The Art of Dominoes
The word domino may be familiar to you from a board game or the restaurant chain that bears its name. But did you know that the concept behind this family of gaming objects is much more than a simple chain reaction? In fact, the domino effect can actually topple things over that are one-and-a-half times larger than the pieces themselves!
When you set up a domino, the unmoving ones at the front have inertia: they will resist motion until a force comes along to tip them over. When that happens, they convert their potential energy into kinetic energy (the energy of motion), and some of that energy gets passed on to the next domino in the line, allowing it to push over itself and all the others that follow. This continues until all the dominoes have fallen.
Dominoes come in all shapes and sizes, from straight lines that form pictures when arranged in the right order to grids that are used to build structures like towers and pyramids. You can even create your own artwork by using dominoes to design 3D structures!
Like playing cards, of which they are a variant, dominoes bear identifying marks on one side and blank or identically patterned on the other. The identifying marks, called “pips,” are similar to those on the face of a die; some squares are marked with an arrangement of numbers, while others are blank (indicated in our listing below by a zero).
In the dominoes game, players make plays off the ends and sides of doubles. The first player who makes a play that results in a score—a multiple of five on the ends or sides—is the winner. There are many variations of the game, and some involve a single player attempting to win all the opponents’ remaining dominoes.
Hevesh, who is known for her mind-blowing domino creations, follows a version of the engineering-design process when she plans an installation. She considers the theme or purpose of an installation, brainstorms images or words that may help convey it, and then determines what type of dominoes will work best for her setup. She also calculates how many dominoes she’ll need for her design and draws a plan to guide her work.
For authors, this idea of planning out scenes to make sure they logically connect and impact the scene that’s coming up is a good analogy for the Domino Effect. If you’re a pantser, as some writers are, and don’t write detailed outlines of your plot ahead of time, it can be easy to end up with scenes that—like the domino in the picture above—are at the wrong angle or have no logical impact on the scene ahead of them. If so, you might be better off with a tool like Scrivener to help you weed out unnecessary or repetitive scenes.