Shelandy Ting: Slots

While I try to play with some slotted  bricks to make an interesting shape, I found out several concerns in having a good design of slotted bricks:

• do not make a long hole in a narrow area, it will bend and can not hold the weight
• use flexible material unless both the laser cutting  and the dimension of the raw board can be controlled in high precision
• better to have several slots in different places and angles, instead of having interesting shape but having less choice of slots in different places and angles

For the material, I choose the foam board.  I think it has enough balance between the overall rigidity and flexibility on the edge of slots.

To take care both artist and engineering concern, I choose not to make too fancy shape in designing the shape of the bricks, but put a shallow engraving on the surfaces to inspire the kids to use the bricks to create interesting shape.  How can I get a iconic expression to inspire people to make something come true?  I first thought of the "wishbone."  Later I realized maybe the fish bone will be a better metaphor to remind people that you can build the interesting creature using those bricks as the skeleton, just as fish bone to a fish.  For achieving  this goal, I make the curve of a whole fish bone, but also dissect it into two parts and spread them on the brick surface to remind people to assembly them in a appropriate way to make the fish body.

I use Gimp and Inksacpe to convert the bitmap of fish bone into vector file, then import to Rhino.
    

The final result with some creative mind of using them to compose some thing fun