Lux: the next big thing in toys

After college, Mike Acerra moved to the Maine wilderness to study art, science and nature. He was seeking a theory of everything. He found it. Fast forward to 2015. Mike is now an established portrait artist, designer and educator and the principal of Acerra Studios in Galesburg.

He is also the inventor with his wife Heather of the groundbreaking construction toy, Lux, which means “light” in Latin and is the culmination of Mike’s theory.

Mike calls his theory “modular corrugation.” It synthesizes the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, the German educator Friedrich Froebel who invented kindergarten, and many other pioneers from Plato to Einstein. Mike observed that nature employs a limited inventory of parts or “structural atoms” to create an infinite “diversity of complex things” and that this principle could connect science, art, history and education.

When Mike became a father, he wanted to take his theory a step further. He and Heather contemplated ways to translate “modular corrugation” into a unique and creative toy for kids. “Building on my time in Maine, I thought that if I could find a toy that imitated what I found in nature, it would be the ultimate construction block.” From his theory of everything emerged Lux, a toy that can build anything.

The miracle of Lux is the way the blocks connect. Each side of the flat square block is extended by a futuristic looking hinge. The hinges snap the blocks together to form an amazingly strong but flexible bond. Lux blocks can be configured to form an atom or a molecule, a model of dinosaur cells or of a dinosaur. Perhaps your kids would like to build a motorcycle or a bracelet, a cylinder or a submarine, a microscopic ocean creature, or something that has never before been conceived until they built it. With Lux, it can be done.

We spoke by phone as Mike and Heather were preparing to debut Lux at the 2015 conference of the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association. They kindly took time out to speak with me about the process of creating a unique toy, the inspiration of history’s great thinkers and other secrets of the inventor lifestyle. Lux will be available this fall at Geppetto’s Toy Box in Oak Park, Galt Toys at 900 North Michigan Avenue, Play in Logan Square, and Building Blocks in Wicker Park and other area retailers to be announced. Visit www.luxblox.com for more information.

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Q: When and how did your invention process begin?

Mike: Lux is a mirror of our marriage. It’s the outcome of years of talking about our children’s education.

Before we had kids, we made pilgrimages to Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, Taliesin, and to Oak Park to look at the homes. We are both architecture enthusiasts.

I was an artist out of college. Heather was a business person, but had a huge interest in photography and architecture. It all became part of the conversation of our marriage.

After we had kids we found out that favorites of mine, Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright were both influenced by Friedrich Froebel who founded the first kindergarten. The toys Froebel had in his kindergarten influenced Buckminster Fuller with his dome and Frank Lloyd Wright with his architecture.

Fuller was also a fan of Einstein. Our children became string musicians through the Suzuki program and Suzuki lived with Einstein in Germany.

We discovered that all these characters of the early 20th century were connected. Our conversation became about blocks and toys and pedagogy.

Heather: We’re like any parents. You want to provide the best tools and education that you can. We thought that a toy like this would inspire students and their parents and at the same time be very fun.

Mike: When Froebel taught young children in France in the 19th century, he believed that if you give them the right tools they would become the future scientists who would change the world. With the right tools, they could do things beyond their parents’ imagination and accomplish things that no one in the world had imagined before.

In that sense, he was a real progressive. He thought we could change the course of humanity. We’re of a similar belief. We wanted to make a toy in that tradition. A toy that could help kids to see nature’s connections and to come up with things they never imagined they could.

Q: How did your growing-up years spark all these interests?

Heather: I have artists in my family and music was always a huge influence in my life, so I’ve always been surrounded by the arts.

Mike: I was raised by working class Italian construction workers and building contractors, electricians, carpenters and tradesmen. I used to love to watch guys pouring concrete, laying tile and brick, and cutting stone.

When I was in fourth grade, Time Life started advertising books on TV. I bugged my parents to get me the series on inventors. I was also a fan of the PBS shows Cosmos with Carl Sagan and Connections. Adventurers, scientists and discoverers were my heroes.

Heather: Both of our fathers are carpenters. My father is a retired police chief, but he built houses and other buildings, poured driveways, and always seemed to be working with his hands when not engaged in police work.

Mike: Growing up, my whole street was homes my dad built. Building is in our blood.

Q: What was the process of inventing Lux?

Mike: It started off with the connector. Nothing was going to happen until we could make a connector that worked. Heather had a lot of input into the connector because she didn’t want it to be complicated. She insisted on simplicity and she also wanted it to be intuitive.

We bought a 3D printer and it changed our lives. Before if we wanted a prototype, we had to pay a gentleman in Peoria and it took a month. If it didn’t work we had to wait another month to get a new piece made. It was crazy slow and frustrating.

Finally, we invested in the printer and developed the connector. We also had autoCAD Design assistance from our 15 year-old neighbor. We went through hundreds of variations. When it snapped together and held just as we envisioned it, it was proof that our concept worked. The connector is the most novel feature of the toy. The connector makes it all happen.

We used the Thomas Edison process of inventing. Edison tried to do as many different versions as possible to exhaust all the possibilities. Friends make jokes about our hundreds of computer files of different drawings of the toy. We were seeking that moment when the lightbulb went off and the toy was what we wanted. We had a list of requirements. It had to make Platonic solids. It had to make Archimedean solids. If you could do that, you could make atoms and molecules.

Froebel studied minerals and crystals before he invented the kindergarten. It’s all connected. He believed that if he taught humanity how nature put crystals together, imagine what kind of humanity we would have! I love that kind of philosophy. Very pure, very idealist.

Heather: Mike studied natural forms as an artist and art teacher. He’s very good at teaching the drawing of forms commonly found in nature by breaking things down into their smallest most elemental parts and showing people through algorithms how to draw various forms including forms that are commonly found in nature.

Q: How do you apply algorithms to art?

Mike: During the Renaissance when Michelangelo and Raphael died, Italians feared they would lose their footing as the arts center of Europe. The Carracci family in Bologna decided to educate young Italian boys how to be artists. They weren’t intellectual artists like we see today. They were craftsmen.

The Carraccis commissioned a primer on drawing the human body. They atomized the process into algorithms. “Take the following steps and you will create a very decent rendering of an angel.” By doing that, they inadvertently found nature’s design principles.

Early Greek artists found that if you take a simple curve and repeat it, you can make an anatomically correct seashell or leaf or any kind of organic thing. There’s a language in art and it’s all algorithmic. It follows patterns.

I followed this theory as a teacher in Chicago. That was when Heather and I were engaged and married and fifteen years later, we’re applying this knowledge to our toy.

Heather: Even then, Mike had elementary school kids doing polyhedrons and all sorts of other models. He’s always been interested in teaching structure and trigonometry through art.

Mike: It’s all from Plato. He recognized that the pyramid and the cube were God-like things. They were the minimal geometric instructions. He believed any culture could discover these things because they were universal.

One hundred fifty years ago, Van ’t Hoff proved that Plato was right. He discovered that the carbon molecule is a pyramid. A simple thing, a four-sided pyramid, is what holds us together biologically. It’s an example of teaching kids science through art.

Q: You’ve said that Lux is based on principles which connect nature and building. What are your most important principles?

Mike: I didn’t invent these principles. They are principles of nature. Most construction blocks are basic bricks. Kids are forced to arrange those blocks at a 90 degree angle from each other, but when you make things with a toy like that, there’s a big disconnect. Dogs and snails and leaves just don’t act like they’re made of bricks.

So my thinking is if you’re going to make a block that models nature, then you have to use the principles that nature is using. We created a block that can model atoms and molecules. If it didn’t model atoms and molecules, it wasn’t modeling nature. I’m going to ask you a question. What do you think is the most common shape that nature makes?

Q: A circle?

Mike: Yes. You turn on the sink. It makes bubbles, right? They are perfect spheres. Our blocks make bubbles. Our blocks make bubbles because of the way the hinges work. If our blocks can make bubbles we knew that we were modeling nature at a very foundational level.

Another thing is this. Nature has motions and one of the motions our blocks make is called Sarrus linkages. When we demonstrate these Sarrus linkages, kids go nuts. [Note: a Sarrus linkage allows a circular shape to become a linear shape.)

Heather: Lux blocks can demonstrate capillary action. It’s an amazing, wonderful movement, almost like a musical instrument. It moves like an accordion. Nature isn’t static. It evolves and grows. There’s motion. And so that’s one of the things that has impressed toy retailers the most, the fact that most blocks cannot capture these exotic motions, but ours do.

Q: It sounds like kids can literally build anything with it.

Mike: We weren’t trying to make an educational toy. We just tried to put into the block those principles that nature uses to create its awesome diversity of forms. We wanted to make a toy that gives kids the freedom to make whatever they want. This is all about liberation. We wanted to make a revolutionary toy.

Our square block can be hinged together to make triangles- so it can make prisms. And because it can make prisms the block can be the seed of more complicated geometric shapes. It is a pattern generator- a fractal seed structure.

Heather: The hinge makes curves possible. That’s really the trick to Lux.

Mike: We can make jellyfish. We can make fabric. We connect our blocks together and you can make chain mail and wear it. It conforms to your body. It can imitate squishy objects. People can’t believe it. They grab it and they squeeze it and it moves in their hand. But it’s all solid plastic.

Q: What sort of instructions will come with Lux?

Mike: We’re big believers in free play, but we do want to teach people how to use our blocks.

Heather: Our web site will have video tutorials and demonstrations of some of the models you can build. The videos will mostly feature children making things with Lux.

Mike: It’s hard to visually show in drawings what the blocks do. You have to see it to believe it. You can make a science fair project or construct a building or a robotic platform. That’s the thing about Lux. It’s not two-dimensional. It’s a dynamic experience.

Q: Please tell us about your theory of everything and how it relates to Lux.

Mike: I’m a fan of the architect Peter Pierce who has a theory called Minimum Maximum: minimum inventory, maximum diversity. He said that nature optimizes. With a limited amount of material, nature makes everything.

In creating Lux our problem was, how do you make a single building block that can generate the most things? So my theory of everything was to see how that worked in nature and then I used that theory to invent the toy.

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who was a nineteenth century contemporary of Darwin, wrote a book called On Growth and Form. It had a huge influence on me. Thompson looked at the claws of lizards and at the backbones of whales and found the exact same structural patterns.

They’re unrelated animals. How could they all have the same structures if they’re not related? He realized there were other physical forces at work in nature besides natural selection.

Is it a coincidence that snail shells and leaves have a lot in common with each other? Or sunflowers and spirals, or sunflowers and the veins in a butterfly’s wings? Why should that be?

So that’s the theory of everything. We found the universal ordering element in the universe and made a toy out of it.

Heather: There have been a lot of thinkers who have gone down this same path. Michael studied these different scientists who promoted a similar idea. Lux distills those ideas and makes them contemporary. We just boiled a lot of other smart people’s ideas into a smart toy.

Q: What are some of the most fun, interesting or surprising things you have built with Lux?

Heather: The snap-and-lock hinge gives it amazing structural integrity. Mike was able to create a tower that reached an eleven-foot ceiling and it was never in danger of tipping over.

Mike: You can make a ball and kick it around the room.

Q: I can envision kids playing with it at home and in school in art and science. How else would you describe its benefits?

Heather: I have a friend who is a physical therapist. She found that Lux could be used for cognitive sequencing exercises and to facilitate understanding of geometric shapes and patterns and to improve fine motor skills.

She also felt that it was very helpful for some of her patients with autism. It helped to have small manipulatives that they could hold in their hands. The blocks helped with focus. So those were some of the benefits that she identified for us.

Mike: Occupational therapy is another potential use; people who need to coordinate hand movement. The block is a tactile experience. It can imitate your fingers because the blocks are jointed similarly. It’s a stimulating activity. It’s very three-dimensional and dynamic. It also connects your hands to your mind in a huge way because it’s very sculptural.

Heather: We’ve had some lovely, serendipitous endorsements. One was during a stay at a friend’s house in Chicago. We woke to the sound of their four year-old, who was up before everyone else, snapping the blocks together. He played for at least an hour.

Another time, we were seated next to a retired architect at an Easter Seals fundraiser. Mike had Lux blocks in his pocket and shared them with this gentleman. He loved them so much he took them home to his wife who runs a Montessori preschool. She loved them and his grandchildren couldn’t stop playing with them.

Mike: I thought it was amusing because Montessori and Froebel were buddies. They were both revolutionary educators. Lux is a very Montessori-esque kind of technology.

Heather: We’ve had wonderful interactions that let us know we’re on the right path.

Q: What would you advise someone who dreams of becoming an inventor? So many people have ideas, but that’s where it ends.

Mike: Know the problem that you’re solving, especially if it’s a problem that other people share. The problem we were trying to solve went back to my childhood. I was a frustrated Lego kid. My Legos wouldn’t make the Starship Enterprise because the little arms would fall off and it couldn’t make cylinders. I knew that I wasn’t the only kid out there who was frustrated with Lego and other kinds of blocks.

Heather: You have to realize the risk. We made a substantial personal financial investment in this. I have friends who are accountants who think I am crazy. They would never do something like this. But I think life is too short not to act on a good idea.

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