Kids take a prototype of the final design for a test-drive.

This was a dream job for me:

Working with an organization that provides an essential public service (one that I use almost daily) to create human-scale art that encourages play.

The only hard parameters were that the mat had to be approachable from any side and it had to incorporate KC Metro yellow.

This is me on my kitchen floor after turning in the initial sketches.

I got the feedback that there needed to be more destinations and a greater variety of roads and pathways so I taped down some paper to give myself a feel for the actual physical scale of the piece and started modifying the Garden Bugs Bee-Line sketch that they had selected.

An early sketch

I got to research the many different transit options available to us here in King County and was given free reign to visually explore all the different ways people (or bugs or aliens) might travel through their cities.

Where do space kids catch the bus?

Do caterpillars commute?

How do roads work in space?