A group of friends met weekly for a while to see if we could come up with something we were interested in building for Burning Man 2015. It seemed like we were getting to a point where we could use some playing with the ideas to see what was interesting. I mean literally playing, so I surreptitiously created some vector files to have some shapes laser cut at a local place called Metrix.

It’s a good idea to star with some tests when doing some kind of new process, so while at Metrix, I created four different templates and tried them out. They were way off. I measured what I had created and then went back to my file. The slots were half the size they should be. Doubled the slot size and tried again. Almost perfect. Closed the slots up a tiny bit and then duplicated those four templates 25 times each. That gave me 100 pieces with various slot orientations. I also made a base piece to see how the other pieces interacted when plugged into a base.

The group loved playing with this and it let us think about things a bit more concretely.