A Company Called “Mr. Science” Turns Scientific Phenomena Into Strange Toys | 100 People With Ideas

A business built on curiosity that opened up the gift market by accident.

The spherical object could pass for a lamp, but a more accurate description would be a “trigger for light.”

Hold an ordinary fluorescent tube against the sphere, or just touch it with a finger, and the whole tube lights up — it looks like a lightsaber.

For some people, setting it off is the fun part. Lin Houjin gets excited about it. He tried to explain the principle behind the “plasma ball” to us precisely, in scientific terms: the sphere holds an inert gas that produces sparks and light under high voltage. You can find the same explanation on the product page of the company's website.

A die-hard fan of Star Wars, Lin also shot a video for the site explaining how to make a lightsaber out of a plasma ball. Hold the homemade lightsaber the plasma ball conjures up, and you feel like a Jedi out of Star Wars.

Things like this — a crystal-ball-shaped USB hub included, unusual in both their science and their shape — are the specialty of Mr. Science Factory, the company Lin founded in 2008. The products are sold at dedicated counters inside Taiwan's Eslite Bookstore chain, where they have proven quite popular. Lin won't give exact revenue figures, but says the business has “grown steadily the whole way.”

In the demonstration video paying homage to Star Wars, Lin dresses up as a Jedi and opens with a line spoken in the film by the Jedi Obi-Wan: “The lightsaber is the most elegant weapon of a new age.” Then he brings out a fluorescent tube, a power bank, and a plasma ball. When he's done, Lin turns off the lights and waves the glowing tube: “You can enjoy the thrill of being a Jedi in the dark.”

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For some “science geek” shoppers, products like these have a natural pull.

“I think the scientific flavor makes it friendlier, with less of that artsy-hipster distance,” said Lu Zijun, a customer who has bought from Mr. Science, when he told QDaily why he likes the brand.

That sense of familiarity comes out of Lu's own background: he studied at National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Entomology, counts himself a veteran “science geek,” and cares a great deal about science communication. He used to edit “PanSci,” Taiwan's largest science news site, and now runs an advertising company called Quanshi Digital.

“Science geek” just means a science-minded nerd, male or female — the term generally covers people whose curiosity about scientific knowledge runs close to obsession. When it came time to declare his feelings, for instance, the science geek Lu Zijun told his wife on Facebook, using a line rooted in common scientific knowledge: “The universe keeps expanding, and yet the two of us keep getting closer.”

A deeper “science geek” would be the physics professor Yukawa Manabu (played by Fukuyama Masaharu) in Galileo, who gives Utsumi Kaoru (played by Shibasaki Kou) the chemical element germanium as a present: “Your birthday is March 2, and germanium's atomic number is 32.”

For a more extreme case, think of The Big Bang Theory. Its four science-geek leads take everything unusually seriously, and now and then, holding to some principle or other, react in ways that are quite funny — when a woman hands the character Leonard a Tequila Sunrise, his first response is to explain how liquids of different densities in the drink interact with the cylindrical glass.

But you don't have to be that obsessed or that expert. In Taiwan, plenty of people are interested in science, and they gather on science news sites like “PanSci,” which brings researchers and enthusiasts together to argue over a different science story every day. PanSci's fan page now has 340,000 followers, and the site also carries Mr. Science's products.

For ordinary shoppers with no science background — especially if their grasp of science happens to be weak — the goods here are not all that friendly. But that is exactly what creates a mysterious distance: the science behind them gives you a headache, while the way they look is very cool.

They all marvel, to some degree, at phenomena that seem to defy the ordinary — a globe floating in midair, which works on electromagnetic induction. Or a Pythagorean cup from Germany that drains every drop if you fill it too full, built on the siphon principle, an effect caused mainly by the pressure difference in the liquid inside the tube.

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Before 2008, Lin had not yet founded Mr. Science Factory. He was then the founder and design director of Yumamen Creative Design Co., which handled everything from spatial design to graphic design to web design. He still runs both companies at once.

Design really is the thing Lin is surest of. But as a commercial designer, he used to spend far more of his time meeting the demands of different clients than following his own urge to create — an urge he often describes as “the artist inside every designer.”

To satisfy the odd, whimsical ideas in his head, Lin did more than start making things. He also had a plan. “I wanted to pull together things that shared the same spirit on one website, choosing products from a designer's point of view — purely fun things. Once that scope was set, the shape of it got clearer and clearer,” Lin says.

He set about founding Mr. Science Factory, and began working out where to source products beyond the ones he developed himself.

The items Lin imports come from close to 500 suppliers around the world, many of them sold here exclusively — a mirror-reflection animation illusion box from Spain, a Pythagorean cup from Germany, a Stirling engine from Britain. Lin negotiated with every one of those suppliers himself. Enthusiasm for these things carried him: he traced each one back to the original manufacturer, went back and forth over the details, and arranged the imports.

By now Mr. Science's shopping platform has built up more than a thousand items, about a tenth of them developed in-house.

“Recombining things into something new — that's what a designer is supposed to do. We learn a scientific principle, then the question is how it can be built into something fun,” Lin says.

Lu Zijun was drawn in by Mr. Science's design sense too. “Because Mr. Science comes out of design, both the products it picks and the ones it develops itself have a certain quality. Add the ‘science geek’ charm on top, and that's what pulls me in most,” he says.

Every self-developed product at Mr. Science is still designed by Lin alone, even though the company has grown from three people at its founding to thirty. “The design team is mainly there to carry out my ideas,” Lin says, joking that his way of deciding things is a dictatorship.

“We don't hold meetings to discuss things. I don't think good ideas come out of discussion — when everyone discusses something together, it drifts toward the mediocre.”

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At first Lin assumed 80 percent of Mr. Science's customers would be men like him, men who loved science or odd little objects. Eight years on, he has found that male and female customers split about evenly, that most are between 25 and 35, and that quite a few buy his products as gifts for friends.

Lin has also worked out something more important: fun is not confined to a small niche, and can reach much further and much wider. Which is why, talking to QDaily, he made a point of stressing one thing: “What I'm doing isn't science communication. I'm just thinking about what's fun.”

Picture a teaching aid built purely to convey scientific knowledge, like the dissection dummy in a biology classroom: its usefulness would far outweigh its fun. That is not the kind of product Lin wants.

Reaching those customers, though, is hard. Marketing, Lin says, is his weak point.

Mr. Science Factory's first self-developed product was a vinyl-record speaker for the iPhone 4, now out of print. In a media interview at the time, Lin described how the early selling went: because he knew nothing about sales, a manufacturer challenged him — “Your pricing is completely wrong. You haven't allowed for retail or distribution margins at all. How is anyone else supposed to sell it?”

Because of that weakness, Lin decided against opening a standalone store, and moved into a larger retail space instead. He settled on Eslite Bookstore, which encourages designer brands.

Setting up inside Eslite cuts down on management problems, and it also lets a designer learn how a physical store is run. “I get to learn how Eslite manages things, how the commission works. If I'd opened my own store at the start, I don't know whether I'd have survived,” he says.

A physical store demands attention to too many things; even the display layout is a discipline of its own. As one counter among many inside Eslite, Mr. Science has a distinctive air, but to an ordinary shopper it is still one option among many. Pulling people in, and keeping them there a while, is a challenge in itself.

Lin says he has borrowed from the sales tactics of fast fashion. “Zara's method is to rearrange everything every Friday, so that when you come in it all feels new. We use the same method — we just move the products around.”

Mr. Science now puts out three or four new items a month, imports and in-house designs together.

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That also sets a demand on the number of products. Mr. Science sells more and more items now, and apart from the steady sellers it brought in at the start, its own designs carry less of a scientific flavor than they used to. The science mug series / element mugs, the two-in-one specimen tote bag, and the 3D origami notebook do not look out of place among the mostly design-led goods sold at Eslite.

Next to the imports built on strong scientific principles, these items have less of a hook, but they are more useful and cheaper, which makes them an easy first buy for a customer who has only just been drawn in.

For many customers, Mr. Science's products now give off the air of an “alternative” gift: buy one for a friend on some occasion, and you seem to be saying something about how “unique” you are.

Last year a group of tourists from Chongqing came across Mr. Science in an Eslite Bookstore. Back home, they got in touch with Lin, hoping to open a Mr. Science Factory in Chongqing as licensed dealers.

That Mr. Science could travel beyond Taiwan surprised Lin a little. He recognizes it as a good thing, though. Ever since he founded Mr. Science Factory, Lin has kept turning over the question of how to make a niche interest mainstream. Which suggests that on the question of going mainstream, at least, he has done pretty well.

Cover image from Bing.