Singular Modular Piece

Materials - Maple Paperback Venner

L4 inches X W5 inches X H2 inches

March 2018

As a youngster, Tetris was a game that I played to pass the time.  As I grew older, I began to wonder where did Tetris come from in the first place.  It was such a weird yet intuitive game that really did not fit much of the marketplace today or back then.  However it is a game that everyone in my generation knew regardless of culture especially if they had a computer.  

One of the first things I learned about Tetris was that it was inspired by Pentomino.  This game was similar to Tetris, but it had five blocks in each piece.  These five block piece were then use to construct a given area.  Usually this game was made of wood.  What I found most interesting about this aspect that this game has been around for a century since the 1890s and has brought countless investigations in mathematics as well as creativity.  One can argue that it is a great fountain of ideas, but for me it was an idea to create a homage to those times as well as my own history to this game.

This piece was going to be much simpler it originally did not have those pockets that you see here.  These pockets came from a series of questioning as well as pondering from suggestions of my peers who asked the what if's? and I began to explore those what if's.  These pondering lead to the design that you see here.  Though there was a slight problem . . . 

No one really knew if this idea would work.  This piece was incredibly small about 3.5" wide.  There were ideas of how it can work, but no one really knew if the lamination would hold with such a tight radius.  This resulted in experimentation of over 2.5 weeks of tweaking and trying new techniques to make this a possibility.

First I tried the vacuum bag, but with only 30 lbs of pressure on such a small area it did not give the pressure I needed to carve out the pockets and those that did broke at the top as the wood was either too thick or too dry.  But even when using the paperback it could not carve out the pockets and so I resolved to use a 2 part mold to craft the shape of this piece.

The second I did was to massage the wood or prebending it into the form that was needed so that when pressed it would not crack.  This took a lot of time as I wanted this to be a plywood format.  While the cracks lessen it still had problems.

The third I did was extending the length of each by a good 2-3 inches on the sides so that the grains would not be short and later cut them down to length.  However despite my best attempts there were always these weird wrinkles.

The fourth thing I did was ironing the paperback and forming the shape onto the two part mold before gluing and with that no wrinkles or deformities.

This process allowed me to understand that this can be a manufactured item a toy in the very sense.  It has an intuitive design that allows people to quickly figure out what it is suppose to do and gives people the freedom of creativity.

This is some of the many failed tests that happened over the course of the 2.5 weeks  This also has the 2 part mold as well as the 3 part mold to glue all three parts together to create the Pentomino piece. 

Below are ideas of what the pieces can do if there were multiples of them