SIMONE GIERTZ / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Curiosity,
with moving parts.
A toothbrush helmet. A pickup truck. A folding hanger.
An invitation to make something.
By Rob Urban
There is something wonderfully hospitable about an invention that makes you laugh.
You can enter through the joke. You do not need to know the name of every component, or arrive with an impressive project of your own. A person made a peculiar thing, and now you get to see what happens.
That welcome is part of what I admire about Simone Giertz. Her work makes building feel like an activity a person can enter while still having questions. The unfinished understanding is allowed in the room.
And once you are in that room, there is quite a lot to notice: mechanisms, materials, collaborators, persistence, and the pleasure of making an everyday object behave differently.
OBJECT 01
An excellent place
to have a question.
TED’s account of her 2018 talk begins with a toothbrushing helmet. Giertz made the robot in 2015 and shared a seven-second clip. Other inventions attempted vegetable chopping, waking her up, hair cutting and lipstick application, with wonderfully unconvincing results.
The premise has a lovely double movement. The machine is funny because we understand what it ought to do. Its actual behavior invites us to examine the gap.
A toothbrush seems uncomplicated until you ask a mechanism to place it correctly, move it sensibly and accommodate a human face. Suddenly the ordinary task contains a surprising number of decisions.
Giertz described useless inventions as a way to loosen certainty about having the right answer. I appreciate the emotional intelligence of that approach. A ridiculous objective creates room to be curious in public.
The joke gives the attempt somewhere friendly to land.
OBJECT 02
Read the credits.
Meet the workshop.
The scale changes dramatically in her 2019 Truckla project, which turns a Tesla into a pickup truck. The video’s description is also an excellent place to understand the people behind the spectacle.
Giertz credits builders including Marcos Ramirez, Laura Kampf, Rich Rebuilds, Ryan Kalb and Nathan Azhderian, along with mechanical engineer Ross Huber. The production credits name Jacquelyn Marker, editors Rose Kang and Jackie Grieff, and camera operators Scott Sorensen and Will Nail, among others.
Those names expand the story. There is the work of changing a physical object, and the work of making that process intelligible and entertaining to someone watching.
I admire the room those credits make for different kinds of skill. A memorable project can have a recognizable author and a substantial circle of contributors. Seeing the circle helps me appreciate the finished work more fully.
Truckla is a big, improbable idea with many human hands in it.
124 versions.
One small hinge.
A coat hanger’s development history makes its final simplicity more interesting.
OBJECT 03
An ordinary object,
given extraordinary attention.
A coat hanger offers a quieter kind of surprise. Yetch Studio’s Coat Hinger folds in half, allowing clothes to hang in a shallower space.
The studio’s development timeline is unusually revealing. It begins with a laser-cut prototype and brass hinge in November 2020. A September 2021 factory sample looked promising but had a weak neck. A team session in March 2022 produced a wire version. By September 2023, the studio reports, 124 versions had led to stainless steel and an injection-molded acetal hinge.
I love the specificity of the weak neck. It makes development tangible. An attractive shape still has to hold up under the demands of being an object.
The timeline gives the final simplicity a history. A person using the hanger need not think about all those alternatives, but knowing they existed makes the small movement of folding it more interesting.
There is real affection for everyday life in spending that much attention on where a shirt can fit.
OBJECT 04
The pleasure of
a light coming on.
The Every Day Goal Calendar takes another familiar experience: wanting a little acknowledgment for doing something you intended to do.
Yetch describes an electronic wall calendar whose individual days light up when touched. Choose a daily goal, complete it, illuminate the day. The design uses a printed circuit board face, gold-plated touch pads and a bamboo frame. It works without an internet connection and retains progress through a loss of power.
What interests me is the choice to make acknowledgment physical. The progress has a place on a wall. Completing the action gives you a small action in return.
The pleasure is modest and easy to understand. A light comes on because you did the thing.
I appreciate design that takes a small satisfaction seriously enough to give it a form. It recognizes that the emotional experience of using an object is part of what the object does.
A room full of possibilities.
The helmet, the truck, the hanger and the calendar make an appealingly odd collection. Their differences are part of the attraction.
Some ask what happens when a familiar task is handed to an unlikely machine. Some ask whether an ordinary object could accommodate a life a little better. Each gives curiosity a physical consequence.
I find that encouraging. There is room here for a funny idea to become a real experiment, for a promising object to need another version, and for capable people to help one another make something that none of us would have thought to request.
Giertz makes that territory feel open. Her work invites a person to look around a room with fresh interest, spot something slightly strange or inconvenient, and wonder what they might make of it.
Sources are linked at the relevant passages: TED’s 2018 reporting, Giertz’s original Truckla video and credits, and Yetch Studio’s product descriptions and development timeline. Product details are the studio’s descriptions. Interpretation by Rob Urban. Checked September 2026.