Three weeks.  Two thousand plastic balls. One hundred linear feet of wood.

The project began as a curricular exercise to build ten prototypes of ideas for team-building tools through the lens of Rube Goldberg machines. After extensive research, our team concluded Rube Goldberg machines are convoluted, fantastical, delightful, devious, and complicated chain reactions.

We emerged with ten of these convoluted, fantastical, devious, and complicated prototypes. Most exciting was the Ball Pit idea; it captured the ludic, delightful spirit of Rube Goldberg. In fact, our prototype was simply an origami paper “pit” filled with M&M “balls”. The real ball pit would be a collaborative “huddle room” in our studio.  We rolled up our sleeves, built the structure, and installed it into our studio. Since then, it has fulfilled its promise of being a workspace, most recently for thesis charrettes.

December 2016.

Project completed within the graduate program in Social Design at MICA.

Project Team: Matt Barr, Molly Reddy, Irina Wong

Faculty Advisors: Thomas Gardner, Mike Weikert