It is a moist and slippery afternoon in London. Rain is drizzling onto my hood while damp concrete aims to upset my feet at the opposite end of my body. A man carrying a giant unfolded sheet on a stick, significantly wider than himself, hurries past me and his haste causes him to mis-time his approach and strike me on the head with the sharp end of this implement. A spatter of rain cascades onto my hair as I stare indignantly in his direction. But not at him -- at his implement, the umbrella. My indignation is caused not by my now visibly soaked hair, but by the fact that the humble brolly maintains its ancient design in the face of the great feats of design, engineering, architecture and science of the 21st century.
Why? Why are we so content with the umbrella? It desperately needs redesigning.
A lengthy article about umbrellas featured in The New Yorker in 2008. Its writer, Susan Orlean, was right on the money when she wrote: "The rewards for whoever improves the umbrella are substantial. The annual retail market in the United States alone is now $348 million -- about 33 million umbrellas. The rest of the world, including many cultures where umbrellas are used both as rain protection and as sun shade, consumes many millions more."
Yet here we are five years later, Higgs boson all but proven, the human genome sequenced, with absolutely no change to the umbrella market. Their clever pocketable and convenient designs may win over new users year after year, but their ability to turn inside-out on a whim, poke passers-by in the face and allow water to dribble onto our trousers and skirts when the wind picks up remains a frustration to most of us.
If you brought an umbrella onto Dragons' Den in its current form, you'd be laughed out of the studio with "try harder" taped to your nose.
But some work is being done. Seung Hee Son's design for an umbrella that turns into a bag is innovative, but still maintains the traditional aesthetic once the canopy is opened; Shiu Yuk Yuen's Eco Brolly makes use of old newspapers as an umbrella component, but again leaves the overhead aesthetic intact.
One genuinely new bit of brolly tech is the Nubrella, which is more of a hood for the torso than a cover for the head. It can be used hands-free, it's suitable for wheelchair users, it can be used on a bicycle and at $55 (about £34) it's not prohibitively expensive. Why is there not more of this sort of innovation?
I'm aware it's not an attractive topic; talking about umbrellas rarely gets filed under "fascinating conversation, please tell me more". But it's an enormous global market and given that we all likely own dozens in our lifetime, it should be a hotbed for budding entrepreneurs. There should be more innovation here.
During my research (while my hair was drying) I scanned Kickstarter -- the holy ground for traditionally unfundable flights of consumer fancy. A search for "umbrella" turned up just a handful of results, most of which were music- and arts-related, and only one caught my eye as even vaguely interesting business-wise. Given the usually vast spread of ideas on Kickstarter, I took this unhelpfully sparse page of results to mean even early ideas into umbrella redesigns were a way away from forming.
So I ask the reader this: the next time you walk down a street on a moist and slippery afternoon and see a child brandishing an unsuitably massive golfing umbrella, think, "Is that really the best humans can do?"
I believe the answer is no, and whoever takes to market the successful replacement could be a wealthy fellow indeed.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
