alchymista:

Ugly Gravity Stools Created with Giant Magnet

These eyesores aren’t going to take home any design awards for style. But I bet that physicists and other science types would love to have one in the office because they’re created by extruding plastic with a super-sized magnet.

But their creator, Jólan van der Wiel, hasn’t come up with some revolutionary new type of plastic that’s attracted to magnets. Instead, like with ferrofluids, when mixing up the raw ingredients Jólan adds iron filings which causes the soft plastic to be extruded and pulled up towards a powerful magnet. Which is how the unique and random design of the stool’s legs are created.

Thanks to the randomness of quantum dynamics (and whatever other science that makes magnets work) no two stools end up being the same. So they’re kind of like gigantic snowflakes, with ugly spiny designs instead of the elegant symmetry of mother nature.

View the video of their creation below: