DesignsbyDuane: Rube Goldberg: Inception Style

So after countless hours working on our first studio project, we finally got it completed. My team consisted of Donald Burlock and Kyohei Yoshioka, two talented designers in our program. (note: click on the images to make them larger)

Project Summary

Our Rube Goldberg device was inspired by the movie Inception. The aesthetics of the design, from the bridge to the city facade, mimic various scenes in the movie. The beginning scene tells the story of Cobb's (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) journey from reality into the dreamworld. At the end of scene, the ball falling into the funnel represents Ariande's (the architect played by Ellen Page) plunge into the dream world and how that events causes a chain reaction of future events in the movie. The bridge scene is from the major scene in the movie when the characters are asleep in the van while the chemist Yusef tries to evade the mind's defenses. The parallel of the characters being in a dream within a dream is mimicked in the redundancy of the bridge system. The last scene of our system tells the story of the collapse of the dream world. Many "kicks" at the end such as the chair falling into the tub and the elevators crashing to top of the world represent the characters' tumultuous journey back to reality. Traces of other movie iconography are found throughout the device such as the spinning top in both the first and last scene and how the dominoes all have a character totem (a spinning top, a die, a poker chip, and a chess piece) etched into their surface.

Materials

Triple thick chipboard and wood were the main materials used in the construction of our Rube Goldberg device. The chipboard was chosen because of it's structural integrity and for its ability to be manipulated with the laser cutter. The wood served mainly as a strengthening material for the various structures found in the device such as the bridge and the riser for the first scene with the city facade.

Here is a look at the timeline of the project from study models to refinement...

Schematics