JAVIER REYNA

 A Moment in the Sky

A Moment in the Sky is a tabletop, kite-flying toy for indoor use. It is meant to get a smile out of someone through an engaging experience as the user plays with a butterfly moving fluidly through the air. It uses an unusual blend between an automaton and a kite for delighting people. Moving pieces in automatons tend to be grounded to their mechanisms through rigid links and maintain a repeatable, exact path. A Moment in the Sky juxtaposes this by allowing a degree of variation as a result of wind flow, user input, and a non-rigid link. Likewise, the short leash by which the kite is held sharply contrasts the traditional idea of long strings used to fly the kite from afar.

Design Process

The first step to this was figuring out if I could even get a kite to fly at a small radius and by having it move through the air rather than the air through it. I spent a good chunk of the weekend learning how to fly a kite and reading about what makes one fly.

Manufacturing Process

Since I had no prior experience with woodworking and I wanted to develop those skills, I used the ShopBot as my primary tool for creating the hexagonal box used to fly the kite. Each of the side panels was milled on the ShopBot, a CNC router, using a 1/32” end mill for the finishing pass and either 1/8″ or 1/16″ end mills for larger sections. I sought to create an organic pattern with small, intricate details that would have normally taken hours to carve by hand. While the top portion of the pattern has a bird taking flight and leaving its nest, the bottom pattern shows a bird returning to the branch holding its eggs; it represents the cycle that continues until its offspring are ready to take flight.