Philosophy of Hypertext: Ted Nelson, pg 66
would be better if only it were completely different, and this has led to many disappointing experiments.)
Designers were always my special heroes, starting when I was a small boy with Leonardo daVinci and Frank Lloyd Wright. At the age of nine or ten I was very taken with Wright’s “Fallingwater” building, which has a stream running through it, a radical and beautiful design. Inspired by this, I designed in my mind, and wrote up for the school paper, a house that would be completely under water.
I read about Buckminster Fuller when I was eleven, in 1 949, long before he became well-known. He was a designer who said that we must create radically new designs to live on a planet with dwindling resources. Following Bucky Fuller’s point of view, I believed that everything would be far better if only it could be redesigned completely.
Many other designers were my heroes: Raymond Loewy, who designed the 1947 Studebaker and an earlier, muscular-looking locomotive engine that practically defined the term “streamlined train”; Bernard Rudofsky, who mocked our systems of clothing; Charles Eames and his wife Ray, who for many years were principal designers for IBM.
In high school I was bemused- and amused- by the designs of Peter Schlumbohm, who designed the Chemex coffeemaker, the Chemex cigarette holder, and the Chemex electric fan (which cleaned the air considerably). Each of these used a disk of filter paper every day; Schlumbohm loved filter paper. It was a wonderful example of an idea filling the universe. I thought this man’s obsession was quite charming. This to me has always been the model of an idea expanding to fill the universe.