If Wile E. Coyote still wants to catch the bird in 2018, what kind of technologies could he uses in the era of Amazon, Internet, Social Media and Donald Trump?

Acme Systems™ is a project based on the American animated cartoon Wile E. Coyote & The Road Runner and linked with the Master Thesis Le Coyotisme: Wile E. Coyote, personnage de cartoon, genius et designer de l’échec. This cartoon, started in 1949, the coyote try to catch a bird by using a lot of gizmos provided by a company named Acme Corporation. The result of all of his attempts is always the same, fail!

Failure is a central point of this project. The coyote use tons of Acme’s gizmos and never succeeded, but he keeps going because of the show of course and because he believes in technologies. He’s persuaded that the next new gizmo will be the right one to finally get the bird and Acme Corporation will always be here to provide him. He gonna use it for 30 seconds, fail, throws it away and then order a new one. It’s not very different from what people do everyday and our Acme, Amazon and some other will be here to provide us.

As we live in an era of entertainment, using the cartoon and its aesthetics as a filter to design objects questioning current themes such as the notion of truth and social media, seems to be a relevant approach. This distancing by fiction makes it possible to highlight some present-day problematics through short and entertaining storytelling, where the search for a balance between the references of the cartoon and those of our time is permanent.

Three different gizmos have been developed, each based on a typical cartoon situation like falling off the cliff and connecting with a technological or salient point of our time.

This project is showcased at the Bureau Culturel de Genève, from September 17 to October 8, 2018.