He wanted to add a solid still-life series, but he couldn’t figure out what his subject should be. Inspiration, as it occasionally does, came at 35,000 feet. “I was on an overseas flight and flipping through SkyMall magazine, which I’ve always loved, and thought it would be great to come up with some ‘inventions’ that poked a little fun at these types of unnecessary gadgets that you see,” he says. In other words, to advance his career as a photographer, Strattner had to try his hand as a product designer.

 

A SkyMall product is only as good as the problem it solves–or, more specifically, the convoluted way it goes about solving it. So Strattner had to think hard about simple things to fix in comically complex ways. “When I first tried to think of products to invent, I just looked at my everyday life,” he says.