Reading Mobiles

This is a sketch for a new mobile that's in the works. All the shaded areas will be painted rainbow colors, and the dotted lines are lengths of monofilament. Here, I'm playing with a number of ideas:

• Movement: Clumps of bubbles in a bucket of soapy water tend to move in a complex way. There's the spinning of the bubble islands around their own centers, but on top of that, the islands themselves orbit around the edge of the bucket. I decided to try to reproduce this circle-within-a-circle pattern (like the ancient Greek model of planetary motion) in my mobiles by using a larger number of independent sections. I think the spacing between the sections will have to be wider than I've drawn them to catch the wind better. I may also use ball bearing swivels to attach the monofilament (in order to loosen the movement), although this would also erase any "default" arrangement for the different pieces.
  
• Interacting mobiles: I'm also introducing more variation within a single mobile. In the past, I would design homogeneous, tightly-organized compositions that expressed a single thought. Here, I'm trying to tell more of a story by allowing the different sections to interact with each other. Hopefully, it will look like a conversation is taking place as they march around each other.
  
• Engaging the audience: When you walk into a room with a mobile, you're not seeing the history of what happened up to then. The mobile was moving around long before you appeared, and you're just catching the story halfway though. What if each viewer could hear the story from the beginning? There would have to be a way to press a "reset" button, and that's what the piece with the hand is for. Even if viewers do not physically push on the hand to launch the mobile (as I intend), it serves as a visual starting point for taking in the mobile.
  
• Letterforms and signage: Reading about font design and the use of lettering in public spaces has led me to refine the imaginary letterforms I've been using (see here for example). The stems of each letter are now terminated with softer corners (although they look like tube socks in the drawing), and the stripes suggest where the pen strokes might begin and end. I'm going for a visual flow in my "words". I also like the symbolic, instructional quality of the hand. It's like a "Don't Walk" sign, except that, here, it is really an invitation to participate.