The following is a journey of pareidolia – just knowing
there is a word for when you perceive familiar patterns in something where
there is none speaks a lot for how the mind both wonders, and wanders.
Well-known examples of pareidolia include seeing the outline
of Great Britain in clouds, and imagining you can hear satanic messages in
songs when they are played backwards, but the kind most often perceived are
when the brain’s cognitive processes go looking for faces in electrical appliances,
buildings, food, craters on the Moon, and so on, although the face of Jesus is
more likely to appear in food. Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot tests, created in
1921, deliberately direct this instinct by testing reactions to ten inkblot
images, chosen from a large number that were all created accidentally.
Of course, there are other ways the human mind can be
directed, and that is by deliberately putting faces onto products. There is no
reason that Tesla need a radiator grille on the front of their cars, unless
they want them not to have a mouth. Meanwhile, the sportier you want your car
to be, the more likely the headlight eyes will look meaner, with the bug-eyed
Austin-Healey Sprite being a major exception.
Meanwhile, what if you are given the job of deciding the
colours of a new vacuum cleaner, and find the top half of it looks like a
bowler hat? It did not take long for the graphic designer in question, Michael
Walsh, to decide that the nozzle looked like a nose, adding eyes and a mouth to
create the “Henry” hoover. Chris Duncan’s Somerset-based company, Numatic
International, had established itself in the market for industrial cleaners,
but the pareidolia inherent in Duncan’s design for a home cleaner created a
product that advertises itself, especially when owners start playing with them
on YouTube.
This is where my experience comes in. We had a Henry hoover
at home, until my parents decided upon an upright cleaner instead, but it is still
the best cleaner we have. My route to work passes a specialist vacuum cleaner
shop, the front window full of Numatic’s range staring out at you, from the
various Henrys to Hetty, George, James and Charles, names apparently inspired by
the Royal Family, and capable of various wet and dry-cleaning combinations.
But Numatic are still makers of industrial cleaners, and looking
at their website made me feel a little uneasy. The “Homecare” have the faces,
but then the commercial “Cleancare” range starts removing these features – the “Henry”
name becomes “Numatic,” then the face disappears on bigger cleaners… but the
black top-hat top half is still there, and the nose nozzle remains.
Nearly forty years of popular culture mean we expect to see
the face on a Numatic cleaner, and not to see one where you expect one to be is
a little unsettling. Still, if you do need one of their industrial cleaners,
you could ask them to draw a face on it at the factory before they box it up.
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