In 2014 a few friends working at IDEO got together to create something completely new for the Burning Man festival.
We decided to take a previously explored method of using corrugated polypropylene to create large scale origami and bring it to life. A garden of 10 enormous animatronic flowers sprouted from the desert floor for a week where they reacted to their environment.
Using sensors located in the flower heads, they react to people as they move through the space. Wind, rain and light also elicit a change in their behavior and orientation.
Just like any product design process we started small (paper model), scaled up (full-sized, hand-actuated prototype) and refined before we leveraged CNC routers to make them in quantity.
As the lead mechanical designer on the project, I had to figure out the simplest and cheapest way to impart motion to the blooms and safely keep them 20 feet in the air during a windstorm. An added challenge was waterproofing everything while simultaneously making it easy to setup and tear down.
This was the first time we got one standing! Look how proud we are…
Since 2014 the flowers have been shown 14 different times for various art and music festivals, corporate events, and museum and gallery showings. They are now privately owned in Chicago Illinois.