Juicy Salif and Dreamfarm

Reaching into the mythic as-if to solve industrial design problems

Once upon a time, a kitchenware manufacturer sent a mythic hero on a Quest: to return with the perfect lemon squeezer.

A tale of two juicers

Innovation almost always involves meta-rationality. Meta-rationality relies on the mythic mode to provide possibility and purpose. Meta-rationality includes skill in transforming nebulous, mythic possibilities into purposes that are definite enough to act on concretely.

My previous post, “The mythic mode: from childhood, throughout life” was subtitled “Reclaiming mythopoeic cognition, even in technical work.” I gave two examples, “A conversation with a sleigh that is also a fish” and “Gods, demons, and suspension bridges.”

Both are true stories of surprising solutions to engineering problems. Both illustrate the process and value of mythic perception and action in technical work (and are good fun!). However, they may have seemed remote from your own experience as an engineer or other professional. They are about inventions made centuries ago, with overt mythic involvement.

This post adds two more examples, both from our own time. They’re less fantastical, and so perhaps more compelling. The first is still somewhat obviously mythic, dream-like; the second might be mistaken for routine engineering at first.

When calamari collides with science fiction in a pizza restaurant

The main settlement on Capraia. Image CC BY-SA 3.0 Luca Aless

I began this post with “once upon a time…” because stories are among the best ways to access the mythic mode (as I wrote in “Mythic language”).

Once upon a time was 1990, the kitchenware manufacturer was the Italian company Alessi, and the mythic hero was Philippe Starck. The quest was innovation in lemon squeezing: Alessi commissioned Starck, already a famous industrial design star, to come up with something new and exciting.

Starck “is known to suggest that design ideas seem to come to him quite magically, as if from nowhere.” Note: “magic,” “as if,” and “from nowhere.” All these are key themes in the mythic mode: with “nowhere” standing in for “domains of as-if,” or in Buddhist terms: emptiness.

Starck said of his success on this particular quest that “this vision came upon me.” In this case, though, we know exactly where that vision came from: how Starck entered the mythic mode, his route through the territory, what he found there, and how he brought it back.

Discussing this quest, Nigel Cross, in Design Thinking: Understanding how designers think and work, writes that innovations don’t literally come from nowhere, although they cannot be be derived rationally:

Designing is not a search for the optimum solution to the given problem, but an exploratory process. The creative designer interprets the design brief not as a specification for a solution, but as a starting point for a journey of exploration; the designer sets off to explore, to discover something new, rather than to reach somewhere already known, or to return with yet another example of the already familiar.

Starck went to Italy to visit Alessi and discuss the project. Then he took a short break on a tiny picturesque island, Capraia. He went to dinner at Il Corsaro, a pizzeria there. As he waited for his food, he began to sketch on the paper place mat.

He began at the right end of the island on the map; you can see there the completely standard lemon reamer/juice bowl combination that everyone had at the time. What could he do to make something different? Hmm, what if the reamer was much taller? He drew a couple versions of that to see, just above the label “CAPRAIA ISOLA.” Well, not very interesting!

So… what if the squeezy bit was lemon-shaped, he wondered? More interesting, maybe! But then it wouldn’t bite into the pulp the way a reamer does. Better put teeth on it! You can see those in the row just below the island name label.

Then his antipasto plate of baby squid arrived. Lots of edible legs! He squeezed a lemon on them, manually. Wait, can I put legs on the lemon squeezer, instead of lemon on the legs? That would be different! (Bottom row, to the right of center; and then evolving in the top part of the place mat.) Kind of creepy!

Starck’s father was an aeronautical engineer. Born in 1949, the son grew up fascinated with flight and futurism. His childhood fantasies (stage 2!) often featured the rocket ships he saw in 1950s comic books. And, wait, his first walking-squid juicer sketches looked like—

The squid juicer evolves into a rocket-squid-juicer in the bottom left of the place mat. You can see that these are much more nearly finished designs than the initial rough sketches.

In “Seeing and acting two ways at once” I wrote about dual vision, transformation, and things that are simultaneously other things:

Children’s play constantly relies on this. A fork becomes a spaceship, and the child zooms it around the room, seeing it as a spaceship, acting on it as a spaceship. At the same time, the child remains perfectly aware that it is a fork—and sees it, and holds it, also as a fork.

Children’s stories, and myths and dreams and visions, feature impossible transformations, across conceptual boundaries, of places, people, things, activities. Frequently they shift the apparent ordinary into the imaginary extraordinary, the boring into the bizarre—and then sometimes back again. These evoke wonder, curiosity, delight, and sometimes amusement or horror.

The as-if has its own power, players, and logic, who also get a say. This is not supernatural magic; it’s true for all human creativity. Painters find unexpected people, objects, or acts appearing on the canvas, disturbing or delightful, demanding inclusion.

The next morning Starck phoned Alessi: “I’ve got a lemon squeezer for you,” he teased. And he mailed the place mat. And the rest is history.

Behold! The Juicy Salif:

This squid-rocket-juicer is a famous icon of design, but it is also a phenomenally successful commercial product, having sold many hundreds of thousands of units.

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In “Understanding the seductive experience” Julie Khaslavsky and Nathan Shedroff analyze the appeal of the Juicy Salif in order to draw lessons about software design. You’ll hear frequent echoes of my description of children’s mythic fantasies in their writing:

At first, the shape creates curiosity, then the emotional response of confusion and, perhaps, fear, since it is so sharp and dangerous looking.

It promises to make an ordinary action extraordinary. It transforms the routine act of juicing an orange into a special experience. Its innovative approach, simplicity, and elegance in shape and performance creates an appreciation and the desire to possess not only the object but the values that helped create it, including innovation, originality, elegance, and sophistication.

It teaches the lesson to expect wonder where it is unexpected—all positive feelings about the future.

Don Norman, in Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, adds:

The reflective joy of explanation: the juicer tells a story. Anyone who owns it has to show it off, to explain it, perhaps to demonstrate it.

Is the Juicy Salif story a good illustration for my discussion the mythic mode in contemporary technical practice? Culture theorists discuss it mainly in aesthetic terms: as a work of art that also, humorously, happens to be a kitchen gadget. They say “well, yes, it’s no good as an actual juicer, but…” And, while 1990 is is not the distant past, I first read about it many years ago, and hazily considered it already a historical event, dwindling into the distance.

Still, it somehow occurred to me to check Amazon… and was somewhat startled to discover that you can buy one today! $71.88 (as of posting time) and it’s yours.

It surprised me much further to see that it has a 4.7-star rating, with 2,867 reviews. Amazon’s “AI”-generated summary of them:

Customers praise this juicer’s beautiful design and functionality, noting it works better than electric models. Moreover, the juicer receives positive feedback for its quality, build solidity, and value for money. Additionally, they appreciate its kitchen design, with one customer describing it as a showstopper on the counter, and find it makes a great gift.

I read a few dozen reviews. Opinions of its functionality are somewhat mixed, but many do praise it, with headlines like “Easy to use, easy to clean, reliable.” One enthusiastic customer posted a video showing it in use. I suspect many of the theorists who dismissed its mundane functionality never actually tried one.

Dreamfarm and the Fluicer

Is a 4.7 rating actually good? I used the “Sort by average customer review” feature of the Amazon web site to see how lemon juicers stack up. Out of hundreds of products, there’s only a couple dozen 4.7s. All except the Juicy Salif are knock-offs of a single design, which uses lever action to squeeze the lemon between two hemispheres, one convex and one concave. I have one like that. It doesn’t work very well.

There’s only one juicer that’s credibly rated higher, at 4.8, with 1,205 reviews.¹ It’s the peculiar-looking Dreamfarm Lemon Fluicer. Maybe not quite as peculiar-looking as the Juicy Salif, but you wouldn’t guess from looking at it that it is a lemon juicer:

The second image on the product page also caught my eye:

Wait, this is also an award-winning innovation? Maybe I can use it as another example in the post I’m writing!

So I did a web search, and yes, TIME did call it one of the best inventions of 2023. They wrote:

It is really annoying: the kitchen drawer full of a jumble of accessories and single-purpose tools won’t open or close because something—maybe the hand-held citrus squeezer—is sticking up. The Fluicer, which folds flat, is designed to avoid this problem. But it also reinvents its main job, squeezing half a lime (or lemon or orange) from the sides as well as top to get more juice out of every press.

It also has a seed-catching doohickey, so you don’t have to strain them out of your juice.

“Dreamfarm” sounded intriguing, since dreams and myths are closely related. Searching that word: it’s the name of the company that invented the Fluicer.

I found their “Our Story” web page deeply moving. (Brilliant engineering makes me cry. Really.) It turns out Dreamfarm makes a couple dozen different kitchen gadgets, which have won a ton of design awards. But what I found inspiring was not mere success. It was the videos toward the bottom of the page, about how they do what they do.

If you watch the videos, keep in mind this from “The complete stance and the mythic”:

Meaningness describes six “textures of the complete stance”: wonder, curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creativity. These are all also characteristic of the mythic mode!

You’ll see all these front-and-center in the Dreamfarm videos.

They repeatedly invoke “magic.” And the first sentence of Meta-rationality, the book, is: “In fields requiring systematic, rational competence—science, engineering, business—some few people can do what may seem like magic.”

Innovation almost always requires stage-5 meta-rationality: skill in choosing how to apply abstract reasoning to concrete, actual-world purposes. In “Seeing and acting mythically in stage 5,” I wrote:

Entering the mythic mode in stage 5 is not a regression. It is a skillful deployment of one of your acquired capacities in an appropriate situation. Although it is the same mode, it is also not the same mode, because while you see and do things in the mythic, as-if world, you retain your meta-rational understanding—and your awareness of potential reasonable and rational considerations. Those don’t diminish the experience, but complicate and deepen it.

Meta-rationality can relate meanings discovered in the as-if to the actual world effectively.

I wrote this post in one day, because the very serious post I am supposed to be writing has bogged down in conceptual complexity. I’m five thousand words in, maybe halfway through, no end in sight.

Working late into the evening, I have just ordered a Fluicer. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, publication day for this post.

As adults, we get to choose what we “bring back from a world as-if.” Figuring out which gifts will be beneficial in the actual world, and how, is difficult. It requires meta-systematic insight and exploration and experimentation.

Further reading

For many STEM-educated people, particularly ones who have read some cognitive science, the obvious question may be:

Well, how does this work? What’s going on in someone’s mind, or brain, when they’re doing this “mythic mode” thing, or doing innovative engineering?

These might be good questions to ask if answers helped us do it more and better. However, I find the available theories unenlightening. They are vague, have nearly zero scientific support, and are contaminated with metaphysics.

Fortunately, we have found answers to “more and better” empirically and pragmatically instead. We know many ways to enter mythic realms of as-if; to explore landscapes there; to select what gifts to bring back from faerie; and how to transform these mythic objects into beautiful or useful analogs in actuality.

Although these operations are aspects of all technical work, they have been explained best in design theory. Technical people are likely to misunderstand “design” as meaning ornamentation or aesthetic coating, applied after the serious engineering work is finished. In fact, the main work of design, instead, is getting from a nebulous hassle or opportunity to a well-specified problem that can solved using routine rational methods.

If you’d like to learn more about that: Nigel Cross’ Design Thinking: Understanding how designers think and work is excellent, and has been a significant influence for me.

My mentioning his discussion of the Juicy Salif may contribute to the misimpression that his book is about aesthetics, which it mostly isn’t. Even less so, his Engineering Design Methods: Strategies for Product Design, a classic now in its fifth edition, is about hardcore mechanical engineering.

An illustration from Cross’s Engineering Design Methods

I also recommend Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown’s Pragmatic Imagination.² From its blurb:

Pragmatic Imagination is a small book that presents a valuable resource for navigating our broadly connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent world. It begins from an assumption that agency in the world today requires a productive entanglement of imagination and action. It then presents a framework for unpacking the imagination as a wide range of mental activity that can be put to purpose in this world. This is the Pragmatic Imagination—a concept and framework of six principles.

That book is actually an excerpt from a much larger one, Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, published in two giant, expensive volumes. I have a mixed opinion of that book, and wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but there’s much of value in it. It’s worth at least knowing about, as an attempt at a manual of meta-rationality, even though perhaps few people actually read it.

1. The other three 4.8s have only a few reviews; plausibly astroturf or statistical noise. They are all of the generic two-hemisphere design.

2. Thanks to Samuel Hobl for reminding me of it.