On the advent of the three-legged fly swatter.

We saw a video of a lecture by Daniel Pink, related to his book on right-brainedness. In it he displayed a fly swatter that has three little legs protruding from the handle for it to stand on when not in use, and pointed out that this device commanded a wild price tag (I think it was $8 or $14), just because it had a cool designer look and feel. At least that’s how I interpreted it. Me, I think he was just a wee bit off the mark. The designer toilet brush he also displayed sold for only 3 bucks. So what’s so special about a three-legged fly swatter?

Anyone who has ever lived in close proximity to livestock knows that you want your fly swatter handy. Particularly in the kitchen, you want to be able to grab and swat in a matter of seconds. But one thing you definitely DON’T want is to lay the business end of the thing down on the kitchen counter. Hence the legs. Really, it’s a great design. And if it’s patented, which I’m sure it is, it can easily sell for 14 bucks. This is not to detract from the beauty of the design, but to point to its utility. “Form follows function” is, in my opinion, more than a principle taught at design school, it’s a law of nature; could even be considered to be a corollary to the law of natural selection. Really build a better fly swatter and, in time, you’ll drive all the other contenders out of the market. If that fly swatter is better because it has legs, then the fact that the legs give it a unique appearance is secondary to the increased utility of the design. This is also not to detract from the value of right-brained thinking, but to point to the overarching value of integrated thinking. Recognizing the need to have your fly swatter handy is a left-brained kind of a thing. Pulling together a wide range of disparate elements and seeing within them a creative solution to the problem is right-brained.

What, then does this have to do with education? Pinks thesis, as I read it, is that we as a society do not value right-brained-ness sufficiently and do not do enough to culture it in our educational system. Probably he’s right. And that, to me, is rather discouraging. My only real problem with his book and his seminars is that it seems to me yesterdays news. These ideas have been floating around the culture since at least the seventies. I point to that decade because that is when I first became aware of them, and did so only because that is when I first began to pay attention. Probably they have been extant throughout human history. Why then is the left-brained, linear, goal-oriented style of thinking so dominant. I haven’t an answer, but I think it may have something to do with fear. When we fear death or suffering, we rely on the most direct means of meeting our basic needs, be they real or imagined. That puts us in linear, short-term survival mode where the left-brain is most successful. Only when we have some time to relax can we open ourselves to the bigger, longer, holistic appreciation of life.


Anyway, there it is, and what I have to say is concluded, concerning the nature of the fly swatter.


Perhaps you’d enjoy an interlude of cross-brainedness.