Is your dreary office cubicle in need of some spice? If so, a new book, Eccentric Cubicle, has your much-needed remedies. Featuring zany and interesting ways to pump some fun into your workspace, Eccentric Cubicle will improve your building and creative skills, while quickly turning your cubicle into an office hot spot. Author Kaden Harris — the unconventional mind behind Eccentric Genius — takes aspiring and die-hard do-it-yourselfers through a highly entertaining gamut of workplace-oriented projects. From desktop guillotines and crossbows to mood-enhancing effects and music makers, these interesting builds combine a wide spectrum of basic shop techniques, alternative materials and designs that are guaranteed to bring some fun into any office environment.

Specific projects include:

• Active Desktop: Over-engineered and cunningly executed, this postmillennial version of the classic French revolutionary guillotine is the last word in cigar accessories. Or desktop snack choppers.
• BallistaMail: This Greco-Roman missile (good for launching spears, javelins, and the occasional boulder) scales down to an intimidatingly powerful interoffice mail delivery system. Your memos will never be ignored again!
• Maple Mike: Because golfing is a stepping stone to boardroom success, make your own desktop simulation of the perfect golf swing in one easy-to-use/easy-to-build project.
• Haze-o-Matic 3000: Bring the “fog of war” to your contract negotiations. Build a mechanism that’s as inherently cool as a fog machine and mystify your co-workers!
• The Gysin Device: Harness your subconscious for enhanced creativity with this lucid dream induction device — all from the comfort of your own cubicle! Sitar not included.

Eccentric Cubicle offers far more than a collection of project “how-tos.” Filled with oblique industrial design, fabrication philosophies and sardonic social commentary, Eccentric Cubicle offers the reader encouragement to adapt, modify, and hack their way through their builds. “The book’s overall intent is to infuse the new-school Do-It-Yourself community with a therapeutic dose of slightly non-Euclidean engineering, classic shop techniques and surreally interpreted physics,” explains Harris. “The projects are intended to make people say, ‘It does WHAT?!’”

Tags: invention, hack, modification