Have Fun Inventing: Learn to Think Up Products and Imagine Future Inventions

In 1974, Steven M. Johnson worked as an urban planner in the San Francisco Bay Area while maintaining a sideline career as a cartoonist. That year, as he turned 36 he discovered by accident a latent interest and desire to create inventions. He had been assigned by the editor of Sierra magazine to imagine and satirize future recreation vehicles. Asked for 16 illustrations, he came up with 109! Since then, he has been creating whimsical products, inventions and predictions for magazines and online, as well as in two books published that were in the 1980s and early '90s. Have Fun Inventing describes the lessons he has learned in the past 40 years as a self-styled Whimsicalist and Possibilitist. He offers a clear description of his manner of thinking as he searches for invention ideas, and details the steps taken to come up with unique combinations and permutations of objects in almost any subject area. The book includes hundreds of his captioned illustrations, many published for the first time. For persons of any age who are curious about how an inventor thinks, this is the perfect book.

Steven M. Johnson was born in 1938 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His undergraduate studies were at Yale University and U.C. Berkeley. He lives in Southern California with his wife. His son also lives in the Los Angeles area. He earned his living in careers as an urban planner, newspaper artist and future trends analyst at California companies. His drawings have been featured in newspapers and magazines both nationally and abroad, as well as online in Design Mind (Frog Design), Good, Harper's, Mother Jones, Road & Track, Scion, Sierra, The Atlantic, The Futurist, The New York Times, The San Francisco Examiner, The Washington Times, Tur & Retur (Swedish Railways), Txchnologist, Utne Reader, Whole Earth Review, and also Box and Brutus (Japanese magazines). Two books have been published: What the World Needs Now, Ten Speed Press, 1984 and 2001, and Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-A-Mats and Other Visions of the 21st Century, St. Martin's Press, 1991. In recent years, his work has been shared widely on the Internet. A collection of his images and references to publications and limited edition giclee prints can be found on his Web page, www.patentdepending.com. He has been a consultant with performance artist Michael Portnoy on several exhibits at The Taipei Biennial in Taiwan. Publicly, he has discussed his methods for creating unusual, whimsical or prophetic images with attendees at an art show featuring his work in Palo Alto, and for several years at The Maker Faire in San Mateo and Pasadena in California. He has given workshops and a public lecture at Elon University in North Carolina, and lectures in New York City to classes of graduate students at the School of Visual Arts and to employees at the international headquarters of Smart Design.