Advice From an Internet Inventor
Earlier this year, I got to interview Simone Giertz, one of the Internet’s most prominent inventors. She recently underwent something of a rebrand: She got famous by making “sh*tty robots” on YouTube that fell apart and had no real purpose other than comedy, but now she creates functional, elegant inventions that solve everyday problems. For example, a chair you can put your laundry on that doesn’t look super messy. Or a fruit bowl that can change its size depending on how much fruit it's holding. For Giertz, invention “is magic,” but chasing inspiration has been a lifelong process. Here’s a short excerpt (it has been edited for clarity and brevity) of my conversation with Giertz about how her work has evolved and her outlook as an inventor.
Emma Gometz: What’s behind your new direction?
Simone Giertz: I learned how to build things on YouTube. I don’t have a degree of any sort and definitely did not study robotics in school. I came at it from a very hands-up kind of way, like, “I don’t know how to do this; I’m just gonna build machines.”
I think, as my skills grew, I started to feel like I was kind of beating myself down a bit. I was making myself smaller and dumber than I actually am. So I feel like I outgrew that shtick. Something that [also] played into it was that I went through really severe health problems. I had a brain tumor, and I went through brain surgery, and that was a period that was very severe. I didn’t necessarily feel like making myself a clown on the Internet. I felt ready to actually stand by the things I was building. It was the natural progression for me and for me to feel like what I was doing online was aligned with who I actually am.
EG: What attracts you to inventing solutions to mundane problems?
SG: I think I’m a combination of incredibly lazy and incredibly ambitious because there are these little mundane problems where I’m like, yeah, with the fruit bowl, I got frustrated because I always felt like my fruit bowl was too small or too big. And I could just switch out my fruit bowls—but I’m like, “No, I’m gonna spend years, literally years, developing this fruit bowl that mechanically changes size depending on how much fruit you have.”
But it’s just such a fun place to be in because it forces you to rethink the things that you take for granted and the objects that you take for granted. It’s so embedded in your brain what a bedroom chair looks like or what a coat hanger looks like. And once you start questioning that and [asking yourself], “Okay, but how could it be different?” It forces you to use so many parts of your brain and kind of go further back down the design tree. And I think what’s really cool about that is you realize that all the objects we have around us are mostly just things that people made up, and you can be one of the people that makes those objects up.
EG: What have you learned through your process?
SG: The hardest material in the world is diamond, but it’s not the strongest material in the world or the toughest material in the world, because if you hit a diamond with a hammer it will shatter. Instead, the toughest material in the world is something like rubber because it’ll deform and it’ll bounce back, and I really aspire to be rubber. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m soft, and I will take impact, and I’ll get beaten up, but I won’t shatter. I’ll bounce back, and I’ll figure out a way to adapt and to reshape and to overcome all the problems that life throws at me.” —Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor
