Google's homepage doodle today celebrates the birthday of Alexander Calder, an American artist best known for inventing the mobile.
Last year I wandered into a white room at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago full of Alexander Calder’s delicate “objects,” all beautifully balanced and proportioned, moving gently in the air currents like a whimsical metal forest. Calder took ordinary materials at hand—wire, scraps of sheet metal—and made them into brilliant forms, letting space and motion do the rest. As an engineer, I work with abstractions, too, so this really struck me.
But you kind of want to play with the things. They do not let you do that at museums.
So I coded up a very basic demo of a mobile and showed it to a friend, who showed it to one of our doodlers—and then this amazing thing happened: talented artists and engineers who liked the idea just started to help! What they ended up with is way cooler than anything I could have built on my own. I’m proud to work for a company where an idea like this can actually happen.