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.

Design Thinking with Cubes, Components, and Constructions

The photo above shows the design called Q50/plan01 disassembled into several components. The components are made from two or more cubes, and these components can be rearranged into new constructions.

If you take a close look at the plan that comes with each 50-pack or at this plan from the Q-BA-MAZE website, you can see which cubes make each of the components shown in the top photo:

• Cubes 1-7 are the "base" (front middle in the photo)*
• Cubes 8-11 are a "4-cube scrambler" (back row, far right in photo)
• Cubes 12-22 are a "9-cube scrambler" with a "2-cube switch back" on top (back row, second from right in photo)
• Cubes 23-34 are a "double helix" (back row, third from right in photo)
• Cubes 35-36 are a "2-cube column" (back row, far left in photo)

* This "base" composed of cubes 1-7 is good stable starting point for any new construction.

The photo below shows Q50/plan01 on the left and a completely new construction on the right made from the same components just rearranged in a new order. Working with components like this is a faster way to design and build new constructions compared with building one cube at a time. An understanding of components will also assist your design thinking as you imagine your own new constructions.

Have fun inventing and building with Q-BA-MAZE!

A 20-Pack Design with Three Jumps

This is my new favorite construction with the 20-pack. The features I like are:

• The base is just one bottom-exit cube.
• There are jumps out of each of the three double-exit cubes.
• An upper part of the structure appears to float (the weight of the construction does not come straight down through a column, but is diverted in a mini-spiral).

If you would like to build this construction:

• You can try just copying this construction by looking at the photo.
• You can follow this plan (which comes in pdf format).
• You can follow this Excel plan (see the post on Q-BA-CAD to learn more about using Microsoft Excel as "CAD" software for drawing, saving, and emailing your Q-BA-MAZE designs).

(If you make this one, remember the trick to get the balls out: just slide the construction to the edge of the table with one hand and catch the balls in your other hand.)

Designer Toy Mash-up

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

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?

 

 

Do Bats Play?

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).