When Lily Hevesh was 9 years old, she began playing with her grandparents’ classic 28-piece set of dominoes. She loved the thrill of setting up the tiles in a straight or curved line, flicking them and watching everything fall in a satisfying cascade. Today, Hevesh, 20, makes a living as a professional domino artist. Her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers and she’s worked on team projects involving hundreds of thousands of dominoes. She even holds a Guinness World Record for the most dominoes toppled in a circular arrangement, a feat that took several nail-biting minutes.

Like the playing cards of which they are a variant, dominoes are small rectangular blocks with an identity-bearing face on one side and a blank or patterned face on the other. The identifying faces are marked with an arrangement of dots called “pips,” similar to those on dice. Typically, each domino has a number of pips equal to its value, but some have no pips at all.

Dominoes are used for a variety of games, the most common being positional games in which each player places one domino edge to edge against another, so that their adjacent sides match or form some specific total (such as 5 to 5, for five-points). The value of the first domino is established by counting its pips, and each subsequent domino is added to this value in the same way. The player who reaches this total wins the game.

In a broader sense, domino can mean an event that triggers a series of events with significant consequences, such as the collapse of a business or an economic downturn. The domino effect is also sometimes used to describe the effect of an action on a larger group or organization, such as a political movement or an international crisis.

When Eisenhower was asked about the prospect of a communist domino effect in South Asia, he emphasized the importance of supporting Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam and of supporting non-communist forces fighting a civil war in Laos to prevent a spread of communism. His successor, John F. Kennedy, increased the commitment of U.S. resources to this containment effort in the 1960s and reaffirmed his belief in the domino theory.

Domino Art

When Hevesh plans a new domino setup, she follows a version of the engineering-design process that starts with considering the theme or purpose of the installation. Then, she brainstorms images or words to incorporate in the design. Finally, she creates a draft of the plan on paper. She may draw arrows to indicate the direction of the dominoes and mark off the dimensions on the sheet of paper to help her visualize the final design.

When Hevesh knocks over her creations, she is applying the same principles that she uses to plan the setups. The first domino has inertia—the tendency to resist motion unless an external force is applied—but once it begins to fall, much of this potential energy converts to kinetic energy and provides the push needed to topple the next domino. Then, the process repeats itself until the last domino falls.