Unplugged tech: three-character classic

I find this ineffably elegant: Yu-Hsiang “Shaun” Chung, a student in a class called “Art for the Internet” at Parsons The New School for Design, created the “Movable Type Cube” by marrying Chinese characters with an anniversary-edition Rubik’s Cube made of wood. He was inspired by the graph typically used to lay out Chinese characters for students learning to write:

Chung writes that he wanted to celebrate China’s long printing history:

In 105 AD, Cai Lun invented the paper. In 200 AD, the Chinese invention of Woodblock printing produced the world�s first print culture. In 1040, Bi Sheng invented the first known movable type technology. Therefore, I want to use a Chinese text for my cube. The text I used for my cube is called �Three Character Classic.� It is a traditional Chinese text that teaches young children to be a good person in the society. The text is written in triplets of characters for easy memorization, which is perfect for the cube since the cube is 3 by 3 on every side. The text is written by Wang Yinglin during the Song Dynasty, so I used a font called �Song,� which is correspond to the Song Dynasty when a distinctive printed style of regular script was developed.

�isn’t that perfect?

Then Chung inks the cube to produce elegant printing:

I’m eager to know what new collocations of words can be made with successive twists of the puzzle.

[via Neatorama�but better, read Chung’s fuller and completely engaging write-up of the project here.]