During the summer months, it's a safe bet you can find us underneath an umbrella or a shady tree, relaxing in a comfy chair. To us, certain chairs signify summer more than others... A chair with classic stripes gives off a preppy, summery feel that looks great in a garden or a patio. Wicker chairs universally scream summertime and are synonymous with front porches. For us, a summer seat has always been a rocking chair for relaxing and reading a book. Our new favorite find is Kay's Acapulco chair (complete with rocking feature). We love its design and colorful style with a patterned weave that is stunning.The last chair you purchased likely arrived fully assembled, but let’s be clear: It didn’t assemble itself. There’s only one chair in the world that can do that, and it’s way too small for you to sit on. This very special chair, standing upon a 15 cm by 15 cm footprint, is the work of Skylar Tibbits and his team at the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. You’ve seen Tibbits’ (and his researchers’) work before.
This is the same lab that made these programmable materials and created this self-assembling aerial installation out of balloons. The lab’s most recent project, Fluid Assembly Furniture, is an investigation into how structures might be able to autonomously assemble in uncontrolled environments like water. In the video you see six white blocks thrown into a tank. Turbulence shooting through the water jostles them around until eventually, after a good bit of random interaction, you see the pieces hook together to form a miniature chair. Viewed in time lapse, it looks easy enough, but getting materials to self-assemble isn’t simple. Every variable—the size, weight and geometry of the individual pieces, the force of turbulence, the amount of water, etc.—impacts how efficiently the chair builds itself. In this rough prototype, the chair is made up of six components. Each is embedded with magnets and has an unique connection point that allows it to latch onto another piece.
Think of it like a puzzle with the magnets acting as the attracting force. “At close proximity, each piece should easily connect with its corresponding component but never with another one,” explains Baily Zuniga, a student in the lab who led the research. The way the pieces eventually find each other is mostly a result of trial and error—pieces floating next to each other until they find their perfect match. It’s hard to tell from the video, but it took seven hours for the chair to fully assemble itself. Not lightning fast, but an impressive starting point. “Finding a way to make the pieces more interchangeable would increase the probability of the pieces finding their matches,” says Zuniga. “Thus resulting in a faster assembly.” Faster is good, but there’s a delicate balance between randomness and control at play in self-assembly. Exert too much control over the system and you’ll be stuck with a one-trick object. Allow too much randomness, and you lose the ability to dictate the final form at all.
“This project is somewhere in the middle,” says Athina Papadopoulou, a researcher in Tibbits’ lab. The chair project is more controlled than, say, the lab’s work on fluid crystallization, where 350 submerged spheres aggregate together without a formal shape. Still, there’s an element of not quite being able to govern what happens in the tank. In some ways, this is a good thing. Flexibility will allow an object to adapt, which could be a useful trait in situations where underwater infrastructure needs to self-repair, for instance. But in the context of assembling furniture or some other pre-determined design, efficiency is important. Right now, the team is gathering quantitative data on the project to get a better understanding of why certain materials and shapes work better than others. Eventually, the team plans to make a self-assembling chair that’s large enough humans to sit in and show parallel assembly with hundreds of chairs coming together simultaneously, but hang tight Goldilocks—that’s gonna take a lot more research and a much bigger tank.
It was Christmas in July when Dad brought home the silver Plymouth Fury station wagon. It meant that my brother, sister and I no longer had to fight over who had to sit in the middle of the back seat with their feet on the hump (where the drive shaft used to be). Someone got to ride in the rear-facing third seat, stretched out on the luxurious naugahyde, like Cleopatra on her chaise, napping or making faces at the passengers in the car behind us. This was a huge deal because summer meant vacation and vacation meant road trip. I was the oldest. I was the loudest. I got that back seat. One of our favorite locations was Lake George, the threshold to New York's Adirondacks. My parents had visited as newlyweds (they took a picture of him in the stocks at Fort William Henry). Attractions included Storytown USA, an amusement park that combined an area devoted to nursery rhymes with one simulating the Wild West. We prospected at Barton's Garnet Mines. The birthstone ring I purchased in the gift shop continues to occupy a special place in my jewelry box even though it turned my finger ogre-green that summer.
Accommodations were roadside motels with ice cold swimming pools or bungalows situated on the frigid lake. We went back with our kids and things hadn't changed much at all. Storytown's now a Great American theme park and a large hotel was constructed with an indoor water park, permitting swimming without the risk of hypothermia. The Mohican and the Minne Ha Ha, an authentic paddlewheeler, keep cruising the lake, operated by the Lake George Steamship Company, founded in 1817. The motels still line Route 9 and their pools are ringed by Solair chairs, the plastic bowls with holes that created monstrous grid patterns on my thighs in 1973. it's residual pool chair damage. It rained during most of our stay at Roaring Brook Ranch, but we took the kids on their first horseback rides, taught them how to play pool, and participated in the evening variety show. I volunteered as the hypnotist's victim. To this day, they've kept the details of that evening a secret. I love them for that.
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