Iz, a Pencil, and the Warehouse of Discoveries
Once upon a parallel universe there was a rebel named Iz and she was the first finisher of her world, called in after scientists had their moments of exploding sparks that settle into Eureka!
It was Iz’s job to finish a discovery, adding the unspoken, intangible thing that made human beings want to keep that discovery with them always and use it to bring their world closer to the spectacular image of rightness etched their heads.
Poor Iz. What she possessed in strength, ingenuity, and smarts was never quite enough; she never reached her pinnacle of a finisher—to do the job so well that she became invisible, as she believed that only the invention should be seen. Be kind to her though, because in this story she is the only finisher in her entire world. It’s pressure.
Friends of Iz knew they could find her in one of two places. The first was in her studio at a desk, staring at a mound of pure powered gray graphite, just a mound of it, the newest recording discovery. She sat there for hours and days and weeks thinking, “Hmmm, something will come to me”. The second place to find Iz was in bed, asleep or not asleep or trying to sleep, or sleep-mumbling to herself about spheres and rods and cubes, sometimes even screaming out loud while being tossed in a gray powder hurricane at sea. In the morning, she would wake up…
A sphere.
A solid graphite sphere.
To seize the day, she sat in front of the graphite and floated her imagination to people writing with different shaped instruments in all kinds of places–circles at work, cones, cylinders, doodles on the playground, ellipses, hexagons, irregular asteroids in transport, octagons, ovals, parallelograms on Sundays, pentagons, pyramids, rectangles on the moon, rods, semicircles at parties, spheres, squares, stars at school, trapezoids, triangles on the beach, wedges, whorls. The people in her imagination struggled.
“How do you help a person have their thoughts fly from their mind directly to the page?”
Iz knew the problems. How do you make the writing instrument portable? How do you make it easy to hold? How do you help a person have their thoughts fly from their mind directly to the page? To tackle the problem, Iz invited some friends over to see how people acted around this new graphite powder, how they made marks and what they felt when they used it. People used the graphite in two ways. Some would dip their finger into the powder and write on a piece of paper, as if they were writing a note on a steam-coated window. They were calm and soothed, but a bit spaced-out writing in this way. The graphite powder worked fine, until someone sneezed–indoor blackout. Others used the graphite in a way that greatly disturbed Iz. They would find a ragged chunk of graphite in the powder, a small fragile rock, grasp it between two fingers and a thumb, and start to write with a crumbling instrument, sometimes cutting their fingers and never making any legible marks, only sounds of ouch and clumsiness. They winced and hurt. Instead…
A sphere.
A solid graphite sphere.
Okay, prototype. Iz drew up the specs for her spherical pencil, called one friend named Ilsa, who worked for a cricket equipment supplier and another friend Ama who specialized in developing high-tech polymers. A meeting of minds and materials and the prototype was cracked from its mold perfectly within 10 hours. It fit exactly into the palm of the hand. It had a serious weight and mesmerizing veneer, a deep reflective gray. The friends tried writing and the sphere glided smoothly across the paper. It didn’t crumble. The drawn lines were just varied enough to help word readability, and capture expression in drawings beyond anything ever before.
The next morning, Iz delivered the prototype to her client and manufacturing began. One hundred million units. Ninety million units sold within the first week. People began to write. Whenever, wherever.
But there were small frustrations. Iz would often see a man in a business suit chasing a dropped sphere down the street. The hip pouches people used for their spheres caused bruises for the owner or an innocent bystander on a braking subway car. Spheres were not nameable, so a lot of theft took place without any way to identify whose sphere was whose, really. The graphite stayed on the skin for too long and it was nearly impossible to write something down and then attend a party without smudging another guest by accident. Embarrassing. These seemed like small things. Writing with the spherical pencil seemed quite normal, and everyone was enthralled at the ability to write without clouds of dust or injury. The inconveniences of the sphere faded into normal. “A meeting of minds and materials and the prototype was cracked from its mold perfectly within 10 hours”
Over time the world changed in ways that only Iz could see. The sphere had had taken on a life of its own. People began to purchase black clothes to camouflage graphite smudges and marks, and the fabric industry jumped to meet the need. Within a year hardly any colored fibers were produced. Color became a black market. Looking from the top of a building people appeared as dark dots shifting and moving throughout the world. Every so often you could see someone dressed completely in white our yellow, broadcasters who wrote on their clothing to express themselves to the world. There was a movement of people who refused to write with the sphere, because the embedded graphite on their hands made fingerprints wherever they went: an uninvited tracking system.
“Finishing is a lonely job,” she thought as she walked toward the global president’s warehouse of discoveries. She needed to pick the next discovery to finish, to bring its Eureka! moment into the everyday. “Wait…maybe anyone….” The next day she invited a hundred people (including her friends Ilsa and Ama) to the warehouse, people she knew and liked.
The one hundred designers worked together to unpack one hundred discoveries.
They began…
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