any other woman. And her patents are engineering patents — she's a chemical engineer. She's a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, which specifically recognizes her inventions in medical batteries, the batteries that fit into medical devices like pacemakers. She has literally saved millions of lives.
WD: Failure is such a big part of inventor culture -- this constant trial and error. Do you follow up to see if their ideas really do make it?
DF: One woman I interviewed invented a very interesting domestic project she called easy-to-thread sewing needles. The eye of the needle has a slit on the side and the thread can go into the slit. It doesn't fall out, and you can basically thread a needle in a few seconds.
At the time she was seeing some success. There was a lot of interest in it, and it was very important to her that she not take it overseas to manufacture it. She went on and on about how it could be a "made in the USA" project, how it could be given to soldiers since they have sewing needs — she really saw it as all-American.
Fast-forward a couple of years. She now has a much more successful project. You can see it on infomercials, and she was on the show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel, but she kind of sold out — in order to make it attractive enough for the infomercial market, she has to have it made in China.
I asked her about that, after I saw the commercial, and she said money is really tight and she was getting to the point where she needed income.
WD: Is there a dream interviewee, maybe an inventor celebrity, you would like to feature in your series?
DF: I have a few inventor celebrities — well, they're not celebrities like we think of celebrities. For a while my dream inventor was Dean Kamen and he was nice enough to give me an hour of his time over the summer, so I can check him off. I have other celebrity inventors like Art Fry, who invented the Post-it note, and Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse.
I've had a few back-and-forth conversations with Steve Wozniak's wife, who manages his schedule, but we haven't been able to make it work yet.
WD: Which interview is your favorite?
DF: There are two videos that have emerged as the people's favorites, based on the number of views. One of them is about Ralph Baer, who invented the first videogames. I posted the video on his 90th birthday last month. In the interview he speaks very inspirationally about why he's still inventing, even at 90.
The other one is about Steven Sasson, who invented the digital camera at Kodak. It's a fascinating interview in which we see the inner workings of that first digital camera and learn about why certain engineering decisions were made. It's especially relevant since Kodak just filed for bankruptcy, and a lot of people blame their failure to capitalize on digital photography as part of their downfall.
>There is still a lot of ingenuity in this country, and I have no trouble finding people with ideas that they're trying to get off the ground.
But my personal favorite is probably Brent Farley. Nobody has heard of him because he hasn't had any success at all. But the man is obsessed. He's a creative thinker, and he fills dozens of notebooks with ideas for inventions, but he doesn't really distinguish between ideas that might just be good mental exercises and ideas that are worth pursuing. And so he tries to pursue them all. He speaks quite candidly about how this obsession with inventing has greatly interfered with his life. I find his story both inspiring and tragic.
WD: There's been so much said lately about how Americans are lagging when it comes to science and technology. Are you trying to say something about the state of ingenuity in the US?
DF: Well, I hope this project can at least be part of the conversation. There is still a lot of ingenuity in this country, and I have no trouble finding people with ideas that they're trying to get off the ground.
Some of them are struggling, and I include people like that in this series. By including inventors from all walks of life, some of who've had great success, and some people who are struggling, I'm trying to show that there's a broad spectrum of people who invent, and there are lessons that can be inferred from their varying experiences.
