Simone Giertz says that engineering too often loses its sense of joy and humility, and the root cause of this for her was her performance anxiety. The explanation of how she went from a high school student crying about getting a B on a math test to an inventor on the TED stage is the focus of her Talk Why you should make useless things. Giertz says that her life is a modern-day fairy tale: a girl builds a machine, posts a video on the internet, navigates the hundreds of comments from creepers, and then starts a Youtube channel as an inventor.
There are several machines demonstrated in this talk: a shirt full of googly eyes so that Simone can feel like she’s pointing as many eyes outward as the audience is pointing at her, drones used for cutting hair, a morning alarm consisting of a hand slapping at her face, a knife robot that chops vegetables, and a rotating neck brace that feeds her popcorn and water.
Giertz started building robots because she wanted to learn about hardware, and she says that building robots had a high chance of failure and a high chance of making herself feel stupid for that failure. Her solution to this problem was to build robots intended to fail instead of robots intended to succeed. Removing the constraints from her work removed the pressure and anxiety from the system and gave her the opportunity to build, learn and play.
Simone Giertz is quick to point out that she is not an engineer, but she’s proud of the fact that she’s a maker, builder and might be a roboticist. She says that her success comes from sharing her enthusiasm with other people, and the knowledge and declaration that you don’t know what the best answer is can lead to more questions, and lead to greater discoveries. This is a great presentation full of humor and self-deprecating wit. Giertz’s Youtube channel is full of robots that we might not call successful but are definitely built with the maker spirit and great inspiration for engineers.