Gravity Wave Backgammon

Gravity Wave, the company behind the recycled-plastic material, set the brief: take a single 1m × 1m sheet and increase its value. The challenge was as much conceptual as technical - what do you turn a flat sheet of recycled plastic into that someone would actually want, and pay for?

We chose to make a backgammon board, drawn by the material's visual character and by the quiet value of a good board - an object you'd happily look at for hours, on the table whether or not anyone's playing. It's the kind of everyday object that justifies being made well.

The rules left us one material and nothing else. A backgammon field is defined by alternating light and dark triangles - but with no inlays, no paint and no second material, we had no way to colour them. The board had to render its own pattern.

The answer was in the material itself. Milled down to between one and three millimetres, the recycled plastic lets varying amounts of light through it. By alternating the thickness across the surface and lighting it from behind, we used light alone to draw the entire backgammon pattern - the dark and light points rendered as differences in transmission, the playing surface left completely flat and smooth.

We prototyped in 3D and CNC'd early versions in wood - cheaper iterations to lock down the form and the playing-surface dimensions before committing the single 1m × 1m sheet we couldn't replace.

The finished board hides its cleverness: a flat, recycled-plastic surface that turns out to be lit from within, the whole game drawn in light rather than ink. The constraint - one material, no additions - became the feature.