Sometimes, inventions happen quite by accident.

Mechanical sculptor Arthur Ganson, who is lecturing at 7 p.m. Thursday in the College of Design’s Kocimski Auditorium, knows this well.

It was during a stroll through a street fair in Austin, Texas that Ganson came up with the idea for the award-winning children’s toy, Toobers and Zots.

Toobers and Zots are a foam construction toy. Zots are shapes stamped out of square, colored material that have holes for the Toobers, or long foam tubes, to slide into.

“It was really a fortunate accident,” Ganson says. “I was setting up an exhibit at the Austin Children’s Museum and decided to take a break. After a couple beers, I came across an interesting site; a squiggly line in space.”

Ganson says he walked up to the vendor selling those squiggly lines and looked them over.

“It was a case of mistaken identity,” Ganson says. “What I thought was a piece of foam with wire in it was really a long, skinny balloon.”

Ganson says this was a case of his mind creating something he thought was real but was actually something else.

The best children’s toys allow children to create things in their own minds, Ganson says. Adults try too hard when creating toys for children and can actually get in the way of creativity.

“Young kids can create many things out of a cardboard box,” Ganson says. “Those boxes can become anything in their minds. The natural state of a child’s mind is to be creative.”

During his formative years, Ganson says he realized he had a knack for building. He discovered what he thought would be his life’s work — medicine — in one of his favorite toys, Play-Doh. He says he would create realistic people, complete with arteries and veins, and then stage accidents to take them apart again. Medicine was the path that Ganson originally pursued, until he rediscovered his love for building while attending college at the University of New Hampshire. Ganson says he decided to become an art major while at the same time taking pre-medicine courses, which was not considered a major at the University of New Hampshire.

Ganson says he started to see artistic beauty in the machines he was building. He says he used his love of engineering to cross over into the world of art and vice-versa.

“Sculpting, to me, gave me a task along the same line of maybe what I would have been doing as a surgeon. I liked working with a variety of materials in a complex, or delicate way to create very fragile machines. I used art to transcend the machines of engineering.”

Ganson says the process of creating works of art should be personal to each creator.

What: “A Personal Exploration of Engineering”

Where: Kocimski Auditorium, College of Design

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Cost: Free