Project 1: Garapon

The first project I worked on was a Japanese-style lottery box called a Garapon. Garapon are typically octagonal boxes that, when turned, drop a colored ball from a hole in its side. The color of this ball indicates the rarity of the corresponding prize. For example, a white ball is very common, and usually means either no prize or something very small and cheap, while the gold ball is equivalent to winning the lottery, and gives the player a very large or expensive prize. Usually, Garapon have their prizes out for display to entice players with the biggest prize possible.

The Garapon plays off of the design principle of knowing what we could potentially earn through an action, and thus being motivated to do it. This principle is evident in many media forms, especially in Japanese games that use the mechanic called ‘gacha’. ‘Gacha’ refers to when we pay a small fee to earn something unique and rare. The chances of acquiring the rare item are low, but players are unaware of that and so are willing to spend more for the rare moment of success. We see this in capsule machines and in video games with loot box concepts. For this reason, I decided to have instead of small colored balls that corresponded to a prize, capsules that contained the prizes themselves, to create a more contained experience. I was further inspired by my initial project of creating small lottery envelopes to create the same experience of anticipation and either frustration or joy.

Irene Wei, a furniture designer (BFA ’19, RISD) and I collaborated on the Garapon project. She created the machine, including the mechanics and box, working tirelessly to help me, and going above and beyond my original vision. I made the 3D models of the prizes, and 3D printed them in various materials to correspond to rarity. I then put them in capsules with architecture moss to conceal the prizes (to prolong the anticipation beyond just rolling the machine and taking the prize immediately).

We started out by researching the structure of Garapons. After Irene made a test prototype, she then started making the box itself. I created a dragon scale laser cut pattern to adorn the box, to unify it under my Degree Project title of Ryuu no Kioku (A Dragon’s Memories). This proved to be very useful

As Irene was making the machine, I started to think about the prizes that would go inside. When I thought of prizes, I often thought of how they were tiered or ranked by rarity or worth. I then made a fairly unlikely connection: With bug hunting. My late friend and I would go hunting for bugs, hoping to find something new or rare to catch. Grasshoppers were really easy to find, as long as you knew where to look. Dragonflies were really fast and harder to catch. Cicadas were everywhere, but finding one alive was definitely harder than it seemed, considering their short lifespan. Praying mantises were really rare, and we only caught a few during our childhood. Finally, there was the elusive beetle. We could never find one in our neighborhood, we would have to go hunting in a forest fairly far away, making it the rarest bug of all. In this sense, the bugs acted as prizes with different tiers. I decided to make bugs out of a media to put in my capsules.

Initially, I wanted to make the bugs out of origami. After attempting to make them, I realized that the more complex bugs like the beetle were too complex to allow me to mass produce them for a 1 inch diameter capsule. There was also the problem of its fragility, thus making their worth seem less to people who got them from the capsules. I scrapped that idea, and instead 3D modeled them using Cinema 4D, and opted to 3D print them to give them a more lasting and collectible feel. After learning to 3D model and create this bugs, the next step was to consider the materials I would print them in. Originally, I was going to have the capsules have color on them to indicate rarity like in traditional Garapon machines. However, my order of colored capsules did not arrive, which was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to order clear capsules, and then apply the colors to the bugs themselves. This helped build up the anticipation of the player so they were completely surprised when opening a nondescript capsule, and it applied the rarity of an object directly to it as opposed to its packaging. For color and material choice for the 3D printed bugs, I modeled them after the color rarities found often in games (taking advantage of the preconceived notions people already have). The order of colors, from common to rare, are: Green, blue, red, and gold.

I 3D printed a small batch of bugs in black to remain a secret prize as well. For the gold bug (the beetle), I had it printed in platinum and then gold plated with 18k gold. This would make the bugs have more tangible worth when holding them. After this, I put them in architectural moss and then in a capsule. The moss concealed the bugs from view at first glance, prolonging the anticipation and making the emotion felt afterwards stronger. It also protected the bugs from breaking in the capsule while being rolled around in the Garapon machine (the bugs were only 20 mm or so across dimensions, making them breakable if handled roughly). I stress tested the capsules by throwing them on the floor, and found that the bugs were adequately protected.

Once I packaged the prizes, it was time to test them in the machine. Irene had finished gluing up the box, welding the internal mechanism which would limit the number of balls falling out of the hole, and had mounted it on a stand that was attached to a platform. I created a pattern for a pond, which was to be routed from the platform, to give the capsules a place to land in. After this, we tested the machine. There were several areas we had to solve for. The first was that the pattern and the direction of turning (which was counter clockwise) did not match, and so we solved this by laser cutting arrows from ash veneer to stick on the handle area to indicate to the audience. The second issue was that the handle did not lock and turn with the Garapon, so to solve it, Irene drilled a hole deeper in the middle supporting bar that held the handle, in order to lock it in place with a small pin. The final issue was that with the method of turning, the machine let go of two capsules at a time and would roll them into the pond as opposed to dropping them. This meant that people would have to move the Garapon at a steady speed, and it made us rethink the design of where the capsule should end up. Initially, Irene was sculpting a clay frog with its mouth open, in which the capsules would fall into. This was a reference to old machines from Japan, like seismic detectors, which would use dragon and frog motifs (in our case, the dragon scales and the frog sculpture). Instead, we decided to keep the frog (to add a unique flair and departure from traditional Garapon machines) at a smaller scale in the pond. This way it would also act as a stopper if the capsules dropped at a higher elevation by chance. Irene then had to attach the frog to the Garapon platform, so she added sand to create texture for the pond, and then casted the frog and pond in resin (for protection as well). With this, the Garapon was complete.

There were several reactions to my projects which I felt hit what I was aiming for. One was the fascination over the materiality of the bug prizes, and the craftsmanship of the Garapon. The material choice made the objects seem valuable, and the custom Garapon added to the effect.