CORYN KEMPSTER, a graduate student in architecture at MIT, was tired of close calls with swerving cars and buses on his daily bicycle commute to class. So he took matters into his own hands and devised a way to travel less fearfully. The invention, which Kempster calls ''Hairy Bike,'' is currently under construction, but on paper it consists of a special hooded jumpsuit, completely covered with long, wavy tentacles made, perhaps, out of fiber-optic cable. In Kempster's renderings, it looks like a wiry cloud moving down Mass. Ave.

Kempster's bike is an example of chindogu, the Japanese art of the ''unuseless'' invention created by designer Kenji Kawakami in the 1980s and, according to Kawakami, practiced around the world. Chindogu - which translates literally as ''an odd or distorted tool'' - is an invention that may appear to solve an everyday problem but isn't quite worth using, because it actually makes a task harder or more time-consuming, or is simply ridiculous.

Now chindogu has arrived at MIT, where the ''Hairy Bike'' is one of five finalists in the first annual Unuseless Competition. Organized last fall by MIT architecture grad student Luis Berrios-Negron as a way of getting students from different departments to collaborate, the competition pokes fun at, among other things, MIT's serious ''Ideas Competition'' and the less serious ''Bad Ideas'' competition. The finalists, who were selected in April and each given $100 to build prototypes of their inventions, will be judged by applause from the audience at an awards gala on May 13.

''We can suppose that for every inspired notion that advanced the human situation, there must have been at least as many duds,'' Kawakami writes in the introduction to his latest book, ''The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions'' (Norton). The third compilation of chindogu published in this country, the book presents 200 unuseless inventions built and photographed by Kawakami and other Japanese chindogu enthusiasts over the years. The International Chindogu Society, which, the book tells us, has 10,000 members worldwide, ''protects and nurtures those ideas that technological evolution would otherwise doom to extinction.''

The society's website is one such idea, it would seem, and that must be the point: The rudimentary and nearly information-free Chindogu.com is of little use. It does, however, display Kawakami's 10 tenets of chindogu. The first is that a chindogu ''cannot be for real use,'' because practically speaking it's almost completely useless. It is not, however, completely useless, like a pet rock, for example. As the fourth tenet states, chindogu is intended for everyday life: It is an invention that you may for a moment imagine yourself using - before you think better of it, shake your head, and walk away.

In Kawakami's book, several categories of inventions emerge: There are those that attempt (but fail) to make everyday tasks easier, such as the ''portable commuter seat,'' which slides between the unwelcoming thighs of two ''more conventionally seated'' passengers on a crowded train and props you up above them. There are those that are intended to save time, such as the ''portable parking spot,'' a cut-out white line to unravel around your car wherever you park it, and those that are supposed to act as social lubricants, such as the ''Grin Grabber,'' a set of hooks that a cranky person slips into his mouth and pulls on to force a smile. And then there are those that simply make you look or feel better, such as the ''Hairy Ego Booster,'' a frame of hair attached to a stand so a bald man can look in the mirror as though coiffed before he heads out to face the world.

. . .

What all chindogu have in common is tenet 2: they exist. (''In order to be useless, it must first be.'') In other words, they cannot merely be drawings on paper. Kawakami and others build their chindogu to show how they would be used were they ever actually used. MIT's Unuseless Competition finalists are required to do the same.

The guidelines for the MIT contest ask inventors to keep in mind Kawakami's tenet 6 - ''Humor must not be the sole reason for creating a chindogu'' - though products are usually incidentally funny. (Tenet 8 sets limits on the kind of funny they can be: nothing cheap or vulgar or cruel, though one finalist - the ''Catsup Crapper,'' a bottle of ketchup that walks up to your plate to ''excrete a pleasant mound of condiment'' - seems to be pushing it.)

Adding a touch of lightness to MIT, says Berrios-Negron, is one reason he started the competition. But he was also interested in the ways chindogu address larger questions about, for example, the modern ideal of function.

''We already live comfortably within our uselessness,'' Berrios-Negron said in an interview, citing the gadgets sold by The Sharper Image as evidence.

The competition website proposes that inventors work within familiar MIT realms like nanotechnology and biotech - instructions largely ignored by entrants. ''The competition takes itself seriously by suggesting we use our heady skills. So we said, ‘Let's make a stick,''' says Liz Burow, who teamed up with fellow architecture grad student Elliot Felix to make their finalist, the Boomerun, a ''streamlined'' boomerang you don't have to sit and wait for, because it doesn't come back. (Thus nicely respecting tenet 3: ''Inherent in every chindogu is the spirit of anarchy.... They represent ... the freedom to challenge the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility.'')

''It's completely useless, but it's not dumb,'' says MIT history and architecture professor Mark Jarzombek, who will advocate for Boomerun at the gala. ''I like that it combined humor and a good dose of cultural irony.''

MIT entrants were also told to follow tenet 9: ''Chindogu cannot be patented.'' (''As they say in Spain,'' Kawakami writes, ''‘mi chindogu es tu chindogu''') - a useful reminder at an institution rife with patents and near-patents. Nor, according to tenet 5, can they be sold.

Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine some of the finalists doing a brisk business at local novelty shops. Among them is ''Stata Glasses,'' inspired by architect Frank Gehry's partly crumpled brick and metal building on Main Street, which distort the wearer's view of blander buildings. ''Use these special glasses and save $300 million,'' claims the entry, though David Hu, an applied math graduate student who designed the glasses with mechanical engineering student Brian Chan, admits, ''You may get dizzy by looking through them.''

Hu and Chan had two other inventions selected as finalists: the ''Humane Fly Swatter'' (essentially a fly swatter with a hole in the middle to give flies a chance) and the ''Will-Powered Chair,'' which pushes an inch away from the table with every ounce of food you eat.

Whether or not the Hairy Bike takes the prize on May 13, Kempster plans to break the first tenet of chindogu: ''I'm not going to go through all this work and not use it,'' he says. ''I don't have much shame. That's my own unuseless feature.''

Katharine Dunn is a writer living in Somerville. Email khdunn@hotmail.com.