SOLVE: Puzzle Design Exhibit at the Design Museum of Chicago offers a bevy of viewable and interactive puzzles and puzzling games. The exhibit, which may appear to be of modest size at first, can provide a few hours of entertainment and mind-bending puzzle play for visitors of all ages. The exhibit is created in partnership with the Mystery League, a gamebuilder and puzzle event organizer.
The exhibit features displays that enable you to use many puzzle-solving skills, such as re-creating a Lego puzzle box, drawing your own Little Monsters, and trying to imagine what your grandparents did with a Ouija board.
The SOLVE exhibit is organized around core skills that are often employed by puzzle designers: Observation, Correlation, Pattern Recognition, and Computational Thinking. The exhibit assigns colors to each attribute, which allows the exhibit design to connect examples of each. Featured objects and stories illustrate each of these skills, and give the solver a framework to use when encountering puzzles in the exhibit and in their own lives.
The Little Monsters exhibit allows visitors to create their own Little Monsters, which are hung in the museum’s Gallery of Little Monsters. ("While technology is a crucial part of design, sometimes pen and paper are still the best tools.") The trick is that your monster should utilize letters of the alphabet in its design. This is an example of Pattern Recognition, represented by the color blue in the exhibit. Little Monsters is designed by Sarah Leadbetter and Nathan Fung of Miskatonic University, a game experience started in the 1980s in the Bay area and hosted in Boston in 2019.
Masquerade, designed by Kit Williams, is an “armchair scavenger hunt,” which provides many layers of clues and riddles to be found in a complex image (as in the exhibit) or in a portable format like a book. Masquerade is coded red for Correlation.
The Lego exhibit provides Legos of various sizes and colors and asks you to recreate a Lego puzzle that appears on the table enclosed in a clear box. Visitors, of course, can build their own Lego creations too.
An example of Computational Thinking (yellow) is shown in the exhibit with examples of clocks, codes and ciphers. A code uses words that others can understand and have a new meaning if you know the code. For instance, “10-4” means “yes, I understand.” Morse Code, a telegraph signaling system, and Braille, a writing system used by and for blind persons, are well-known ciphers.
And that Ouija board. It’s a vintage game, often called a spirit board or a divining board, and still available from Hasbro. People believe you can ask the board a question and the planchet (the piece on top of the board, with players’ fingers lightly placed on it) will move around the board to provide an answer in letters and numerals, “yes” or “no.” What will the Mystifying Oracle reveal to you? Yes, people believed that the planchet moved on its own. And perhaps it does. The Ouija board is coded red for Correlation.
If you happen to find an old Ouija board in your grandmother’s attic, this video explains how to ask Ouija to answer your questions.
The museum offers an additional challenge; the exhibit is a metapuzzle in itself. An instruction sheet tells you how you can look for a series of three clues hidden throughout the exhibit and put them together as a three-word phrase to finish the quest.
SOLVE: Puzzle Design Exhibit will be on view at the Design Museum of Chicago, a storefront at 72 E. Randolph St., through March 31. Museum admission is free and it’s open daily from 10am to 5pm.
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