Joost Bonsen prides himself on having “snuck a fart machine into
a design museum.” But this was no prank: the curators of the
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York chose to
display “The Happy Hippo” as an example of hands-on science
education. The comic-book-style story teaches kids how to build
a device that allows them to “capture the acoustic aura of the
mighty hippo” by sitting in a chair and “shifting their mass.”
It’s just one of 15 “Howtoon” comics collected in Howtoons: The
Possibilities Are Endless! Howtoons, which feature the fictional
siblings Tucker and Celine, got their start at MIT in the spring
of 2003, when Bonsen ‘90, SM ‘06, and Saul Griffith, SM ‘01, PhD
‘04, were grad students. Bonsen, who had learned to read by
paging through comic books in Dutch and English, told Griffith
that he dreamed of making do-it-yourself cartoons for kids.
Griffith reached up to his bookshelf for his collection of
century-old illustrated how-to books, saying he’d long wanted to
update them. Griffith so