When a British engineer named Denys Fisher introduced the first Spirograph set at a toy fair in 1965, he tapped into a demographic of non-artists who really wanted to create art. Those sprocketed ...

Remember the Spirograph toys you had when you were a kid, which let you draw mathematically precise hypotrochoids and epitrochoids (or, as I called them, “neat shapes”) without cracking a sweat? What ...