In late 2010 Dutch design studio HEYHEYHEY built a large-scale Rube Goldberg machine called Melvin the Magical Mixed Media Machine that interacted with viewers by uploading photos and videos of them to its own blog, Facebook and Twitter pages as it operated. A ‘robot’ with an online personality that corresponded to offline actions, Melvin was a huge hit.

Earlier this year HEYHEYHEY wanted to scale Melvin down a bit, so it could travel the world and send ‘its’ own postcards to interact with people while on the road. As opposed to its technologically advanced larger predecessor, the new Melvin speaks to the old art of letter writing and hopefully keeps the practice of sending traditional postcards a thing of the present.

So far, the machine has traveled from England to Milan. Here’s to great a project connecting people in old ways, after trying the new. Watch Mini Melvin in action in this extremely charming video below.

Melvin the Traveling Mini Machine