Customer Reviews

Reinventing the Wheel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jessica Helfand's Reinventing the Wheel is my favorite kind of design book: one part lookie-L@@K-pritty-pictures, the other part explaining what it all means. The book is about information wheels -- alternatively called wheel charts, wheel calculators, or volvelles.

Folks my age might remember the circular BAC (blood alcohol content) calculators distributed every three months or so in junior high and high school...spin the wheel to your weight and a certain number of drinks and it calculated how drunk you were. Fat lot of good that did me; I could have done with something a little more useful such as a wheel calculator that determined your attractiveness to girls based on GPA and where your mom bought your clothes ("3.9 and K-Mart? Not looking good...").

The BAC and Unfashionable Teen Boy calculators aren't featured in the book, but many other wheels are, including several from the 30s and 40s. My favorites are the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer (for its complexity), the DeKalb Hybrids "What Your Corn Can Do to Help Win the War" wheel, the Wonder Bread Guide to U.S. Warships, the U.S. Navy Semaphore Signaling Guide (this one is really ingenious), and the colorful hand-made "Cercle Chromatique", and the surreal Puzzle Pets Letter Wheels.

Helfand has done a really nice job with this fun book. Definitely recommended.

More than a simple collection of ephemera, Helfand's book is as generous as it is specific. Her thesis is that the simple form of the circle - or two joined circles (a "wheel") - literally turns all it touches. Unlike boxy, "windows" environments, circular logic spirals and spins out into webs and whorls, mapping and envisioning the world itself. Her introductory essay deals with moveable circular diagrams before the turn-of-the-century, specifically in astronomy, mathematics, and navigation. A gorgeous color plates section shows over 100 twentieth-century wheels at work. Her final thesis turns to the nature of the wheel in modern art, music, philosophy, and design. Aimed at a wide array of readers, Helfand manages to find a voice for them all: "Reinventing the Wheel" will be a welcome and unusual addition to bookshelves of designers, collectors, and the curious alike.

Jessica Helfland appears caught here between her inner love of collecting trivia, and her academic role: and while the graphics put on display her remarkable collection of wheels and volvelles her text unfortunately veers toward academic pontificating of the worst order as she uses her collection in an attempt to ruminate on how we see life, and how linearity as in the design and format of books (left-to-right, one page after another) is confining compared to the multidimensional viewpoint afforded by circles. Helfand's writing is rigidly locked into the very paradigm she criticises, and in the end her more human Foreword is by far the most interesting text in this handsome hard back volume.

Handsome? Graphically, this is an outstanding book - well-designed, beautifully typeset, graphics gorgeously reproducing the collection of wheels, even the paper seems especially chosen - but I found Helfand's logic and her weak arguments quite frustrating. It reads like the first draft of a thesis - before the student's overseeing Professor has had a real go at the author. ("Come on - you've made a leap in logic here!")

So this is one book where the pictures can do all the talking. The text and the often redundant captions (they describe what we can already see, thank you) is frankly superfluous.

This is a one of a kind special catalogue.
Jessica Helfand shares with us her big huge collection of categorized volvelles, from the astronomical ones to instructional, farmaceutical, etc... with the collaboration of designers and researchers like John Maeda, Ben Fry and many more.
The quality of the picture is great, let the reader explore every detail of each volvelle.
If you like this kind of interactive object, you will definitely love this book!

interesting trivia and great for a collector of wheels but I was looking more for a visual mapping type of collection. Nice book for nostalgia seekers.

bought the book for the pictures and the paragraph about each one. haven't read most of the text and don't particularly care to.

a shoulder surfer actually thought some of the wheels were real, the reproductions are that good.

4 out of 5 because I didn't read/rate the text.

Fun book, brilliantly layed out, but would have liked to see the backsides. And really, the photographers were so lazy much of the time to not get the info disks in register with the die-cuts. I presume this was the author's collection or from like-minded collectors and/or conservators. This flouting of attention to detail is conspicuously disconjugate to the demanding esthete of this type of person. Enjoyable none the less. Despite my pleasure, in reference to my conclusion, I reject a reverse: I object; no obverse. Julian Mason, Beaufort SC

This book is an excellent research on the subjet with very good examples. Interesting for designers.