I open my laptop to check my email
and Google comes up on my home page as it always does,
but today I type in Robert Allen Caigan.
This blog comes up and the engagement announcement to Grace Gabe.
For no obvious reason I then Google Robert A. Caigan
and there is a new patent listed.

I visit the site BOLIVEN Patents.

Outboard Marine Corporation
has a seat based partially on one of my father's patents.
Google just matched it with his name.
Filing Information

* Patent Number: US5913571
* Application Number: US8937686
* Filing date: 09/29/1997
* Issue date: 06/22/1999
* Predicted expiration date: 09/29/2017


* Inventor(s): Daniel R. Dystra · David W. Windstein ·
* Assignee(s): Outboard Marine Corporation · View assignee updates
* Attorney/Agent(s): Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue ·
* Primary Examiner: Nelson, Jr.; Milton ·

It's very unlikely that any of these people knew Robert A. Caigan.
They have looked at his work.

In order to create a patent and be approved
one must PROVE that there is something unique in an invention.
Therefore, at least one of these people had to step into my father's
design process and determine that the the designs are comparable,
but individually unique.

Intellectual process, not just the product of the seat,
is what I am curious about.
How does one inhabit, save, frame that process?
How do I learn about the ways in which my dead father THOUGHT
about design/ problem solving/ ideas?

I keep thinking about the beauty of a firefly in a jar.
It cannot be contained or it will die.
Perhaps mental process, intellectual ideas are momentary
because they are based in time formulated through variables?
Maybe his designs are how he contained ideas?

Here's a good example of real time variables...

I just interrupted myself by realizing
that I have to start the laundry.
I can't pull this thought back.
Company is coming. The kitchen is a mess.
My own design aesthetic cannot bare it.
I am a feminist and yet I cannot shake my spacial concepts.
I suspect there will be more pondering on this topic.

Until then,
Bob's Daughter