Q-BA-MAZE

Transferable Skills and the Transformer Crate

People often ask me if I miss being an architect now that I am a full-time toy maker. Since I got into architecture because I love making things and I continue making things now, I don't sense a loss. The architectural mindset of problem solving through questioning and drawing also continues in my daily work. The Transformer Crate story shows this in action:

Preparing for the Toy Fair in New York, I was thinking through how to get a whole bunch of stuff to the convention center for the Q-BA-MAZE booth -- including a large light table. It struck me that if the shipping crate could transform into a light table, I'd have huge savings because the crate would be doing double duty.

My friend Noel is an outstanding woodworker who's always interested in a head-scratching design conversation. As we spoke about the crate, I pulled out a little sketchbook. We roughed out the basic concept: a plane of translucent white plexiglass hovering over a trough that can catch rolling balls. There is an arm and hand in the sketch because the edge of the plexiglass needed to be high enough to fit a hand underneath so that I could demonstrate the trick of how to remove balls from a Q-BA-MAZE structure by sliding it to the edge of a table.

The trough is part of an oversized lid that fits diagonally into the shipping crate. A blue fleece slip cover keeps the maple rim of the trough from getting scratched during shipping. Once the crate arrives at the show, the contents are removed, the top comes out and is fastened onto the crate, and the crate itself is wrapped with white poster board to disguise it's bruised plywood exterior. We had one more meeting to work out the details, and then Noel built the "Transformer Crate" in January.

At the show, the table worked as planned, with people gathering around (attracted by the light). I built an absurdly tall Q-BA-MAZE structure, just to show off how high I could build with only a 4 1/2" base. An unplanned part was a crew showing up from Dad Labs to interview me. Maybe I should smile the next time I'm on camera?! Whoops. But please understand, I had been standing for five days straight at the point they came for the interview...at least I sprang for the air sole shoes or I might have been grimacing like some other people at the show.

But the BEST thing was at the end. All of the exhibitors start tearing down their booths only to have to wait and wait for their crates to be delivered from storage, which might take 3-6 hours. Because our light table is our crate, we didn't have to wait. We just packed up, applied the shipping labels, and checked out with no line in front of us.

So you can see I get a total kick out of making designs that WORK, designs that improve life in some way. Right now the Transformers Movie is coming out and I have a total appreciation for Transformers. One of my favorite books is my Gundam Weapons: Zeta Gundam (ISBN 4-89425-133-7) of this figure that transforms from a giant robot into a fighter jet. I bought the book in a tiny toy and model shop in 1996, the year I lived in Mongkok (on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong), right when the whole designer toy scene was beginning. The book has such incredible graphics and the creativity of the designers of these toys is astounding. BUT while these transformer type toys are cool, I'd rather make my own "transformers" out of Lego (as in, old-school rectangular red and white bricks Lego). I get so much more psyched by designing and then using something as simple as the Transformer Crate, than I do out of owning a Transformer toy where somebody else (the designer) already had all of the creativity in coming up with the thing. And this really comes around to the whole idea behind Q-BA-MAZE: Q-BA-MAZE is also a "transformer" but the transformation, the design, the creativity in dreaming up the reconfigurations is for the user rather than the designer. I get such joy and satisfaction out of designing and building things and Q-BA-MAZE is my attempt to transmit a similar thrill to others.

INSPIRATION: Grandpa's Hand-made Marble Run

With several years of effort to make Q-BA-MAZE a reality, I have a long answer to the question, "How did you come up with Q-BA-MAZE?" But that is the 99% perspiration part. The 1% inspiration is pretty simple and the subject of this post:

Living in New York City, I jumped out of an architecture career to start a business making computer generated images of buildings for architects. Crazy. But somehow it worked. And as a bonus (not a Wall St. bonus, but a bonus nonetheless) I had some time and the tools for my own design work.

One day, sitting in my apartment/office I remembered this marble run my grandfather had made many years ago. I loved playing with this as a boy on visits to Grandpa's house. I also loved Lego and building elaborate structures with wooden blocks to make tunnels for my toy cars. All of these favorite toys of my boyhood were in my mind and I wondered, "What if the hand-carved blocks in Grandpa's marble run were loose and could be continually reconfigured into different pathways?"

So I fired up the computer and drew two rectangular blocks, each with a spiral groove, one right-handed and the other left-handed. I made a whole set of these blocks and played with them in the computer, making the structure shown here. But the pathway just wouldn't go where I wanted it to. There was something inherently limiting about the design. I wanted the ball to be able to twist and turn anywhere, but the rectangular shape and the single entrance and exit in each block did not provide sufficient design freedom. Then I realized that a CUBE with more entrances and exits would both simplify the system and increase the design freedom for the user.

To test the strength of this cube concept in reality, I made a plaster prototype and ran marbles through it. The double-exit blocks really clinched it. They created such anticipation about where the marbles would go. I wasn't sure about how to proceed from there, but I knew I wanted to pursue this idea.

This is post #1 in a series on "The Making of Q-BA-MAZE"