Troels Fonsboel wanted a design concept that gave people the ability to create art that would fit their space and personalities. He is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund Wallz, a building puzzle for your wall.
Fonsboel started out with three design constraints: the art should be able to stick to almost every wall type, the art should be able to be moved or reconfigured, and the art must not damage the wall. With these constraints in place the EVA foam was chosen for the base material and different adhesives were tested for the best possible adhesion.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1521543395/wallz
The EVA foam has been tested at the factory where the Wallz cubes are produced and independently verified at a second lab to make sure that both the foam and adhesive are not harmful to humans. However, the possibility of a choking hazard exists so the product will be specified for children four and older.
An online design center will be built to house designs that can be built with the cubes, and to showcase designs that other users have built. That open source exchange of ideas gives this project another dimension and allows people to do more with Wallz than would be possible alone.
Wallz is an excellent example of using something simple in an innovative way for a very specific purpose. The idea that a developer didn't have the product (wall art) available in the way that he wanted (customizable and reconfigurable) isn't new. However, to see the developer create his own system and an open source structure to distribute the system to others is amazing.
The Kickstarter campaign runs until November 21, 2014. It's always interesting to see a funding campaign run in krones as opposed to dollars, and as of October 24 around 19,000 additional krones need to be raised for the project to receive funding. Rewards will be shipped between December 2014 and March 2015.