Q-BA-MAZE

Marble Run Sculpture: DINO ONE

At the close of the March 2008 interview with John Baichtal of Wired.com's GeekDad Blog, I said we were working on a brontosaurus, and now:

Here is DINO ONE!

DINO ONE is our first dinosaur design and we are about to follow this up with ROBOT ONE and BUTTERFLY ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR. You can find instruction plans for DINO ONE on our ever-growing plans page on the Q-BA-MAZE website. The plans page includes Q-BA-MAZE designs you can build using anywhere from 12 to more than 100 cubes.

Cantilevers, Counter-balance, Components and other Craziness

This photo shows a blue "straight-away" component cantilevering to the left, while a green "straight-away" component counter-balances the structure by cantilevering back to the right.

In this post, I illustrate a number of different "components" that can be built into a complete construction. I use the base configuration from Q20/plan03 (cubes 1-6) and then 4 blue single-exit cubes and 4 green single-exit cubes to create the various components.

This is a six-cube "zig-zag" component. Each green cube makes a right-turn and each blue cube makes a left-turn. The left-right-left pattern makes the zig-zag. An eight-cube "zig-zag" would have required further cubes on the opposite side as a counter-balance.

This is an eight-cube "switch-back" component. Each single exit-cube aims the pathway back under the previous single-exit cube. The result is very stable tower form that is just one cube wide and two-cubes deep.

This is an eight-cube "switch-back helix" component. The blue single-exit cubes each rotate 90 degrees with respect to the blue cube above. The green single-exit cubes aim the pathway back under the previous blue single-exit cube. The result is what appears to be a central blue column wrapped with a sporadic green helix.

This is an eight-cube "1x3 switch-back" component. The component is one cube wide and three cubes deep. The pathway goes straight through two cubes and then the third cube bends the path back under the previous two cubes. The set of four green cubes could be rotated 90 degrees with respect to the blue cubes and then you'd have a "rotating 1x3 switch-back".

This is a six-cube "straight-away" component. The two cubes on the left are necessary to counter-balance the weight of the "straight-away" as it leans far out to the right. It is not necessary for a structure to be symmetrical to have balance. There just needs to be enough weight to keep things from tipping. As you get more daring with your own designs, you'll have to experiment with trial and error. If your structure falls down, you probably went beyond some physical limit. Pushing these limits is part of the fun!

This is an eight-cube "helix" component. More specifically, this is a "2x2 counter-clockwise single-helix." Each cube turns the pathway to the left as it goes down, so the pathway spins counter-clockwise. If each cube turned the path to the right, it would be a clockwise helix. Looking at this helix from above, it fits on a 2x2 cube grid.

This is an eight-cube "2x2 counter-clockwise double-helix" component. It is much like the single-helix, but a second helix fills in the empty cantilevered spaces of the first helix. Here, one helix is green and the other is blue. DNA is a double-helix. Question: Is the DNA double-helix clockwise or counter-clockwise? and why?

This is an eight-cube "3x3 counter-clockwise double-helix." The two helixes will never touch. Double-exit cubes can be used occasionally as a "3x3 double-helix" is built as a means of connecting and stabilizing the two pathways. Cube #34 in Q50/plan01 is a double-exit cube used in this way.

This is an eight-cube "3x3 counter-clockwise single-helix."

The list of components goes on and on. Take a look at the post on 10 Billion Trillion Combinations and you will get an idea of just how many configurations are possible.

Have fun experimenting and exploring and finding the coolest components for your crazy constructions!

Why Cantilever? Example #1

Below is a Google Streetview of the Minneapolis Central Public Library by Cesar Pelli.

CLICK HERE to explore all sides of the Library via Google Maps (hint: move the little orange man to NICOLLET MALL and rotate the view to look back at the Library to see how the roof cantilevers on the other side as well)

Here is a night time view of the roof cantilevering out over Hennepin Avenue (a main thoroughfare in the city).

REASONS FOR THE CANTILEVER

1) This roof clearly announces the location of the entrances on either side of this public building. The roof grabs a person's attention and leads the eye to the entryway. The Library is sort of two separate buildings with a glass enclosed public space in between them. This huge cantilevering metal roof shelters this public space between the two halves of the Library. In this photo looking straight up from under the cantilever, you can look all the way through the glass-enclosed public space and out the other side of the Library. The entry vestibule on this side of the building doubles as a heated bus shelter. If you look closely on the ground level on the right, you can see what is probably the best selection and display of bus maps in the city. A coffee shop in the corresponding position on the opposite side of the building provides another bit of street level activity -- something sorely missing in Minneapolis generally, but sensitively planned for here. I think it is this combination of bold form and sensitive planning which makes this an already much-loved building in the city.

2) From a distance, this roof announces the location of the building itself. From many blocks away, the roof can be seen jutting out over the street. Special clearances from the city were necessary to allow this. Because this is a public destination, it makes sense for such a variance from regulations to be granted.

3) This roof provides horizontal counterpoint in a vertical city. The buildings behind the library are vertically oriented and reaching for the sky. The Library takes up a full city block, so it can have quite a bit of square footage without having to grow so tall. Without the cantilevering roof, the Library would just be a short building. The roof, however, emphasizes its horizontality.

4) Contextualism: The roof has a relationship to regional culture. Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered this idea of boldly cantilevered roofs in his Prairie Style houses, most notably, in the Robie House. Wright's idea was that on the flat landscape of the prairie, a roof should emphasize the horizontal. The roof of the Library, interestingly, is like an upside down version of the hip roof of the Robie House.

5) Contextualism (part 2): The Library and the Wells Fargo Building, both by Pelli, are a study in comparison and contrast. The Wells Fargo building can be seen in the photos as a glowing amber tower in the background. It has a stone facade with strong vertical elements that mimic the vertical column structure behind. The Library has a similar stone facade, but it emphasizes the horizontal instead by rimming each of the floor plates and thus highlighting a different structural component of the building. Pelli established an architectural vocabulary in the earlier Wells Fargo Building and is both repeating and adjusting it in the Library. The cantilevered roof participates in this dialogue between the two buildings.

I shot the photos of the Library at night because there is an optical illusion at night that makes the cantilever appear to be far longer than it really is. Since the roof is not too heavy, the columns supporting it can be slender and from a distance they sort of disappear.

Next buildings in this series on cantilevers are the new Walker Art Center by Herzog and De Meuron and the new Guthrie Theater by Jean Nouvel. Eventually, I'll also make a post about ways people can experiment with their own cantilevers using the Q-BA-MAZE cubes.

10 Billion Trillion Combinations: Toy Math and Design Space

WHAT IS A DESIGN SPACE?

The huge sets of possible permutations for LEGO Bricks and Q-BA-MAZE cubes are called "design spaces" (Beinhocker, p. 193). It is up to the designer, the person playing with LEGO or Q-BA-MAZE, to discover the best designs among the zillions of possiblities. The enormity of these "design spaces" describes both the potential challenge and the level of freedom for the designer.

How many combinations are there? How big are these design spaces? Just six 2x4 studded LEGO bricks of a single color can be rearranged in 102,981,500 different configurations (Bedford, p. 19). The Rubik's Cube* can be scrambled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 ways (Walsh, p. 230). The LEGO "Creator" set contains 500 pieces of different shape and color which can be combined in roughly 10 to the power 120 combinations (1 followed by 120 zeroes) (Beinhocker, p 193). Given that the universe contains around 10 to the power 80 atoms (1 followed by 80 zeroes), the 500-piece LEGO set is pretty impressive!

I've always been impressed with these huge numbers, but also a little skeptical, because I like seeing proof. It seems the math behind these figures is never shown. And probably, the math cannot be shown, because the problems are so complex that a computer program needs to be written to calculate the combinations. This is the case with Q-BA-MAZE. I can't easily get the answer to the seemingly simple question, "how many ways can the Q-BA-MAZE cubes be reconfigured?" because it would take a custom computer program to calculate this.

It is possible, however, to make a rule that describes a subset of the ways Q-BA-MAZE cubes can be rearranged and to express this rule in a simple mathematical formula. The results of our calculations, just a subset of the total possibilities, yield these surprisingly huge numbers of ways 18 to 36 Q-BA-MAZE cubes can be rearranged:

Calculation 1B above of the 18 single-exit cubes in a 50-pack yields 9,656,357,112,229,430,000,000 and can be described as roughly 10 billion trillion combinations.

The helical construction of Q-BA-MAZE cubes in the photo at the top of this post is a single continuous pathway with no jumps. It is made with the single-exit cubes that come in the Cool Colors 50-pack (Q50C) and is one of the configurations included in both Calculation 1A and 1B.

HERE'S THE MATH

To satisfy my curiosity, and with the help of some mathematician friends, we devised this formula:

If you would like to see this formula in action just open up this Excel file and you can manipulate it as you like and see what happens as you change the variables. Here is a screen shot of the Excel calculations:

Five pathways may converge on every Q-BA-MAZE cube in a construction. This formula, however, describes only a single pathway entering any particular cube, or even just a stacked connection. So the results of this formula are far lower than what an eventual computer program will find, but it will at least provide a minimum starting point for understanding how many ways the cubes may be reconfigured.

• N is the total number of cubes in a construction
• Nb = number of blue cubes, Ng = number of green cubes, Nc = number of clear cubes
• N = Nb + Ng + Nc
• C = number of connections
• when C = 4, there is a single continuous pathway with no jumps (the side joint on each cube is always engaged with the cube below)
• when C = 8, the path may be discontinuous and jumps are allowed (either the side joint or the bottom pegs may be used to connect to the cube below)
• the ! symbol means 'factorial' (as an example, 6! = 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720)
• the left side of this equation deals with the color combinations
• the right side of this equation deals with the cube configurations

* I include Rubik's Cube here because I found this huge number that describes it and so it makes a good example of how many ways something can be scrambled. Because Rubik's Cube is a puzzle, it is mostly thought of as having only one solution: all sides a single color. But there are interesting checkerboard and other patterns in the design space of 43 quintillion Rubik's combinations, its just that the mechanism of rotating cubes intentionally makes these difficult to find.

If you have an answer to the question "How many ways can the cubes of the 50-pack be reconfigured?" I'd be very interested in hearing from you!

Sources for this post:

The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide, Allan Bedford, 2005, No Starch Press Inc., ISBN 1-59372-054-2

The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys, Tim Walsh, 2004, Keys Publishing, ISBN 0-9646973-4-3

The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Eric D. Beinhocker, Harvard Business School Press, ISBN 13-978-1-57851-777-0

Designer Toy Mash-up

This post features Eames Office Kubrick, Automoblox S9, Q-BA-MAZE, and Troll.

Here By Design Exhibit: Opening Snapshots

I'm on the right side of the display case describing the design process. The original inspiration came from the green wooden marble run on the right made by my grandfather, probably in the 1940s. My handmade plaster prototypes are at the far end of the case on the left. Two rows of rapid prototypes show the evolving generations of the design of the single-exit and double-exit cubes.

Another view of the display case.

Exhibit curator James Boyd-Brent is on the left. A wall system designed by Marc Swackhammer fills the background. I am demonstrating how a side joint on one cube can connect on all four sides of another cube.

YOU'RE INVITED: "Here by Design" Opening Party

Here by Design III: Process and Prototype

Opening Party
Friday, October 19
7-9 p.m. FREE
@ Goldstein Museum gallery
Minneapolis, MN

I'm honored to be part of this new exhibit, curated by James Boyd-Brent, Associate Professor of Graphic Design. The entire design process behind Q-BA-MAZE is on display -- inspiration, sketches, CAD drawings, rapid prototypes.  Visitors even get a chance to play with a multi-pack structure!  As part of the related symposium, I'll be sitting on a panel -- and a fellow panelist will be Vince James, one of my architecture instructors from the University of Minnesota.

"HbDIII will examine the ingenuity of Minnesota designers using digital fabrication for rapid prototyping innovative and sustainable design solutions. A related symposium will explore these issues in greater depth through panel discussions with the designers, tours to digital fabrication facilities, and a nationally-known keynote challenge speaker." Exhibit runs October 20, 2007 - January 20 2008

Watch for photos in the next few days...

Dreaming of Metabolist Architecture

Photo: arcspace

Metabolist Architecture was a movement of the 60s and 70s and this apartment tower in Tokyo is one of the best examples -- the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kisho Kurokawa. The repetition of simple modular units is a basic principal of architecture. The bricks in a wall, for example, are all the same size, repeated over and over, but capable of making so many different forms and enclosing so many different spaces. The Nakagin Tower uses an entire apartment as the modular unit instead of just a single brick.

One day I hope to make it to Tokyo, but this landmark building will problably not be there anymore -- it faces the wrecking ball due to both neglect and rising land values. So the Capsule Tower must live on in dreams.

This Q-BA-MAZE construction is how I imagine the Capsule Tower at night -- with each cube being a modular apartment unit:

   

The White Stripes: Living the Lego Dream

This is probably the coolest Lego thing ever. Lego forming a swimming pool with colorful spiral waves! A lead guitarist made from just 34 bricks and animated!

It is the video for "Fell in Love with a Girl", which is the second single released from The White Stripes' third album White Blood Cells. Released in 2002, it reached number one.

I have a DVD with this and other videos by the director Michel Gondry. It comes with a little book titled:

I've been twelve forever

The title is Gondry's self description. He is now 44 years old and the director of the films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Science of Sleep (2006).

Isn't it funny that we grow up with adult voices telling us to "stop acting like a twelve-year-old" only to reach adulthood and to find one of the greatest industrial designers of the 20th Century stressing the importance to the design process of "the attitude of the child"? (See my Sept 1 post). And stepping into the present, to find Gondry producing such brilliant work by having just remained twelve (at heart)?

Here is the "making of video":

*the next coolest Lego thing I've seen is a Lego robot that can solve the Rubik's cube (I'll save that for another post)

Angels and Firecrackers

Charles Eames once said that in the "world of toys he saw an ideal attitude for approaching the problems of design, because the world of the child lacks self-consciousness and embarassment."

When I came across this statement in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention (p. 139) it really jumped out at me. I have been doing a lot of play-testing with kids and adults and I have noticed how much more quickly kids learn. Children just proceed and experiment, they figure things out as they go along, they don't worry about rules, judgement or success.

The Eames House of Cards

The "world of the child" comment, led me to notice an underlying connection between the Eameses architectural design and their toy design (see this link for lots of photos of the interior and exterior of the Eames House). Both the Eames House and their toy the House of Cards have simple repetitive structural systems. The structural systems work, but it is the play of color and the collections/images of diverse things (in the house and on the cards) that brings them richness and meaning. Playing with the cards and living in the house are similar activities -- both involve a continual rearrangement of things, a richness of ideas that can come together in ways which inspire new unexpected and creative thoughts. Look closely at the photo here. Who ever thought of "angels and firecrackers in an archway"? These things don't go together. Such a combination is against the rules, but there are no rules in "the world of the child."

For more information on Charles and Ray Eames, see this website related to the Legacy of Invention exhibition organized by the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum.

Did A Childhood Toy Inspire Frank Lloyd Wright?

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?

 

 

SKETCHING: The ongoing importance of free-hand drawing

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"

2D/3D CAD DRAWING: Coordinated Precision

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: Design Gets a Reality Check

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"

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"