Domino, the game of laying down a row of dominoes and then flicking one to knock them over, has long fascinated children and adults alike. As a metaphor, the domino effect is a powerful tool for understanding how focused energy can help us achieve goals. The key is finding the right dominoes—tasks that advance your larger goal and can naturally influence other activities.
When you’re designing a domino setup, it helps to think like an engineer. Each domino has potential energy that’s stored until it’s pushed. Then, the potential energy converts to kinetic energy, the energy of motion. This energy then travels to the next domino, giving it the push it needs to fall. And so on, until the last domino falls.
Lily Hevesh, 20, has been fascinated by dominoes since she was 9. “My grandparents had the classic 28-piece set and I’d spend hours just setting them up in straight or curved lines, or even creating grids that formed pictures when they fell,” she says. “When I was about 12, I started posting videos of my setups online.” Now Hevesh is a professional domino artist, creating massive domino setups for events and movies, including the Katy Perry album launch. She uses a variation of the engineering-design process to create her amazing setups, which can involve hundreds of dominoes and take days to set up.
Hevesh starts each design with a clear vision of the final outcome. “When you look at it, it should be a mind-blowing setup,” she says. She then considers how she can achieve the desired results, whether that’s a line of dominoes that form a picture or stacked walls of 3-D dominoes. She also considers the materials she’ll use and how they might affect the way the dominoes topple. For example, plastic dominoes on a smooth surface will be more slippery than wooden ones on rough flooring.
The most common domino sets feature 28 tiles with numbered ends. Larger sets add tiles with more pips, increasing the number of unique combinations of ends and the total number of pieces. Some sets include more readable Arabic numerals instead of pips to make them easier for younger players to identify.
As Hevesh builds her designs, she carries out repeated tests on each part of the setup to make sure everything works correctly. Once she’s satisfied that each section is ready, she begins putting the sections together. She focuses on the largest, 3-D sections first. She then moves on to the flat arrangements and finally the dominoes that connect each of those sections together.
Regardless of whether you’re a pantser who writes off the cuff or a plotter who creates detailed outlines, plotting your manuscript will ultimately come down to answering one simple question: What happens next? Using the domino effect as a framework can help you plan and execute your story in a way that will keep readers engaged. This graphic was created by Gartner, Inc. and should not be reproduced without its written consent. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of individual researchers and do not constitute a professional advice or recommendation.