I was contemplating my toothbrush just now and thinking how ridiculously overengineered and overmanufactured it is. This after a long yet instantaneous vision of how, post-apocalypse, I'd have to use this same toothbrush for the rest of my life.
It's a pleasant, firm, yet yielding texture, faintly rubbery but in no way sticky or too slick or unpleasant. It could be a high class prosthetic device. Its coloring is precisely controlled, so that it's perfectly white and then has harder plastic purple bits. We haven't even gotten to the bristles yet; this is just the handle. It has sparkly gold letters for its superdesigned logo. There's a hole in the ergonomically designed handle just in case I want to hang it up.
How can this be sustained? How can we make such very designed and made and yet disposable objects? Isn't there a cost to this conspicuous consumption? Must everything be so nice? Isn't the superfanciness of this toothbrush actually made of someone's blood and misery?
Some whole committee probably did studies of how the subtle womanly curves of the toothbrush handle could play upon our advertising-sick psyches. What a waste of their lives and time and mental energy.
All this for what is basically... a few bristles glued to a fucking STICK.
I'm sure there was a cheaper, plainer toothbrush, but maybe I would have saved a quarter by buying it.
Wait, but if I buy the fancy one, I'll probably brush my teeth more. Because I associate brushing my teeth with the idea of an annoying chore. So the more ornate the object, the more I'm ritually buying belief, or commitment, to the toothbrushing.
Here is where I think that sumptuary laws might be a good idea and also relatively painless. Though it seems ridiculous to make a fancy toothbrush illegal, and I'm sure for someone with arthritis, the fancy grip is helpful. Or just give, oh, I don't know, tax breaks for companies that manufacture simpler things. I'm not saying there needs to be an aestheticism tax, or a cushiony-tool-handle tax... but maybe something more like a "needless complexity tax". Or every 5 years, have a sort of contest and only allow the top 10 different toothbrush designs. How the fuck many do we need!
Standard disclaimer on how I don't know anything about actual economics.
Also, I'll never say no to that really thin minty "glide" floss, which does mean that I floss my teeth rather than just thinking about it.
No, you DON'T know anything about economics. You just put a couple hundred decently-paid industrial designers out of a job. Now they not only are draining the welfare system to feed their families, but they're not paying taxes, and thus there's less money IN the welfare system to support laid-off industrial designers.
Economics is not a zero-sum equation.
Posted by: Pretty Lady | January 15, 2008 at 08:26 PM
Well, duh... I mean I get that part of it; but our 200 industrial designers (not to even mention the resulting patent lawyers) could industrially design something more industrious and useful. We could give 200 people professional jobs digging tiny holes in the sand with a toothpick and filling them back up again, and yay trickle down economy, but that doesn't make it a job worth doing. And if in the meantime some OTHER thing is going on, used, neglected, polluted... it's not like I'm saying anything new here and I'm aware that It's All More Complicated. At what point do we just acknowledge that ridiculous excess is possible? Certainly at the point where I am expected to throw this rather beautiful thing away after 3 months of use (or 6, or a year, depending on who you ask about toothbrush change frequency), a thing constructed to be permanent or last for thousands of years (if not to be used for that long.) Or how about if they design the thing to be useful in some way after it is done being my toothbrush. Oh for my monkish (yet beautiful and comfortable) spacecraft with its Reclamation and Recycling Chute... or failing that, some purpose for enduring trash, and/or simpler or less enduring trash.
Posted by: badgerbag | January 15, 2008 at 09:17 PM
We have a system for recycling and reclaiming used toothbrushes; it's called art school. I am almost certain that there is some undergrad somewhere doing a tootbrush project. I know someone who did his master's thesis with objects made from recycled vinyl record albums and their covers, and now he has a business selling them to designer boutiques.
And I, for one, love my hyper-designed toothbrush. It's nifty. Having had an industrial designer for a roommate, I know that there are people with genuine vocations for this sort of thing.
Posted by: Pretty Lady | January 16, 2008 at 11:29 AM
Also, I use my old toothbrushes for scrubbing goop out of hard-to reach places, in bathrooms or in the kitchen, just like my mom did. They don't get thrown away until they're genuinely useless.
Posted by: Pretty Lady | January 16, 2008 at 11:34 AM
Actually, the consequences you describe in the first comment would only happen if economics really was a zero-sum game. A world without overengineered toothbrushes might still be a pareto improvement on our current one, and it's not eeevil to imagine it. Imagining improvements to how we allocate resources is part of what drives economics. Assuming that the current status quo accurate reflects everyone's innermost dreams isn't even free market worship; it's just kneejerk conservatism.
Also, sadly I think we may have already reached Peak Art Student Toothbrush Usage. It is our grim meathook future to be slowly buried under overproduced plaque-removal gadgets as our planet plummets towards the Dental Health Event Horizon.
Posted by: Zond 7 | January 16, 2008 at 09:44 PM
re: zond 7 - chuckle.
like badgerbag, i frequently fulminate at the waste in our economy. in addition to industrial designers and patent attys, we also have advertisers, plastics companies, and many factories working on an overproduction of different competing toothbrushes. and because they are seen as a disposable commodity (reuse is good but designing products to be permanent instead of quickly obsolete, or out-competed by some other branded and over-hyped "New! Superior! Shiny! Improved!" version of the same damn thing).
but we have a massive capitalist infrastructure built on reinforcing wasteful competition in some areas and undersupplying needs in others. my major life project of utopian is figuring out to have an spontaneously unplanned economy that nevertheless avoids the problems of the Government's & Capital's not-so-invisible hands & thumbs on the scale.
oh and how to mix more metaphors.
Posted by: laura queue | January 17, 2008 at 08:35 AM
Actually, my knee-jerk reaction had less to do with 'assuming the status quo accurately reflects everyone's innermost dreams,' which is demonstrably and obviously untrue, than to the assumption that government regulation is the only way to alter the status quo. This sort of thing can have very nasty unintended consequences.
Also, it has been my experience that meaningful change generally comes from within. We will not have a true toothbrush revolution until a bunch of comfortable, solvent industrial designers look at their aerodynamic toothbrush plans, think, "Wait, this is stupid," throw down their blueprints, and go start an organic farm with their retirement fund.
This may mean that I am a conservative progressive, or a progressive conservative, but I have very little use for labels.
Posted by: Pretty Lady | January 18, 2008 at 10:46 AM
Well... I must say from the start that i have never thought too much about my tooth brush in relation to its ergonicity?? suffice to say that i shall never make such a mistake again. i'll never be able to walk down the personal hygene products isle in the market again without thinking about how many hours went into the design of each and every one of these utensils. Its going to do my head in i know it. I may never recover. Therapy may be in order!
Posted by: Wayne | January 19, 2008 at 10:25 PM
I get industrial design of toothbrushes for a few reasons:
-- to get kids to brush their teeth (Superman, Batman toothbrushes make it fun)
-- to better reach hard to brush areas
-- if there is a a major breakthrough to help keep teeth healthy.
Of course, my family has problems with their teeth so I may be a bit skewed in my thinking.
But, you are right, there is a lot of time spent on silly stuff instead of looking at the most ergonomic and efficient way to create a toothbrush - or anything else.
Posted by: MLO | January 20, 2008 at 11:25 AM