For the third day, Alex Feng and I teamed up and worked on a Rube Goldberg machine using, a camera, LEGOS, Peanut M&M’s, and lots of found items around ITP (mainly from the old “junk shelf”). After seeing the IDEO chain effect challenge and a recent Honda Accord commercial, I was inspired to look at more examples and build one myself. The gist of our machine was to take a picture of a the user as s/he tries to catch a piece of candy with their mouth.
While playing with objects and learning about physics is real fun, I also really liked this project because the result is a big metaphor of sorts — lots of events in our lives, maybe all, can be perceived as a chain reaction. We can see where things go wrong, and where things work out fluidly. . . etc. Anyway, here’s Alex using the machine and some photos it took of some daring volunteers below. Thanks everyone! note: Alex + Liesje were successful, hence take the top positions. The rest of us missed. Womp, womp.
rube goldberg: photo candy catch from ben yee on Vimeo.