Industrial designer Brady Whitney grew up on a cattle farm in Iowa, so he was taught from a young age how to work with his hands. This pedigree and a crazy amount of creativity led Whitney to launch the Codex Silenda project for his senior thesis at Iowa State University, a five-page 3-D puzzle book made completely out of laser-cut wood.
But you can’t just crack the book, flip through its pages, and call it a day: Each page is its own puzzle that needs to be unlocked before you can turn to the next one. (The puzzle pages consist of a Mechanical Iris, Rotating Maze, Geneva Gears, Paradox Sliders, and Cryptex Lock; see images of three of them below.) After solving each page, the reader will also find a portion of a short story about an apprentice in Leonardo Da Vinci’s workshop, so you get a little bit of knowledge to go with your brain-tease.
The Codex Silenda is just one of a number of projects Whitney has designed from scratch. Check out the rest of them—along with more detailed information about his thesis project—here. He also launched a Kickstarter for the project, which you can view here. Take a look at some of the blueprints for the book and its pages. At the bottom, watch Whitney’s Kickstarter video.
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