The Silent History: A Novel by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby Page A

eat. Bang: Cereal Milk. I can’t see in the dark. Bang: Light Jackets. I can’t leave my cat at home. Bang: Pet Björn. I just came up with all of those concepts right now. I don’t even like them. You see, though? I try not to waste too much time between the problem and the solution. That’s where a lot of businesses flounder. I guess it’s just my nature, you know, ever since my father. We grew up in Pennsylvania, an old industrial town, and my father owned a furniture store in an old mill building. In wintertime he noticed people weren’t shopping for furniture. It was too cold out! They didn’t want to leave their cars, so my father, what he did was add a drive-thru option. The store was named Nuregesan’s but people called it Drive-Thru Nu’s, and every weekend there would be cars backed up for blocks waiting to pass through and check out the merchandise. This was a big thing in our town, until the Raymour & Flanigan opened in Scranton and suddenly everyone wanted to go there, quality and service be damned.
    I got a degree in engineering from Rutgers and started working for a company called TrendNest, which was a kind of think tank that produced patents for products that other companies would then buy and bring to market. My most successful product design there was the Dype, which I don’t know if you heard of but it was an undergarment aimed at men in their early twenties who liked to party but who sometimes lost control of their bodily functions as a result. You might not think there was a need for that, but I saw many of my classmates soil themselves while at Rutgers, and it was a thing that tarnished their reputation, sometimes for good. The Dype was made with a superabsorbent four-way stretch material that was protected under a separate patent I also created. It could be branded with any sports team or popular video game or singer. Anything you could print on clothes. The cobranding is key for that segment, or really every segment.
    Then Isabelle was born. An adorable little girl who had everything going for her until the diagnosis. I didn’t understand much about the mind science behind emerging phasism, but I knew it was a problem for the parents and the kids and everyone else, too. I wanted to do something, to make a product that could help Isabelle and everyone in her situation. But I have a proprietary five-phase design process, okay? Discovery, Analysis, Strategy, Design, Implementation. And the discovery phase here was almost impossible, because how do you really know what these kids need? You can’t know. You can’t get this out of them, obviously. I had to fall back on the core principles that I apply to any product I’m thinking about designing, which are comfort, convenience, and safety. If your product isn’t somehow tied in to one or more of these, you might as well get out of the business. You’ve got to fill a need. Your product or service or whatever has to make someone’s life easier. It’s got to have some emotional tie, something that would convince a person they can’t live without it. I spent a lot of time observing Isabelle, taking notes on her activities. I followed her around at the park and in the woods behind her house and at Rumpus Run, that restaurant with the illuminated treadmill. I gathered a ton of data, and when I ran it through VisChart the answer was as clear as day. The main difference between Isabelle and normal, talking kids was that they were moving their mouths and she wasn’t. Maybe silent kids just weren’t talking because they hadn’t gotten enough mouth exercise. Just like how a weightlifter has to train for a long time before he can bench four hundred pounds, maybe these kids just needed to get their jaws and lips working a lot harder. Maybe if they understood what a mouth was for, they’d start to really use it.
    So that’s how I came up with the Chatter, which was a hinged mouthpiece made out of a proprietary silicone blend. The mouthpiece fit