This project is an investigation addressing the question: How can we design with uncertainty in material stock? What began as a consideration of masonry, quickly took on more creative and humorous applications. What would toy blocks or saltine crackers look like as tightly packed assemblies?

The first step towards a future of irregular assemblies is understanding how materials might pack into any desired larger geometry. The reassembly of a broken, small-scale object into a new form is as much a computational problem as it is a design problem. Instead of optimizing a solution to reduce gaps, we wrote a script that gives the user control over a variety of variables. The spacing of gaps, order of units, degrees of rotation, size of library and bounding geometry are all up to the user. The gaps are then not viewed as a problem, but as intentional opportunities for design. Skewers, strings, dowels, grout, and dry stack techniques can all be considered as potential connectors.