Children's Toy Design

A representative from a toy company contacted us in 1982 to talk about toy designs. He had seen my kinetic sculptures and wondered if I had ever thought of designing and licensing toy designs. This was also the year that our second daughter was born so we were getting well aquatinted with children and toys and the idea appealed to us. 

Our first design was the bicycling bear. Marji did the characterization and I did the mechanization. I built the model out of wood and Marji painted it and brought it to life. The toy company loved the idea but after a bit of research determined that it was too large (26 inches high x 22 wide) to make at a price people would be willing to pay. The mechanism didn't really lend itself to shrinking (the story of many of my designs!) so we had to put it aside. But the toy bug had bitten us and we started designing. We had an in house testing and inspiration department and the ideas just kept coming.

Eventually we licensed some designs and a few products actually came to market. In general though the final product bore no resemblance to our initial models and looked like every other cheap toy on the market. We grew disenchanted with the toy business at about the same time that our "inspiration and testing department" outgrew young children's toys. It was time to move on.

We have fond memories of that period. We had a great time designing together and with our kids. We met many wonderful people in and around the business. Probably most significantly to my current work, it was through the toy industry that I heard about constant force springs. You'll notice an abrupt change in power source between 1982 and 1983 in the sculpture archive.

Shimmer Kinetic sculpture

Shimmer is a new sculpture using the patterning wheel I designed for Radiance
but with a completely different mechanism. I explain the why's and wherefores of the creation of this piece more fully on my web site but it comes down to the fact that I had a patterning wheel I really liked and couldn't decide on the best mechanism to move it, so in the end I made them both.

Serpentine kinetic sculpture

1979 was a big year for us. We moved into the house/studio Marji and I had spent the previous year building and, our first child, Amanda was born. Life changing events that seemed "normal" at the time.

Wood That Works and my progress in learning to design and build kinetic sculptures also saw some big changes that year. The combination of a much nicer work space with new family obligations led to a burst of creativity and problem solving. The 5 pieces I designed and produced that year, Blizzard, Crustacean, Kaleidoscope, Serenity, and Serpentine all broke new ground in both mechanism design and complex pattern creation.

Kaleidoscope was the most popular sculpture with the public but my personal favorite was Serpentine. It produced a random, chaotic motion that I never tired of watching. That turned out to be a good thing because getting the individual sculptures to perform correctly turned out to be a fairly tedious chore of watching, tuning, tweaking and then more watching, tuning and tweaking. There was a fairly narrow range of operation where the sculpture would perform the way I liked it and yet not stall.

My mechanisms are more refined today but each sculpture still requires a period of testing and tweaking, but no where near as much as Serpentine did back in 1979!

Cascade Kinetic Sculpture - 1980

Cascade is a sculpture I designed and built in 1980. Like all my early work this is a weight driven sculpture with a relatively short run time of 20 minutes or so. I used a version catch and release ball mechanism concept that I originally designed for Kaleidoscope 1 in 1979. It's a bit noisy and jerky at times but I was thrilled that it actually worked and had an interesting motion.

I've used very short weight strings in the video so I can show both weights at the same time. Normally the string length would be set so that the light weight starts on the floor and the heavy weight just below the sculpture. The weight on the right has about 5 pounds of metal encased in the wood shape. The left hand weight is the counter weight and is solid wood.

Dragon from 1989

My current sculpture Phoenix was inspired by an earlier sculpture of mine called Dragon. I built a small edition of Dragon sculptures in 1989. This was long before I was doing digital video so I didn't have any record of the motion. Recently I had one come back for new strings. Other than the tangled strings it was in nearly perfect condition and ran great. I decided I could not pass up the opportunity to make a short video if it.

By my current standards Dragon didn't run very long and the stringing was a bit challenging but I loved the movement and pattern. If memory serves me correctly the patterning wheel design was the result of learning the Adobe drawing program Illustrator and inadvertintly turning the wheel inside out with a flubbed "scale" command!