#HTE

Niklas Hagemann’s Sheets-of-Paper Chair, Held Together by Friction

The Shuffle Chair is an interesting furniture experiment by design engineer Niklas Hagemann. “Inspired by the idea that two telephone-books, when shuffled together, are virtually impossible to pull apart (see Mythbusters), I created a paper chair held together by the friction between individual sheets of recycled paper,” he writes.

“With a single paper clip to stop the bottom two pages from unravelling, the chair is held together entirely by the friction between the pages (~500).”

“Sketches showing how the paper slots onto the frame.”

“Tests with old newspapers proved the principle, a first frame prototype buckling under load, making the final steel frame, close-up of the pins which were inspired by the way paper slots into a ring-binder.”

“Chair assembly animation.”

Hagemann did the project back in 2012, when he was studying design engineering at the Royal College of Art. Today he’s a Research Fellow at MIT Senseable City Lab, where he’s working on latching and docking systems for autonomous boats.