Today is National Ballpoint Pen day—I heard about it on The Current. It was interesting to read about the history of the ballpoint pen’s invention.
“What the ballpoint pen did was to make writing something that could happen anywhere. I’ve written in snow and rain, on the back of an ATV and in a boat at sea and in the middle of the night,” says Sax.
The ballpoint pen is testament, Sax says, to one of the tenets of “really great design – it almost disappears. If the ballpoint didn’t exist and you launched one today on Kickstarter, it would be the biggest thing ever,” he says.
That quote about design reminded me of How Design Makes the World by Scott Berkun. This was a book I read a while ago and found fascinating. Maybe it’s time for a re-read. The idea of invisible seamless design as an ideal is one that I’d like to keep in mind.
And yet, ballpoint pens produce so much plastic waste.
How does all of this relate to my favorite problems? The ballpoint pen is a story of the creation of something of immense need that no one realized could exist. It had an unforeseen consequence though in the amount of waste produced. Looking at my favorite problems, many of them center on creating systems related to teaching, learning, and collaboration. Design thinking is worth a revisit in thinking about these problems.