Pin Art

Pin Art — also sold as Pinpressions, or simply a pinscreen — was created by the American artist Ward Fleming. It grew out of his pin-array work connected to San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum around 1980, and the vertical three-dimensional image screen that became the commercial toy was patented, with its U.S. patent issued in 1987.

The mechanism is beautifully simple: thousands of thin pins sit in a grid, each free to slide independently, held in place only by friction against its neighbors. Push any object against one side — a hand, a fist, a face — and the pins displace to trace its exact contour, holding a crisp 3D relief on the opposite side until you flatten them and start again. The original toys used metal pins, which gave that signature silvery shimmer (and bent if you were too rough); later versions switched to sturdier plastic.

Through the late '80s and '90s it was a staple of museum gift shops, gadget stores like Sharper Image, and novelty-shop shelves everywhere — an "executive" desk toy that was really just an excuse for every kid to squish their face into it. It's often confused with a separate, older device: the 1930s pinscreen used for animation by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. That's a different lineage entirely — the desk toy is Ward Fleming's, and it's still sold as a classic science-store novelty today.