We were supposed to create a mosaic. Not just any mosaic, but one built from pieces with different shapes. The idea was to show that you can create something fantastically beautiful out of diversity and variation. The strength of the mosaic was that things were not alike. Irregularity and difference were the whole point.

To make this possible, we created a system for producing the pieces of the mosaic. The goal was practical: we needed a way to produce enough pieces to actually build the mosaic. Over time, this system was streamlined and optimized. The main measure of success became how many pieces we could produce.

The way we achieved this was by making all the pieces the same. Same shape, same form, same structure. From the perspective of efficiency, this made perfect sense: identical pieces are easier and faster to produce. But from the perspective of the original idea, it quietly destroyed what we were trying to do. We wanted a mosaic that drew its beauty and strength from difference, and we ended up with a system designed for sameness.

At some point, we noticed that the result did not match the original vision. So we tried to fix it in a simple way: we painted the pieces in slightly different colors. That gave us some variation, but only on the surface. The pieces still had the same shape; they only looked different because of the paint. The diversity had become cosmetic instead of structural.