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                           is a catalog of heuristic design explorations that examine the nuanced formal and material interactions between people, objects, and environments

This series of miniature puzzles each comprise a square 6 x 6 grid of pieces that are interrupted by a set of 5 platonic forms: a circle, a hexagon, a square, a trangle and a cross. Each of these formal disruptions carves away and reorientes the layout of the puzzle pieces. The shape of the box is a clue to how to solve the monochromatic puzzles. Without a reference image to guide them, users must evaluate the shape of each puzzle piece to determine if the straight edges correspond to the outside boundary of the square, or the interior void made by the platonic form. As the user finishes the puzzle, they may discover that they are missing one piece. After contemplating this shape, they should realize that the final piece doubles as the lid of the box that contained the pieces to the puzzle.  The 40 unique variations of puzzles offer differnt difficulty levels. These are best experienced as a set of 5 puzzles.



Borage Triangle

“I cannot understand you, tis because you lean over my meaning’s edge and fee, a dizziness of the things I have not said.” (Trumbull Stickney)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Center
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 28



Indigo Triangle

“Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience” (Elizabeth Bowen)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Center
Division: Offset Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 29




“Adventure is just bad planning.” (Roald Amundsen)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Center
Division: Offset Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 29



Mustard Triangle

“Experience is a private, very largely speechless affair.” (James Baldwin)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Edge
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 28



Dianthus Triangle

“In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.” (Walter Benjamin)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Edge
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 28


Bergamot Triangle

“Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character” (Bruno Schulz)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Corner
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 28



Mint Triangle

“My stubborn childish life that moves only, Toward an eternal aspiration for vague things.” (Valery Larbaud)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: 45° Center
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Vervain Triangle

“We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: 45° Center
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Chicory Triangle


“Mornings, drink the dew from the magnolias; Evenings, eat the petals dropped from the crysanthemum.” (Yukio Mishima)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Rotated
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 31



Sage Triangle

“The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.” (Juan José Saer)

Shape: Triangle
Placement: Rotated
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 31



Sage Square

“That the green has no “weight”, yet weight (gravity) is what shapes the piece.” (Richard Tuttle)

Shape: Square
Placement: Center
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Oregano Square

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” (Anais Nin)

Shape: Square
Placement: Center
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 36


Peony Square


“We suffer more in our imagination more often than in reality.” (Seneca)

Shape: Square
Placement: Center
Division: Rotated Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 36



Borage Square

“The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind” (Wallace Stevens)

Shape: Square
Placement: Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 27



Dianthus Square

“The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.” (Frank Lloyd Wright)

Shape: Square
Placement: Center
Division: Rotated Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 36



Lavender Square

“That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.” (Emil Cioran)

Shape: Square
Placement: Corner
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 27



Geranium Square


“It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.” (Alfred North Whitehead)

Shape: Square
Placement: Corner
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Mustard Square

“When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don’t really know what they mean.” (William Faulkner)

Shape: Square
Placement: 45° Center
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Basil Square

“I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it.” (Alexander Stepanov)

Shape: Square
Placement: 45° Center
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Indigo Square

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” (John Cage)

Shape: Square
Placement: 45° Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 31



Allium Square

“The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be’” (Richard Feynman)

Shape: Square
Placement: Rotated Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 30



Chicory Square

“Unknown, Incomprehensible, whatever you choose to call it, call; But leave it vague as airy space, dark in its darkness mystical.” (Richard Francis Burton)

Shape: Square
Placement: Rotated Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 30



Mint Square

“Art is the big door, but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new.” (Jean Giraud)

Shape: Square
Placement: Rotated Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 30



Bergamot Square

“In so far as the learner was in Error, and now receives the Truth and with it the condition for understanding it, a change takes place within him like the change from non-being to being.” (Søren Kierkegaard)

Shape: Square
Placement: Rotated Offset
Division: Rotated Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32


Lavander Hexagon

“The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity. (Douglas Horton)

Shape: Hexagon
Placement: Center
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Chicory Hexagon

“The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.“ (Richard Dawkins)

Shape: Hexagon
Placement: Center
Division: Offset Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 44



Mint Hexagon

“Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.” (Ray Bradbury)

Shape: Hexagon
Placement: Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 30



Indigo Hexagon

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.” (Charles Mingus)

Shape: Hexagon
Placement: Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 30


Mint Circle

“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” (Marcus Aurelius)

Shape: Hexagon
Placement: Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 30



Borage Circle

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.” (Georgia O’Keeffe)

Shape: Circle
Placement: Center
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 36



Lavander Circle

“In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.” (Hans Hofmann)

Shape: Circle
Placement: Center
Division: Offset Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 24



Chicory Circle

“Geometry is moribund. I want a lilt and joy to art.” (Ellsworth Kelly)

Shape: Circle
Placement: Offset
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 31



Indigo Circle

“All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.” (Gustave Flaubert)

Shape: Circle
Placement: Edge
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 31



Sage Cross

“Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults.” (Gerhard Richter)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Center
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 36



Indigo Cross

“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Center
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 28



Mustard Cross

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” (Confucius)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Center
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 28




Mint Cross

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.” (Buckminster Fuller)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Diagonal
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 27



Vervain Cross

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” (Alfred North Whitehead)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Diagonal
Division: 45° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32



Borage Cross

“Things separate in order to appear.” (Matthew Sullivan)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Rotated
Division: 90° Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 32


Chicory Cross


“Beauty is boring because it is predictable.” (Umberto Eco)

Shape: Cross
Placement: Rotated
Division: Rotated Grid
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Pieces: 3












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