One can hardly imagine a more fun child’s plaything than a toy balloon. These have been around in various forms since the middle ages at least, and are as pleasing to today’s children as ever. And they generally look like the balloon in the illustration below, from the classic children’s book, beloved by generations of Israeli children, “Tale of five balloons”.
But not at McDonalds. I visited one of their ubiquitous locations last week and saw at the counter the balloon you see at the right above. The poor thing was peppered with… legalese.
For those of you whose Hebrew is rusty, here’s what it says:
The balloon is made of natural Latex.
WARNING
- Not suitable for children under 36 months of age.
- Suffocation risk for children under 8 from uninflated or torn balloons – adult supervision required.
- Keep uninflated balloons out of the reach of children.
- An exploded balloon must be immediately thrown into a trashcan.
- Keep balloons away from the eyes and ears.
Sigh…
One of the most famous sculptures made in Israel is “Nimrod”, created in 1939 by Itzhak Danziger.
A powerful figure in red sandstone, it depicts a naked young man with a falcon on his shoulder and a sword held behind his back, looking intensely ahead.
This is Nimrod, the biblical great-grandson of Noah, king of a number of cities in Mesopotamia, and traditionally considered the leader of those who built the Tower of Babel. He is also cited as a mighty hunter, the original prototypical hunter of animals.
So what?
So, in October 1988 the National Geographic Magazine published on its cover a photo of a small carving, in mammoth ivory, of a male human head. This was found in Dolní Vestonice in Czechoslovakia, a rich archaeological site that had yielded a number of sculptures, including one of those obese “Venus” figurines. The carving is dated to some 26,000 years ago or earlier, and is the earliest representation of a specific person that has come to us from our ancestors.
And it instantly evoked in me the face of Danziger’s Nimrod, as you can see in the photos below:
Both figures represent hunters (well, we can’t know for sure what the caveman on the left did, but I doubt he was into computer programming). Both hunters come from the dawn of human history. And both have the same indescribable expression on their face.
What a cool coincidence!
Unusual business cards are not rare; many companies and individuals try to deviate from the traditional white rectangle design in the hope of standing out from the crowd. But today I was handed a card that goes far beyond this. Here it is:
This card has a rotating wheel that allows different short phrases to be viewed through a cutout in the cardboard. The wheel carries the phrases “SIT International”, “Father and Uncle”, “Facilitator”, and “Builder of Communities”.
Unusual, but at first glance this seemed just one more gimmick. You see metal cards, wooden cards, cards with laser engraving… so this one has a wheel. Nice, but…
And then it hit me: there is a deeper purpose to this design! You see, once the recipient gets the idea that rotating the wheel will reveal more information, it is inevitable that they’ll rotate it in anticipation of each new snippet of insight about the card’s owner. As they do that, their interest goes beyond the mere form of the card; they engage with its content instead. Most information on a business card just slides past you; but through this tiny experience you can’t help internalizing what the phrases say about the person: the fact that he is a father and proud of it; the fact that he values his skill as facilitator; the fact that he does not care about formal titles. The wheel trick gets this knowledge across in a far more engaging manner than just reading a static card would do.
Incidentally, Amnon is the co-founder and manager of a company specializing in innovation methodology, and he told me the design for this card was undertaken as an exercise in applying that methodology; you can read about that in this article.
And here is the back side of the card – it’s quite cool that the stylized man of the company logo actually turns somersaults when you rotate his wheel!
