BARRY KUDROWITZ

Product designer

By PAUL MCMORROW

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If I'd been on a team that designed a revolutionary patented core-extracting endoscopic biopsy needle, I'd want to tell anybody who'd listen -- especially if I knew what any of that meant. Barry Kudrowitz is not of the same mind. "It's not very fun," he says.

Kudrowitz, a PhD candidate at MIT, would much rather talk Super Soakers, Nerf guns and Catsup Crappers. That's where the fun is.

For many MIT students, building cool, fun stuff is a way to escape the rigors of schoolwork. By contrast, fun is Kudrowitz's work. "I knew I wanted to design for entertainment," he says. "Amusement park rides, televisions, that kind of stuff. With toys, there's a lot of opportunity for funding and research, and it's a nice introduction to design. It's easy to get into. It's a lot harder to build roller coasters on campus."

Kudrowitz is entering his third year of teaching toy product design at MIT. He gives his students a design concentration (in the past, they've done toys promoting oral health and toys that could be manufactured inexpensively in Brazil), and then they go through the process of brainstorming, sketch modeling and mocking up prototypes. The toys don't just have to be designed well -- they also have to be deemed fun by a group of local schoolchildren. At the end of the semester, Kudrowitz's students pitch their toys to a rep from Hasbro.

He designed and founded the class, and nationwide, there are few, if any, direct parallels to it. "It's kind of its own branch of product design," he says. "A lot of toys are designed to be inexpensive, but you have to put a lot of thought into making them really neat. You're an engineer and an entertainer."

There's little research on toys and play from an engineering perspective, so Kudrowitz is researching and writing his own textbook for the class. He recently spent time in the Netherlands, studying "applied multisensory incongruity, surprise and emotion" -- that is, applying joke theory to design.

When he's not teaching others to build fun stuff, Kudrowitz is building fun stuff himself. He recently built a power-chord-only guitar that can be played by anyone. He dreams of building a gun that shoots farts. His remote-controlled Catsup Crapper grabbed national headlines in 2005; he's got his own sensory ride at Washington, DC's International Spy Museum; he's done consulting for a PBS design show; and he has his own Nerf gun on the market.

Kudrowitz's Super Soaker work was less successful, though. Neither a bullet-shooting water-pulsed gun nor a Super Soaker that shot snow panned out. The latter "ended up being a Super Soaker mister." Says Kudrowitz, "It wasn't very fun. Maybe you could use it for indoor play. Or maybe when you're giving somebody a haircut."

[wonderbarry.com]