« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
Kubricks and Q-BA-MAZE mashed together in an unexpected meeting! This is a cell phone photo of a set of Reservoir Dogs Kubricks displayed on a Q-BA-MAZE construction. Sam of Minneapolis, a long-time toy collector and a fan of the ROBOT Love design and toy store, just sent this in. It looks like some steel balls are flying by -- great action shot Sam!
When he was a child, Frank Lloyd Wright's mother gave him simple wooden Froebel blocks with the intention of raising an architect. Friedrich Froebel was a nineteenth century German educator who invented "kindergarten" and an educational system built around a series of "Gifts" which include the wooden blocks.
I have long been skeptical about these Froebel blocks really having any connection with Wright's work as an adult. How could these simple cubes and rectangles have any bearing on Wright's elaborate and sophisticated designs?
But I recently read several essays in the book On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles. The Froebel blocks and other "Gifts" are mentioned repeatedly in essays by various scholars. Richard MacCormac especially focuses on the topic in his essay Form and Philosophy: Froebel's Kindergarten Training and Wright's Early Work.
After reading this I was intrigued and decided to buy some Froebel blocks myself. It struck me that it would be possible to design a Froebel version of Wright's famous Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. On a recent trip to Chicago, I took a side trip to visit Unity Temple so that I could make comparison photographs for this post.
The following are several excerpts in Wright's own words taken from Frank Lloyd Wright: An American Architecture edited by Edgar Kaufmann:
I finally pushed the staircase towers out from the corners of the main building, made them into free-standing, individual features. Then the thing began to come through as you see.
The Unity Temple of 1906 was reinforced concrete. It was the first building to come complete as architecture cast from forms....Why not make the wooden boxes or forms so the concrete could be cast in them as separate blocks and masses, these grouped about an interior space in some such way as to preserve this sense of the interior space, the great room, in the appearance of the whole building?...The wooden forms or molds in which concrete buildings must at that time be cast were always the chief item of expense, so to repeat the use of a single form as often as possible was necessary....This, reduced to simplest terms, meant a building square in plan. That would make their temple a cube -- a noble form in masonry.
Wright made the overall form of Unity Temple a cube. The stair towers are separated in the corners as vertical blocks (and represented in the Froebel version of Unity Temple with two stacked cubes : ) Even the lighting inside Unity Temple is made of cubes and spheres. 
Wright called Louis Sullivan "mein liebe meister" (German for "my dear master") having apprenticed with him. But it seems his design bears more resemblance to the spare simplicity of Froebel, than it does to the exuberance of Sullivan as seen in this detail of Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott Building.
Two dimensional grids form the basis of several of the Froebel Gifts. A grid pattern can be clearly seen both inside and outside at Unity Temple. Notice how two squares of the paving pattern match the width of a stair tower on the exterior. Inside, this grid continues in the pattern of the skylight in the ceiling.
Did the exposure to Froebel as a child really propel Wright's creativity? Are there other such direct examples of this phenomenon of play leading to design?
As irreplaceable as 3D CAD is to the design process, sketching by hand is still a necessary skill. Architects have a phrase, "don't talk about it, draw it." Words will gloss over all the difficulties, a drawing exposes the difficulties and forces a resolution.
The sketch included here is a combination of the "just draw it" philosophy and a method I learned in a design course from architect Tom Meyer of MS&R Architects while I was a student in the University of Minnesota architecture school. He calls this "talk drawing." The idea is to record design thinking in both drawings and words side by side on the same piece of paper -- and to actually talk outloud. If you leave and come back to this "talk drawing", you have a rich source of material to review to get your mind back into all of the myriad issues that can be at play. The visual-spatial and the verbal-analytical parts of the brain are both fully engaged in this kind of drawing.
This particular drawing deals with a number of issues that came up in the middle of the rapid prototyping process (during the decision to decrease the size from a 2" to a 1 1/2" cube). Among the issues are the supporting ribs inside the cube, the spherical shape of the interior, and the unification of the side joinery elements into a single horseshoe shape.
At the top of this post, I include the detail zoom into the drawing mostly because pencil on paper looks so amazing. You can SEE the thought process in the lines, the erasures, the pressure on the pencil, in a way that is just never revealed in CAD drawings.
If you look closely, you'll see that this was drawn on the back side of a Private Placement Memorandum I was writing in parallel with the design process, in order to raise money for the business. I was at my local Dunn Bros coffee shop reviewing the PPM and did not have a computer at hand. An ability to draw free-hand allowed me to get some important thinking done when inspiration hit. But another reason for approaching a design problem with sketching and plaster and CAD and rapid-prototyping, is that different things are noticed, different insights gained in each method. So it is not so much that one process is more important or better than another, I think the important thing is to have a multi-faceted process that will help bring out all of the issues.
This is post #4 in a series on "The Making of Q-BA-MAZE"
I do all of my CAD (computer-aided design) drawing in 3D with software called Microstation (Microstation is not typically used for product design, but it is the software I know from my years in architecture, so I have stuck with it). I do not need to draw 2D drawings, instead, the software automatically generates the many 2D drawings from a single 3D design. This saves a lot of time. It also means that every aspect of every drawing is perfectly coordinated, because it all refers back to the same single 3D object.
The drawing on the left is actually part of the submission to the US patent office. The software assisted me in making a very thorough submission of many variations of the Q-BA-MAZE concept.
The same 3D file that produced these drawings also produced the rapid prototypes. And when I was getting initial bids from injection molders in Canada, I was able to tell them the exact volume of the parts, again, by analyzing the same 3D design file.
The surface number 600 in fig 2B is the concave-up sphere, on which the cascading balls will pause while rocking back-and-forth. This sphere is placed in the same location in every type of Q-BA-MAZE cube. Only the exit configurations out of the cubes vary. The precise alignment of the top of the side joinery and the intersecton of the cube wall can be seen in fig. 2I. But without getting into every detail, I will summarize by saying that these drawings show that the cubes contain an abundance of detail and every one of those details impacts the next because there is almost no tolerance in these parts. The only option is that they fit perfectly. CAD software made this possible.
This is post #3 in a series on "The Making of Q-BA-MAZE"
Rapid-prototyping is a means of "printing" working 3D objects directly from a 3D computer file.
Q-BA-MAZE has an underlying geometric simplicity since it is just a system of cubes. But an endless complexity lies in the details of these cubes -- the internal geometry that slows the cascading balls and the joinery that allows daring cantilevers required months of design investigation.
Rapid-prototyping was at the heart of these investigations. I made at least eight generations of the design in this way. With each iteration, lessons were learned and the design improved for the next round. I usually made about 6 cubes in each generation, enough to test the joinery and the movement of the balls through a simple configuration.
This gray cube is the first generation. The side joinery is a kind of split dove-tail connection that reveals my background in woodworking. This joinery was not rigid enough. The bottom edge of the cube had an unacceptable "accordian" action. 
This red cube is the second generation. The side-joint now has a "hook" shape. The "accordian" on the bottom edge is gone. The interior of the cube is a cylinder in an attempt to make a shape that would keep the balls rolling. The cylinder and the uninterrupted bottom edge also work together to increase the rigidity of the part.
This is the "solid" version. I had noticed that Philippe Starck's Ghost Chair had polycarbonate resin in excess of 1/4". I thought making the walls so thick would be the way to give the design quality through solidity and a beauty similar to crystal glassware. The thickness also allowed the corners of the cube to become rounded and pleasing to the touch. This was a bomb-proof design that proved to be far to expensive to manufacture because of the sheer volume of resin required and the size of the press to run the mold. It also turned out to just seem heavy and clunky rather than luxurious.
In this generation the scale of the cube is reduced from a 2" cube to a 1 1/2" cube in order to make the cubes fit more comfortably in the hand. And four internal ribs are added to give the part strength and solidity through engineering rather than heft.
In this final rapid prototype generation (I've skipped over a couple of generations in which the developments are very subtle), a concave-up sphere now forms the interior geometry of the cube from edge to edge and the side-joint is unified as a "horseshoe" rather than being split in two parts. The round corners of the "solid" version have returned to the design to make the cubes pleasing to the touch, to increase surface area with the interconnecting bottom-pins, and to ease the flow of the hot liquid resin during molding. The four ribs have also been extended upward, in the upper half of the cube, to form "buttresses" or a kind of box-beam in every corner. Satisfied that the design now had the right form, feel, and function, the design was ready for making the production tools for injection molding.
Here is the final molded polycarbonate part -- embodying the lessons of the many generations of rapid-prototypes that came before it.
This is post #2 in a series on "The Making of Q-BA-MAZE"
Saturday night a playful bat led me to the book The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits by Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee. Here's what happened:
I was staying over the weekend in this old log cabin in Northern Minnesota and sleeping in the loft. Just prior to dawn on Saturday morning I heard a couple of bats flutter in to a roosting spot they have just outside the loft window. Going to bed Saturday night I put my nose right up to the screen to see if I could see the bats. No bats. But I did see a speck of bat dung just outside the window. Then I saw a speck of bat dung on the screen on the INSIDE. It took my groggy head a second to conclude that "DUNG INSIDE" also means "BAT INSIDE", and at the very moment this realization sank in, a bat flew at the back of my head and darted away as I turned around. I pulled off the screen so the bat could fly out the window and I pulled off another screen on an opposite wall as well. The bat flew figure-eights between these windows as I tried to block its path using the removed screen as a deflector and coerce it to exit. After seven of these fly-bys, the bat disappeared down a gap between two notched logs.
I'm all for bats because they eat mosquitos. I'm just not interested in bats flying around in the cabin. So I climbed down out of the loft to find some aluminum foil to stuff in the bat hole. My uncle stuffs mouse holes with steel wool with the reasonable theory that mice don't like chewing steel wool. Lacking a ready supply of this, I thought of aluminum foil. Unfortunately, the roll was basically empty. So I went over to a basket by the woodstove that is filled with old newspapers used for lighting the fire. I grabbed a bunch, climbed back up into the loft and into the tight triangle of space where the roof, wall, and loft floor meet and the bat has its little entrance/exit hole. I shoved in the foil and then wad after wad of newspaper until I couldn't jam any more in (I double-checked in the morning to make sure there was a hole leading outside so the bat would not starve in the wall, but could continue its nightly mosquito feast). A last piece of newspaper I began to crumple had an article titled "Let's play." This caught my eye, as did the author: Richard Tait, founder of the Cranium game and toy company. So now it's past midnight and I'm wedged in under the roof reading a year-old copy of Parade magazine. In the fourth paragraph, Tait mentions The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits.
This book title reminds me of a presentation I saw just a couple of weeks ago by Dr. Stuart Brown at the PUSH conference in Minneapolis. Dr. Brown is the head of the National Institute for Play and in his talk he showed slides from Alaska of a hungry polar bear approaching a chained sled dog. You'd think the dog was lunchmeat, but the bear and dog, rather than fighting, engage in 15 minutes of, um, "horseplay."
So I find myself wedged under the ceiling next to the newly plugged bat hole, having originally thought I was the human controlling the animal, and now wondering, given this example of interspecies play between bear and dog, if I hadn't just been engaged in play by a bat! Was this bat "testing the limits"? Was I "testing the limits"? Probably neither of these, but I need to buy Dr. Burghardt's book to see what he means by this phrase. Whatever the case, it certainly was odd to have this bat experience provide direction for further research into play in animals (and humans).
Q-BA-CAD is a way to use Microsoft Excel as a kind of computer-aided design software for drawing, saving, printing and emailing Q-BA-MAZE designs you or anyone else makes. If you already have Excel on your computer, you don't need expensive CAD software to record your designs, you can just use Excel.
You will find Q-BA-CAD plans and Design Spaces in the sidebar of this blog.
1) a blank Q-BA-CAD file ready for your design: 5x5-DesignSpace
2) a design for a single 50-pack: Q50/plan04
Q-BA-CAD automatically counts the number and type of cubes in a design instantly as the cubes are pasted into the checkerboard layers of the "Design Space." It also calculates the combination of 20-packs and 50-packs necessary to build a design. The number of "cubes available" (ie cubes from a pack not yet placed in a design) is provided to assist someone who is trying to efficiently use EVERY cube.
1) If you make a super cool construction and then draw it with Q-BA-CAD, you will have the plans to
rebuild the same design anytime in the future. Or you can email the Excel file you make to a friend anywhere, and they can build your design without ever having seen your actual structure!
2) A few toy shops have asked for plans for putting together three 50-packs so they can make one HUGE construction of Q-BA-MAZE. I have started making designs that use all or most of the 108 cubes that come in three 50-packs. There are different designs display needs in toy stores. For a structure 
in a window I would design something expansive with a small base that shows off how far a structure can cantilever beyond its base. For a display that many customers will play with and touch, a more compact design with a lower center of gravity, a broad base, and minimal cantilevers is probably a better way to go.
