Exactly. I can only imagine the level of destruction when a paper jam occurs...flying papers...toppling stacks...women screaming and sheltering the children's eyes... Cool concepts are still cool though.
...cool concepts are poison, though. This shows my bias: I grew up in an engineering house. I trained as an engineer. I'm a firm believer in form follows function - within limits. None other than Kelly Johnson said "if it looks pretty, it'll fly pretty" and he's certainly got the track record to prove it. BUT When people who don't understand how things work get to come up with ideas about how things work, you end up with a disaster. Marcello Gandini had never designed a car before he designed the Lamborghini Miura, so he played it conservatively, aping the Ferrari Daytona and Toyota 2000. When that worked out okay he designed the Countach... certainly an iconic shape, but one that's impossible to get into and out of, that has absolutely crap visibility and which will send anyone over 25 into back spasms if they drive it for more than 20 minutes. Worse, in order to make the design work they used aircraft aluminum (sexy!) that if you lean against it, dents permanently (spendy!). Giugiaro refused to work with Gandini because he was so much of a "designer" that his ideas had no practicality. 10 years later, Gandini bailed on automotive design, and now makes coffee cups that you can't use, blinds you can't close and other ridiculous consumer designs. Giugaro? Well... So we're left with a car that remains absolutely iconic, but that is almost never seen in motion. It's a designer's extraction of "car", as in "something that looks cool on the page but will never ever do 'car-like' things." It carries over to architecture, too. Everybody loves the Sydney Opera House. That was a contest winner, by a guy who had never designed a building before. When they forced the architects to make it work, the target and cost shifted from "six years and seven million pounds" to fourteen years and 107m pounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Opera_House#Completion_a... So yeah. Cool concepts are cool. The problem with them is that people who know fuckall about design want them, and somebody ends up grinding their fingers down to nubs trying to make it work. Having been that guy, fuck "cool" concepts.