Engineering Drawings Take a Humorous Look at Wile E. Coyote’s Lawsuit Against ACME

Consider it a lesson in what could happen if you design faulty devices and the disastrous outcomes that they could bring. Inspired by the humorous Ian Frazier-written Coyote v. Acme lawsuit that was featured in the New Yorker back in 1990, Daniel Weil of design studio Pentagram has reimagined the designs for five gadgets that inevitably failed Wile E. Coyote and produced cartoon-style bodily harm in his never-ending attempt to capture that pesky Roadrunner. In these detailed technical diagrams, Weil explores a situation that no company or product designer wants to find themselves in.

Coyote V. Acme

Completed earlier last year as part of Pentagram’s holiday greeting card, the project reprints Frazier’s essay as a mini legal brief with Weil’s engineering drawings acting as supporting evidence. To make things even more interesting, Weil carefully considered each design to make sure that they would functionally work in the real world a la McMaster-Carr, not just the cartoon desert landscape that we’re used to seeing them in:

Weil’s designs highlight safety features that are seemingly overlooked by Coyote time and time again…resulting in those painful cartoonish explosions and cliff dives. For example, did you know that the Rocket Skates feature a ‘weighted armor jacket’ to be worn when in use or that the Spherical Bomb has a ‘screw-in detonator’?

At a private reading reception held in New York last month, Pentagram also unveiled an ‘official’ Acme Company emblem that was applied to lab coats as well as ‘official’ legal books with linen-mounted covers and brass loop stitching:

So whose fault is it, Coyote or Acme? Well, I guess you’ll just have to read the case to find out!

(Images via Pentagram)

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