Chindōgu: The Japanese Art of Useless Inventions

This speaks to my soul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie_stick was once such an invention

I'm not sure they qualify to be called "Chindōgu", two of the rules are "It must be a tool that solves everyday life problems" and "It is not for sale" while some inventions of theirs don't solve anything at all, and some of them seems to be for sale in their shop.

It's just normal "Unnecessary Inventions".

I think designing "useless" things is actually a really great exercise that forces you to challenge a lot of your biases/assumptions and really flex your muscles.

I help teach some people intro-level coding and we practice on "useless" code all the time, like text mangling to do meme-posting, writing some data-moshing tools, etc. It's practical in that it teaches some fundamentals, but the output is ultimately silly but observable. (e.g., there's not much value to the program but a successful output is clear)

Useless inventions are pretty fun for a lot of things; theatre/home movies are filled with such things as CG is typically too much work for an individual, so practical effects need to be used. For a movie I made for a friend, we had to figure out how to make a puppet "blow" into a party noise maker, and came up with the strangest contraption involving straws and a lot of tape; a overall "useless" invention, but turns out there's a lot more going into making noise with a party noise maker than you'd imagine.

Useless inventions are a great exercise of creativity and logic, blending the practical side of our minds with the emotional/fantastical parts that just want to make such fun and fantastical things work.

In “The Book of Thinkage” (which I heard of on HN), one of the characters practices “cozy” - making his space fit his exact needs, by adding a shelf here, a lever there. There’s something universal, and quite satisfying, about the instinct to shape the world around us to match our individualisms. It’s like all of our random automation scripts, but physical.