About this project
Lego meets Origami, but better
Troxes are triangular, interlocking building bricks. They were designed at the MIT Media Lab as a medium for geometric play beyond the boxes and right angles that are so common in most building toys. Troxes exercise and deepen spatial thinking, and allow for the construction of objects as beautiful as they are unusual.
The Trox Family
Meet the Trox family: Tetra, Octa, and Icosa. Each Trox is built from the same pieces, and the resulting shape depends only on how many pieces are used.
Every member of the Trox family can be combined with every other, by aligning their faces and interlocking them.
Putting together your first Trox is a puzzle, but after practice, they become quick and easy to build.
Design for the Ages
Troxes are designed for ages 6 and up. The final forms are elegant enough to keep on your desk, or design a sculptural centerpiece for the table.
Troxes are made from Plike, a soft-touch paper that almost feels like plastic. The specific paper comes in a small variety of colors, so they are shown here with the colors available. I would love to pick a custom color palette for the Troxes and with high enough volumes, I can put the decision for colors in your hands!
Thinking Outside the Box
Our toys shape how we think. If rectangular building blocks dominate our play, we reinforce arbitrary limits on spatial thinking. That’s unfortunate, because unlike our toys, the world isn’t governed by right angles, and the ability to think deeply about space is profoundly valuable. Spatial thinking is critical to building any physical object, playing any sport, moving safely through the world, all visual art, and has been known, now and then, to alter human history.
As just one example, James Watson and Francis Crick used spatial thinking (and erector-set-like models) to deduce the structure of DNA. It lead to the discovery that DNA carries the human blueprint and gave birth to genetics (source). That’s not the only example of out-of-the-box spatial thinking leading to Earth-shattering insight (for example Einstein is famous for arriving at his theories by thinking in pictures), but I won’t belabor the point.