Three Impossible Things I Wish Existed
Perhaps our fantasy inventions are too creative and too far away from the featured product-reference grammar
Then we deliberately created CHUTEBOARD and GRIPBIN to behave much more like the brief: plausible, tactile, commercial, useful, photographed as real products.
The creative experiment
There is a peculiar moment in an AI challenge when you stop asking: What can I make?
…and start asking:
What do I desperately wish somebody would invent?
That was more or less how I approached Kre8or’s latest challenge.
At first, my imagination did what imagination usually does when given permission to invent anything: it went completely unsupervised.
Teleportation! Time machines! Anti-gravity shoes! A button that makes Mondays optional!
But the more I thought about it, the less interested I became in enormous inventions.
I wanted small impossible things.
Objects you could hold in your hand.
Objects that almost look as though somebody might already have invented them.
And, preferably, objects whose purpose makes you say:
Oh. I need that.
So I started prompting.
The camera that points the wrong way
Not backward in space.
Backward in time.
My starting idea was wonderfully simple: an old camera that doesn’t photograph what is in front of you. It photographs a moment behind you — perhaps decades behind you.
The prompt grew into an elderly woman holding a vintage camera while one precious childhood memory emerges from its flash.
The important words eventually became:
A vintage black-and-brass camera engraved “FLASH BACK.” A brilliant golden flash emerges from the camera and transforms into a living memory: a sunlit beach scene of a little girl joyfully running toward her young father’s open arms. The memory feels alive and dimensional rather than like a photograph or screen.
And suddenly I didn’t want a time machine anymore.
I wanted that camera.
Because perhaps the things we’d really travel through time for aren’t historical events at all.
Perhaps we’d just go back for five minutes with someone.
Choose tonight’s dream
Then came a considerably less sensible thought.
We choose films.
We choose books.
We choose music.
Why on earth are dreams still random?
Surely someone has neglected an obvious market opportunity here.
Enter the Dream Stamp.
Choose one from the sheet, stick it on your forehead, go to sleep.
Tonight: flying whales.
Tomorrow: floating castles.
Tuesday: absolutely nothing involving being late for an examination I apparently forgot to study for.
The prompt:
A peaceful sleeping woman rests in a cozy nighttime bedroom with an old-fashioned perforated postage stamp on her forehead reading “DREAM STAMP.” From the tiny stamp an extraordinary dream physically blossoms into the room: luminous clouds, stars, a crescent moon, a flying whale, floating islands and impossible architecture. On the bedside table sits a sheet of unused dream stamps, each showing a different tiny dream.
This may be the first fictional product I’ve created for which I would genuinely preorder the family pack.
And then adulthood happened
The third invention arose from a somewhat more serious scientific observation:
Adults occasionally become tired of being adults.
There are invoices.
Deadlines.
Emails beginning with “Just following up…”
Things requiring passwords.
Things requiring passwords containing a capital letter, number, hieroglyph and the name of your first hamster.
And somewhere, buried very deeply inside this competent adult human being, remains a small creature who remembers when the greatest crisis of the day was a missing teddy bear.
Obviously technology should address this.
I give you:
THE NOSTALGIA TUTTER.
The prompt became:
A visibly exhausted adult sits at an overcrowded work desk surrounded by the recognizable pressures of adulthood: laptop, bills, paperwork and an empty coffee cup. He blissfully uses an absurd but beautifully designed retro-futuristic pacifier-like invention. From the device flows warm golden light opening into a childhood memory: a cozy blanket fort, bedtime story, teddy bear, simple toys and the warm protective presence of a parent. A vintage metal product case reads “NOSTALGIA TUTTER.”
Insert. Escape. Remember. Apparently. 😂
The interesting part wasn’t the rendering
What fascinated me while making these wasn’t merely whether AI could produce beautiful images.
We’ve become rather accustomed to that.
The interesting question was:
Can an impossible invention feel immediately understandable?
Could you look at an object that has never existed and somehow know what it does?
That changed the way I prompted.
Instead of describing only an object, I found myself describing cause and effect:
Camera → memory.
Stamp → dream.
Tutter → childhood comfort.
And that turned prompting into something closer to visual storytelling.
The invention wasn’t really the object anymore.
The invention was what happened when somebody used it.
That was the fun part.
And I’m stopping there. 😏
Because the challenge is still running, the gallery is filling up, and there are plenty of other impossible inventions waiting to meet each other in those mysterious little pairings.
I’m not telling you which of mine I think will do best.
I’m not even certain anymore.
But I am curious whether something completely absurd can beat something beautiful, whether something emotional can beat something spectacular, and whether the invention we’d actually want is the one our finger chooses when we’re given only a moment to decide.
There is only one proper way to find out.
Invent something impossible.
Then throw it into the arena with the rest of us.
And if somebody actually invents the Dream Stamp before the challenge closes, please contact me.
I have several nights I’d like to book in advance. 😌
