Zen-Tense

It all began a long time ago, a bit more than 20 years actually, in the mid 90’s, at a party. I was working at Zono at the time, and I was having a bit to drink, chatting with Zono’s CEO, Ed Zobrist, and the Head of Software Engineering Jeff Fort, and their wives, in Jeff’s living room.

I was a Software Engineer and I had got to feeling a bit limited in my role, spending all of my time architecting software systems, writing code. I missed making physical things and creating new stuff. I had enough drinks in me to announce to the group that software engineering was too limiting and I wanted to do more, that I could do more – I could invent things and make toys, games, useful stuff.

Ed, who had worked previously at Mattel responded, “Okay Mr. Inventor, invent something right now.”

I glanced around, then reached forward and slammed my hand on the coffee table in front of us, exclaiming, “Custom coffee tables!” And the brainstorm began.

What would be creative about a custom coffee table? A gaming table, a robotic table…no, a calming table. Something you came to, with a drink perhaps, after a long day.

“What if you built an XY plotting mechanism into a coffee table to make a Japanese Zen garden inside? You could use software to run it and make designs, and sit around your table and have a beautiful, relaxing piece of art, and the whole mechanism would be hidden, so it looked like a magic finger was drawing in the sand.

”The conversation eventually moved on, but the idea stuck.

Shuffling Ahead

Over the next several years, I had other jobs, some focusing on software, some software and hardware, and the idea of the Zen coffee table languished in my inventor’s journal (something I suggest everyone keep – a journal of your ideas and wild, imaginative concepts – because you never know when it might be the right time to make it real).  

Then, in the late 90’s, I was visiting Laguna Beach and wandered into a curio shop where I saw the analog version of a mechanical desktop Zen garden – a disc of sand with a pointed plumb weight suspended on a long arm, swinging on a needle-point axis, to draw patterns in the sand.

In 2002 I shared the idea with Melissa, we experimented, we built some prototypes. We aimed to go big or go home from the start, but going full-scale first was the wrong direction. We spent too much time trying to make a large mechanism and ignored all the important things, like making sure it ran quietly and smoothly, selecting the correct materials, getting the lighting dialed in, etc. We had a few, barely functioning, prototypes but nothing that really inspired us.

I purchased higher quality parts, which were much smaller, to help keep costs under control, assuming we could solve for scale at some later time, and chose to focus on really proving out the concept. The new prototype was only 6 inches square, but would allow me to try dozens of different types of sand, powder, and chemicals, without having to use giant quantities just to rule nearly all of them out as not suitable.

Then, we started the experiments with sand. Seriously, we tried out at least 20 different things – sands, powders, metal filings (non-ferrous) and chemicals – to figure out which worked best. 

"What if you built an XY plotting mechanism into a coffee table to make a Zen garden inside..."

 Real sand was too rough, with irregular surfaces that scratched and ground into the surfaces of the box. Other sands were too smooth and wouldn’t hold the grooves to show the pattern, or else were too soft and the metal ball rolling around in it ground it to powder which then stuck all over everything. Static electricity was an issue – some of the powders would jump around and stick to the surfaces at the slightest bump.

I recalled a material we used in A-level physics class to create frictionless surfaces. It looked like white powder but was actually millions of ½ millimeter silicone balls, each super round and designed to roll smoothly between a stationary surface below and heavy metal objects placed on top. Thick metal discs would glide slowly, as though on ice, allowing us to verify the equations describing conservation of energy and momentum in inelastic collisions. Maybe those microscopic balls would flow around the bigger ball in Zen Table, rather than scratch and scrape, but where to find some?

I happened to find myself at a place called Dave & Busters one day, some people were playing a game I had never seen before, sliding what looked like a metal puck along a really long narrow table, trying to get close to a marker without sliding all the way off the end of the table. The puck’s movement seemed unnatural; they would slide much too far without much input from the person chucking. I asked around. The game was called shuffleboard, and apparently there was a powder the D&B employees would sprinkle on the table every now and again to make the puck glide smoothly. I didn’t get the chance to see what it was, but the name shuffleboard stuck.

It was a fascinating and frustrating odyssey to figure out where I could get hold of the materials. Getting samples of shuffleboard powder took me to a place called Barstools & Billiards in the Inland Empire. When I wandered in and asked if they had shuffleboard powder, they immediately asked, “What speed do you want?” which required a bit of explanation.

“What’s the smallest amount of the different speeds can I buy?” And away I went with six samples of different shuffleboard powders.

It turns out the base shuffleboard powder material is indeed the same micro silicone balls I had used in physics class, The different “speed” ratings correspond to the percentage of an impurity added, nut husks, designed to slow the shuffleboard puck down just a bit.

Speed one - the fastest - is pure silicone beads. Turns out, that was not the optimal sand for Zen Table; the round balls would not hold the shape of peaks and troughs, rolling back on itself to leave a level-ish wake where the big ball had moved through. The slowest speed powder looks more like sawdust than sand, and the husks eventually grind to a super-fine brown powder. Speed three turned out to be the happy medium, the perfect silicone-to-husk ratio that can hold its shape, look like fine sand, and pull the husk along with silicon balls to flow around the larger stylus ball, rather than get ground down by it.

Finally finding something that looked like sand and didn’t scrape or grind while the ball moved through it was a big deal in moving the Zen Table concept forward. In combination with the software I had written to create intricate spiral patterns and a rudimentary lighting scheme, enough pieces were in place to prove my vision.

The effect was stunning, beyond anything I had dared to dream all those years before. The precision of what was being sculpted before my eyes was captivating - the depth of the peaks and valleys brought a dimensionality and texture that you don’t get running simulations on a computer screen.  

The ball pushed a small front of sand ahead of it, around it, and left an obvious wake behind; a fragile, semi-permanent record of where it had been, interacting in unexpected ways as the ball pushed through an already richly-patterned area from the previous pass. This was new, I shared the results with close family and friends, and they were mesmerized as well. I knew this was something special.

I was also captivated by the realization that the potential for this thing, this art, had been there all along locked in my imagination and my invention journal, hinted at but not fully realized by my previous, clumsy full-scale attempts. But here it was, finally. It felt like lightning captured in a six-inch-square miniature bottle.

The full sized coffee table. I had to do it.

Leaping Forward

In my free time, I developed a new, much larger mechanism, building upon all that I had learned with the small prototype.

Melissa and I experimented with different types of metal balls and different sizes and shapes of magnets. Even after we found the proper material for the sand, getting the ideal ball diameter, to create the right width of carved furrows working with the right depth of sand...there were all sorts of variables that we spent ages dialing in just right.  

Lighting was another key factor, getting the best height above the sand, angle, brightness, distance to the glass, above which reflected light farther across the sand, different colored lights on the short sides and long sides to create contrast - every detail had to be exact.  The system contained a small computer I designed myself; writing its firmware to control the table as a stand-alone unit. This took considerable time, especially writing path planning and optimization so that the paths would be traced out smoothly and elegantly, rather than in short start-stop line segments.

Algorithmic paths and patterns are at the heart of what made the early results so captivating, but I also wanted it to be able to draw pictures, taking in photographs and interpreting them as sketches in sand. This proved to be a challenge, especially because you can’t instruct the mechanism to stop leaving a mark while it moves the ball from one location to another.

To get from one place to another invisibly you have to backtrack through existing paths and optimize entry/exit points. Otherwise, as you move from one part of an image to the next, the ball would leave distracting lines across the sand, possibly right across the middle of what you’ve just drawn. It took a while to get this right, but it is a piece of software for the system of which I’m extremely proud. 

Once the mechanism and control system were working right, I focused on turning it into a coffee table so we could get opinions from more people by having it in our living room rather than in my workshop. The build out into a full wood table would also give me an opportunity to find any weak points that failed after long periods of use, and it motivated me to find ways to get the mechanism running absolutely silent.

Through it all, there were frustrations and challenges, but I loved it. I was passionate about the project (still am, come to that), exhilarated with every challenge solved, and seeing the various size prototypes working was fantastic.

Present Tense

At this point, I was working as an Independent Contractor, writing code, consulting and working as a games architect. The flexibility of working from home let me push through and finally finish designing and building the first, fully-functional Zen Table.

It really was beautiful, and entrancing, and everyone who saw it fell in love.

I almost killed my phone making a video of the action with the phone taped to the ceiling – it and tabletop survived the phone’s six-foot plummet when the tape failed. 

Now that I had a functional product, the next question was, where did I go from there? My ultimate dream had been to make these tables available for anyone – and market it in a way that the average person could afford one instead of making a luxury item only the really rich could get hold of.  It was all heady and exciting.

An idea more than 20 years in the making, after so much work and trial and error, was so close to being real.

I didn’t know how to get a manufacturer interested in producing something like the Zen Table, but I knew about Kickstarter, a crowdfunding site for inventors and artists.

An angel investor who I had talked to suggested that I use it to determine whether there was any market for this type of product, and I made the decision to go for it – let the public tell me if they wanted a Zen Table, if they were enthusiastic enough about my idea to help make it a reality. 

Next Up: Zen-Tense: From Then to Now

The Kickstarter campaign, what happened after that, and how a dream can careen abruptly off track.

Note About This: This is the story of my inventing and creating the Zen Table – I’m posting it in several pieces to make it easier to tell.

It’s about having a dream, working hard to make it a reality, success, mistakes, stumbles and trips, failures, lessons learned, battles fought and the cost of still struggling on. I’m telling this story because it was pivotal to my life, and I think it has some valuable lessons in it for other inventors, creators and dreamers who want to make their ideas real.

In the spirit of being real, I’m going to be as up-front as possible about where I may have messed up or taken a wrong step – and equally honest about where other people may have had something to do with it. I hope you read, I hope you find my experience useful and I hope to hear from you if you have questions or if you want to share your story.

Cheers.