Where Goldberg meets da Vinci

EDITORS: Photos available on request.

ANN ARBOR—The university has always been a place of learning and discovery. And discover and learn they did in the University of Michigan design studio of Shaun Jackson where students used their imaginations to introduce Leonardo da Vinci to Rube Goldberg.

Challenged to design a contraption that would turn on a light switch, and using only those materials and techniques familiar to the 15th century da Vinci, these student teams from U-M’s School of Art and Design began researching what was rather unfamiliar territory for them.

While da Vinci never needed encouragement to stretch his imagination by creating new mechanical toys and devices, Jackson’s students come from a cyber world of Game Boys and Nintendo.

“These students have grown up in an era that is post-machine age,” says Jackson, a U-M associate professor of art. “They live in a virtual world. Because they are products of the information age, even rudimentary mechanics is foreign to them. But design requires the understanding of mechanics and mechanisms, and systemic thinking,” counsels Jackson. “Most products are still mechanical.”

To help his students become familiar with mechanics, Jackson challenged his class to design and build a machine that would turn on a light switch. And he asked them to use their creativity to make this simple task an engaging experience, much like the work of Rube Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author.

After abandoning his father’s wishes that he become an engineer, Goldberg drew cartoons of “inventions” that resulted in more difficult ways to achieve easy results. His cartoons were, he said, “symbols of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results.” And this combining of technical ability with creative whimsy became the goal for Jackson’s class. But Jackson added one caveat—these absurdly-connected machines could utilize only those materials known to and used by Leonardo da Vinci. Well, Jackson did waffle just a little and allowed rubber bands.

With a prescribed amount of basswood, wire and rods, the student teams began working with mechanisms available in the 15th century. Their imaginations led them to cotton string, fire, fabric, water, rocks, fishing line, matches and scratch paper, metal balls, leather thongs, paper, and visits to local craft stores.

The result? The teams did what college students would have done even in da Vinci’s time. They stayed up until the wee hours completing and perfecting their mechanical light switch thing-a-ma-bobs that did turn on the lights, and in ways that would have made Goldberg and da Vinci proud. From a sailboat carved from basswood, and a balancing “thing” named George, to a catapult and a wagon with wheels, students’ mechanical inventions proved what inventors have known since long before the 15th century—that flipping a switch can be a revelation.

Shaun JacksonSchool of Art and Design