Domino’s tries to spice up its image with pizzas that look like a Batman villain or a colorful, cool-looking delivery car. It has even teamed up with crowd-sourced auto designers to create a Domino’s version of the Chevrolet Spark, a small, urban runabout that can hold 80 pizzas and deliver them to customers within 25 minutes. But these initiatives are not enough to make up for the company’s problems with leadership and lack of effective strategies. Its sales are slipping, and its stock has fallen from $27 per share to less than $1 per share in recent months. In addition, the company has incurred $943 million in debt, and its long-term growth potential is uncertain.
Traditionally, domino sets include 28 small, oblong pieces marked with 0-6 pips on each half. They’re used to play games that involve blocking one’s opponents or scoring points by matching a player’s tiles against those of the opponent. Some of these games are adaptations of card games, and were popular in areas where religious prohibitions against playing cards were in effect. Other popular domino games include bergen and muggins, in which players count the pips on their tiles to determine winning or losing scores.
A player or group of players can also use dominoes to create intricate, decorative art. Depending on the artist’s design, domino art can be straight lines, curved lines, grids that form pictures when they fall, 3D structures, and more. Some artists even combine dominoes into sculptures and installations that are meant to evoke particular feelings or inspire thought.
The most basic domino set is made up of a “stock” or “boneyard” of 28 tiles that are shuffled and then drawn in turn by the players. Each player draws seven tiles until he or she has a set of matches that contain the same number of pips as a domino in the hand of an opponent. The game then continues until one player is left with no more tiles to draw.
Each domino has potential energy (the potential to convert to kinetic energy, or the energy of motion) stored in it. When the first domino falls, much of this energy is transmitted to the next domino, providing the push it needs to fall over. The rest of the energy spreads out from there, passing to other dominoes in a chain reaction that lasts until all the dominoes are knocked over.
Dominoes can be created from a wide variety of materials. In addition to the traditional bone and ivory, sets can be made from silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (MOP), ebony or another dark wood; metals like brass or pewter; ceramic clay; or plastic. The MOP and ebony sets are typically more expensive than polymer sets.
As Hevesh builds her mind-blowing domino setups, she uses a process similar to the engineering-design approach. To make sure each section of the installation works as intended, she tests it separately, filming it in slow motion to ensure every piece moves precisely when and how it should. Once she’s confident that each part of the display is working perfectly, Hevesh puts it all together, starting with the biggest 3-D sections and then adding lines of flat arrangements.