A little bit Dada, a little bit “only sold on television,” intentionally useless inventions called Chindogu look like a bunch of plastic junk at first glance, but there’s more to it than that. And they’re not quite altogether useless. In fact, as creator Kenji Kawakami stated when he first revealed Chindogu to the world in 1995, these objects are “un-useless.” They have a purpose, but they take their halfway practical solution to a perceived problem and stretch it to maximum absurdity. It’s all kind of dumb, and that’s the point.

Chindogu literally translates to “weird tool,” and that’s clearly what these inventions are. There’s a face shield so you don’t splatter ramen broth in your hair. A tiny broom and dustpan attached to the tips of your shoes let you clean the floor very awkwardly, getting the broom filthy as you walk through the city. A suction cup attached to a helmet holds you upright when you want to take a nap on the subway. Tiny roller skate wheels on the pointy heels of your stiletto shoes – but only the heels – could almost help you skate along the road. But not really.

Whatever the particular invention is trying to address, it does so in a way that introduces other problems, looks incredibly stupid, or both. But most of the time, the so-called “problem” isn’t a real problem at all.

“In our world, all technology is progressing, right?” says Kawakami. “So I thought why not take a simple fork and make it electric. Using this fork, with a single flick of the switch you can effortlessly wind up spaghetti. The only drawback is that the spaghetti sauce goes flying everywhere. So the end result is that it really is better not to use it. And that is what Chindogu means. It isn’t something that anyone would actually use, but it has to be a tool that a person could use.”

If all of this feels like a critique on consumer culture – or you’re just feeling a little ornery about the proliferation of crap on a planet that seems to be rapidly circling the drain – Kawakami has something to clarify about that. Kind of.

“I despise materialism and how everything is turned into a commodity, things that should be belong to everyone are patented and turned into private property. I’ve never registered a patent and I never will because the world of patents is dirty, full of greed and competition.”

Just browse any old listicle of “products that shouldn’t exist” and you’ll see plenty of wacky items that appear to be based on early Chindogu designs, but with no self-awareness or sense of irony. Ostrich pillows, goldfish walkers, metal-detecting sandals, gag gifts. But not only are these objects a little too useful at times, they fail to be Chindogu immediately simply because they’re available for sale, invalidating the entire purpose. They’re mass-produced and distributed. They’re almost always patented.

So what actually makes an object Chindogu? Kawakami has helpfully laid out ten vital tenets of Chindogu to explain. To summarize: Chindogu cannot be for sale; it must exist in the real world as a physical object; it must have a spirit of anarchy; it must be a tool for everyday life; it can’t be created purely for the purpose of humor; it must not be used as propaganda; it can never be taboo; it cannot be patented and it can never be prejudiced, i.e. “Chindogu must never favor one race or religion over another. Young and old, male and female, rich and poor – all should have free and equal chance to enjoy each and every Chindogu.”

Just like Chindogu objects themselves, Kawakami’s ‘Ten Chindogu Tenets’ contradict themselves a bit, but that just means any object that claims to be Chindogu has to be a lot more carefully thought out than it appears at first glance. For instance, that seventh tenet says in full, “Chindogu are not propaganda. Chindogu are innocent. They are made to be used, even though they cannot be used. They should not be created as a perverse or ironic comment on the sorry state of mankind.”

So yeah, they may be weird creations that look like junk – but what they actually are is a form of art (or perhaps anti-art) that begs you not to take it seriously. Back to that spirit of anarchy: “Chindogu are man-made objects that have broken free from the chains of usefulness. They represent freedom of thought and action: the freedom to challenge and suffocate historical dominance of conservative utility; the freedom to be (almost) useless.”

Eschewing the internet for the way it isolates people and threatens to make human interactions more superficial, Kawakami hasn’t released many more Chindogu creations of his own outside a series of books, including ‘101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu‘ and ‘The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions.’

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But plenty of people have come to love Chindogu, and contributed to the movement with their own strange inventions. A look at the #chindogu tag on Instagram reveals a wealth of recent creations (and a lot of love for the concept.)

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In a our 24-hour news cycle era of looming climate change catastrophe, stranger-than-fiction political buffoonery and an ever-growing feeling that we’ve slipped into a parallel timeline, sometimes it’s nice to just embrace the absurd, revel in it, and maybe walk around with rolls of toilet paper attached to our heads.

In a semi-arid region of Morocco, where tap water is a luxury but fog is plentiful, a fog-harvesting net based on the structure of a spider’s web naturally collects moisture from the air. Engineer Peter Trautwein of the German Water Foundation volunteered his time to develop CloudFisher, a structure that looks like no more than a fence from afar. Get closer, and you’ll see a metal framework supporting the stretched nets, with gutters and tubing directing the collected droplets to tanks.

The nets are placed along the area around Mount Boutmezguida, which is known for being one of the driest parts of Morocco, but also the foggiest. When the wind blows, it pushes moisture into the complex woven netting, effectively trapping it. Rubber expanders holding the nets to the frames reduce the impact of wind pressure on the net to keep them from breaking.

CloudFisher is the result of many years of study, as Trautwein experimented with various structures of net to see which ones yielded the most water. Ultimately, monofilaments were the most effective. The netting’s tiny triangular openings fill with water, which then trickles down to the collector at the base.

The CloudFisher system was installed with the help of NGO Dar si Hmed and won the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Momentum for Change Award. It’s capable of harvesting between four and fourteen liters of water per square meter of net, ultimately producing up to 36,000 liters (9,510 gallons) of water a day for the area’s 800 residents.

Solar power projects go truly off-the-grid in mobile applications that range from practical if goofy solar panel-equipped Ray Bans to donkeys that stroll around with photovoltaics mounted to their backs. While some are just for fun, others have the (solar) power to bring electricity to remote places, or get around restrictions that hold back renewable energy progress.

Shrub Rover Solar-Powered Camouflaged Car

It looks like an ordinary shrub. Then it starts inexplicably rolling along the ground as if it has gained sentience a la the plot of a particularly terrible horror movie from the 1950s. The Terrestrial Shrub Rover by Justin Shull is a solar-powered, foliage-covered vehicle that lets drivers explore new territories in disguise (as long as you wait to actually drive it until after dark.) Cameras on the outside display the car’s surroundings on screens within so you can see where you’re going.

Pop-Up Solar Power Station

Solar installations can be costly and time-consuming to install, but load them into a shipping container so that they can pop right out when it’s opened and you’ve got a convenient mobile solar power station. The Ecos PowerCube is available in 10-foot, 20-foot and 40-foot ISO shipping container footprints with solar panels hidden within protective drawers. Batteries inside the container store power. Once unrolled, the panels increase the size of the array to three times the footprint of the shipping containers.

Solar-Powered Wheelchair

The winning entry in a competition for inventions that can make a significant difference to people with disabilities, this solar-powered wheelchair can run continuously on the power of the sun. Designed by students at the University of Virginia, the wheelchair features a custom-built 11-square-foot solar panel that doubles as a sun shade and enables the wheelchair to travel indefinitely at 1mph without drawing power from the battery.

Autonomous Solar-Powered Lawnmower

The equivalent of a Roomba for your lawn, this open-source robotic lawn mower runs entirely on solar power so you don’t have to sweat it out on a hot summer day. No need to even control it via remote, since it’s totally autonomous. If you’re handy with electronics, you can try making one yourself – instructions are available at Open Electronics.

Freshwater Floating Solar Power Plant

The world’s largest freshwater solar power plant will be installed over reservoirs and lakes in India’s southern state of Kerala in a $72 million, 50 megawatt project. Using freshwater gets around the problem of landowners overcharging for solar developments, with projects paying rent to the owners of the bodies of water. The total cost will end up being around 15 percent lower than equivalent land-based projects.

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Offbeat Off The Grid 15 Mobile Solar Gadgets

Digital photography innovations have led to cameras that can capture images at the speed of light, see the world from the compound eye of an insect or describe scenes via speech for the visually impaired. Some of these strange and amazing digital cameras will even remember your preferred settings using iris recognition software, spit out descriptive text with the help of virtual workers around the world, or activate only at the touch of strangers.

Touchy Camera for Social Anxiety

The wearer of this odd-looking camera helmet is entirely in the dark – literally – until touched by another person. When continuous physical contact is maintained between the camera, ‘Touchy’, and an outside person, the eye-hole shutters are activated. This gives the wearer back his or her own vision, and captures images every ten seconds. The creators note that we’re all separated into social bubbles, avoiding connection with strangers. “However, technologies like internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. to a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the ‘hikikomori’ and ‘otaku’ cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. the touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth’.

Iris Camera

Iris is an eye-tracking camera that you control by blinking and squinting. It uses biometric technology to recognize users’ faces through their unique iris signatures, automatically loading their preferred settings including aperture, ISO and screen display. Zoom in and out by widening your eyelids, and take a photo by holding your gaze before double-blinking.

Panoramic Camera Ball

This incredible throwable camera captures photos of scenes from thirty-six individual lenses to create a continuous spherical landscape. The modules are mounted in a 3D-printed enclosure resembling a soccer ball, which is padded with foam and contains an accelerometer that helps predict rise time to the highest point of a throw. At that point, the exposure is triggered. Once the ball is caught, pictures are downloaded automatically via USB and shown in a spherical panoramic viewer so you can explore the full representation of the scene.

Descriptive Camera

Imagine having an army of virtual slaves at your command who help you organize your photo collection by printing a description of what each picture contains. That’s essentially what the Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson achieves, taking advantage of people who perform menial online tasks for a few pennies at a time via the Amazon Mechanical Turk API. You take a photo and a worker receives it instantly via IM, typing up a description that the camera will then print on a receipt. The whole process takes three to six minutes, and the quality of the description may vary. One example: “Looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a  sturdy lamp attached to it.”

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Photofuture 13 Innovative Intelligent Digital Cameras

For every invention that actually makes it to production, there are dozens of failed ideas, most of which failed for very good reasons. Like the fact that they’re painfully inefficient, totally unnecessary or just plain bizarre.  These 15 weird and wacky creations developed between the 1920s and 1970s might be ridiculous, but they’re fun to look (and laugh) at.

The Isolator

The Isolator, by Hugo Gernsback: a terrifying hood with an attached oxygen tank, for when you want to be really, really isolated. “Outside noises being eliminated, the worker can concentrate with ease upon the subject at hand.”

Wooden Swimsuits

Swimsuits have come a long way since the days when they were long-sleeved wool monstrosities, but this wooden swimsuit invention, pictured in Washington State in 1929, wasn’t exactly a step forward.

Hangover Mask

Nothing will make you feel better when you’re suffering from a hangover than a mask that looks like this.

Radio Hat

All this poor guy wanted was an iPod. The portable straw radio hat was made by an American inventor in 1931.

Bicycle Tire Swimming Aid

This group of teenagers in 1925 Germany seem pretty proud of their invention, a swimming aid made of bicycle tires.

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Bizarre Inventions 15 Idiotic Ideas From The Past