Everybody's seen the GoldieBlox commercial with the three little girls and the Rube Goldberg device, right?
It's a good ad. But it's not a great ad, because the machine has at least two flaws in it.
A Rube Goldberg machine is a kind of data visualization; it makes mechanics visible to the naked eye in a way that ordinary machines do not, usually using household objects rather than solenoids and gear mechanisms in order familiarize the mechanism and sometimes to introduce a note of humor.
And data visualizations are a kind of argument -- very linear ones. If one leg of the argument doesn't hold up, the whole thing crumbles; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
That's why data visualizations and infographics need to be constructed carefully: The histogram with unevenly-spaced units and the flowchart that uses rhombuses for both decisions and operations are bad arguments. They are incomplete electrical circuits, powering nothing. (Yes, a circuit too is an argument, one could argue.)
The GoldieBlox Rube Goldberg machine has, as I said, at least two flaws. At 1:28 and at 1:33, the mechanism requires human intervention (swinging on the swing and pulling a cord that drops the Little Tykes Cozy Coupe). Moreover, both of these activities completely obviate every component of the machine that came before them; the little girl could have pulled the cord and dropped the Coupe at the start, and everything would have turned out just the same. (I wasn't clear on the seesaw mechanism at :58).
While the Beastie Boys are calling on GoldieBlox to stop using their "Girls" as the soundtrack (and receiving a lawsuit for their troubles), I am calling on GoldieBlox to remake the ad in such a way that the machine/argument/circuit functions as it supposed to. So sue me.
For what it's worth, I think the Beastie Boys should make an exception to their no-advertising rule, because "Girls" works so perfectly with the commercial. But I also think that GoldieBlox doesn't understand what parody is, or, more likely, is using it speciously in their lawsuit with full knowledge that they've got the wrong leg of the donkey.
Recent Comments