Organic Gears

When I studied abroad in Paris this past spring quarter, I had the chance to go to place called Le Musée des Arts et Metiers, which translates roughly to the museum of arts and engineering.  The museum has a fantastic collections of items and artifacts that show the history of the sciences, engineering, and art and where they combined.  From early airplane models to iron casting molds, the museum covered a wide range of topics.  However, the items that shocked and amazed me were sets of gears shaped like hearts, squares and other surprising shapes.

Gears have always fascinated me.  As something commonplace in so many machines, gears have represented the quintessence of engineering to me, yet never before had I imagined that they could be anything but purely circular.  Having had such a positive reaction when I saw them enshrined in a glass case in Le Musée des Arts et Metiers, I wanted to further explore these items and give others the chance to better understand the fundamentals behind gears.

While ideally I would have found templates that replicated the gears I saw in Paris, I was unable to find the patterns I was looking for.  However, I did find a YouTube video tutorial on making and creating organic gears by hand.

Using this video tutorial, I was able to create my own set of gears though I certainly had a good amount of trouble with this and went through several gears before finally succeeding.

While this first prototype was successful, the gears only fully aligned when I drove it from the larger of the two gears.  Furthermore, while this prototype was fascinating to almost everyone that I showed it to, I felt that it was too simple as most would only spin the gears once and then say that's cool.  The most reaction I got from it was when people turned the gears more slowly to see how each tooth aligned.  I needed to create something more interactive.

The first prototype

For my second prototype, I wanted to prove that I could make multiple gears that worked, which I did with a bit more ease than last time.  However, I felt stuck since I had trouble getting people to interact with the gears on a higher level.  The experience of creating the gears was exhilarating to say the least, yet I knew such a process was to difficult and lengthy to turn into an exhibit in that way.  I felt that at the least users should have a way to test how gears fit into each other.  While I had Nish try to align the gears himself, I was not quite comfortable having users do this as I feared frustration in a museum environment with little guidance.  At last I settle on an idea, that unfortunately, I was unable to prototype.

My first realization was that several types of gears were possible - a positive and negative mating gear multiplied by the number of gears available through ratios.  For example, the first pair that I made as well as the pair in the video tutorial have a ratio of 2:1, which means the outside edges of the larger repeat once.  If the base gears used to make organic were 1:1 the outside edges wouldn't repeat, while a 3:1 ratio would repeat twice.  This leaves a large combination of potential gears from a basic positive-negative gear pattern.

A second set of gears

With this knowledge in mind, I decided that to make the exhibit more interactive, I would have several gears set up and aligned that visitors could see and turn by hand that could not be removed.  I would then create a board on which visitors could assemble trains of gears like the ones in the example and figure out how gears lined up.  To minimize confusion, positive and negative gears would be painted different colors to show visitors that the gears they line up should alternate in color.

I feel that this prototype would be much more successful than my initial idea.  I would be eager to test out interaction on users and see how much trouble other had assembling gears, how interested they were, and gain further feedback.