Nervous System is a strange business. We are a computational design and digital fabrication studio known for things like a no-assembly 3D printed dress or designing 3D printed organs.
However neither of those things actually make any money. Monetarily we are primarily a jigsaw puzzle company. How did that happen?
So here’s a thread about jigsaw puzzles.
However, puzzles were originally made of wood and hand cut by an artist using a scroll saw. Jigsaw puzzles have a rich history going back to the industrial revolution. Individual artists had their own unique style and puzzles often included "whimsy" or figure pieces thematic to each puzzle. Being cut by hand, often with no pattern, each one was different. With the advent of mass production this art form was largely lost, though there is a small community still dedicated to the craft today
Here is an example from master puzzle maker John Stokes III
We found out about hand cut wooden puzzles while on vacation in Paris. We followed a guide book to a small shop called Puzzle Michele Wilson. In it a woman sat with a saw, cutting out puzzles as we perused the store. We were delighted and amazed. They specialized in a technique called "color cutting" where the cut of the puzzle follows the image, making it extra challenging
We loved the style and uniqueness of hand cut puzzles, and we thought we could use our techniques of computational design and digital fabrication to reinterpret this craft. Not simply trying to mimic what artists did by hand but to explore the spirit of this art form in new ways.
We created a series of one of a kind puzzles which are computationally generated and laser cut. The cuts are created in a simulation based on a crystal growth process called dendritic solidification and the images are generated by a fellow computational artist name Jonathan McCabe and were based on reaction diffusion. We even went out a limb and bought our first laser cutter, an Epilog Helix.
You can read more about our first puzzles here:
However, for years puzzles were not a major part of our business. They were my pet project. In fact, they weren't really something we talked about when discussing our work. Jigsaw puzzles just weren't very cool.
We still kept working on them though. One of the questions we asked was what can we do with our method of working that would be difficult or impossible to do by hand? This led to the "Challenge" puzzle, a puzzle I originally designed as a Christmas present for my brother. The puzzle has no image, no border, and there is a set of colored pieces scattered throughout the puzzle that pulls out to make their own mini sub puzzle. This puzzle within a puzzle is what is enabled by computation and digital fabrication that is otherwise impossible to create.
Jesse Louis-Rosenberg
Martin Ruskov