March 20 2008 / (0)

Bloxing.

About 10 months ago, seven guys moved into an office. It was a great space, with hardwood floors, a little exposed brick and an open floorplan -- but it was incredibly loud and echo-y because of those exact same attributes. The guys needed to find a way to fix that.

One of the guys, Aza, remembered something his father invented back in the late '60s. A cube constructed out of six folded pieces of cardboard in such a way that they could interlock and build walls. They were called bloxes.

Aza modified the design a little and the guys ordered enough sides to make a thousand bloxes. It worked beautifully; the echoes were reduced, and the space wasn't nearly as loud. Work got done.

Everyone who visited the office thought the bloxes were awesome, and told the guys they should sell them. Eventually, they did. And now you can have some.

bloxes

I'm one of the guys selling bloxes. And, unexpectedly, I ended up being the guy who designed the logo, taking the basic shape of a blox side and adding a little to it. The sort of tertiary triangles represent the triangular pegs on the non-facing sides; I decided to include them in the logo to make it a little more dynamic -- you could almost imagine the blox in motion, rotating through space. Without them, the logo was a little too static (not to mention potentially evocative of a certain fascist regime).

Bloxes launched at SXSW Interactive. People had a great time learning how to put bloxes together and building with them, and with a little help from TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Treehugger , Lifehacker and now MAKE: (and a bunch of other places), we're off to a good start selling.

The negative responses people seem to have to them tend to be A) they're too expensive, and B) they're flammable. Well, they're no more flammable than the rest of the paper (books, files, etc) in your average office, but if you're that worried about open flames, I guess these aren't for you. As for price (they're currently about $3 a blox), what can I say? Cardboard may be cheap, but it isn't free. Once we're able to ramp up production volume, we may be able to reduce the price.

Several people have commented that they could just create their own template and make them themselves out of pizza boxes or whatever -- if that's how you want to spend your time, go for it, but it's not a simple shape, and cutting them out by hand, even with a template, would take far longer than the measly $3 it costs to buy one.

0 Comments / Leave a comment





    

Archives: or

About
Andrew Huff is editor and co-founder of Gapers Block. He writes ...well, just about anything, for a living. Email him at a.huff@this domain. The site's RSS feed is here.

Other projects » Dead Horse / Gapers Block / Out of 5 / I [star] Chi

All content © Andrew Huff, 2001-present. Design by Weightshift.

More at Flickr