Alizul: POLAR: THE WONDER MAGNETIC PEN

Wednesday, 2 October 2013

POLAR: THE WONDER MAGNETIC PEN

This Amazing Magnetic Pen Will Take Hours From Your Life
By Kyle VanHemert, Wired, 2 October2013.

Think about how many cumulative hours you’ve wasted with pens in your lifetime. You’ve spun them; you’ve drummed them; you’ve unscrewed them and launched their tops off like little rockets. The pen’s unimpeachable status as a tool needed to get things done lets it slide undetected into even the most oppressive fun vacuums - places like lecture halls and meeting rooms - whereupon it assumes its most vital function of giving you something to fiddle with. And when it comes to fiddling, this magnetic pen is a quantum leap beyond your standard plastic Bic.

Dreamed up by Canadian designer Andrew Gardner, it's made of 12 neodymium magnets.

Polar, as the wonder pen is called, is a writing implement made of 12 neodymium magnets. But according to Andrew Gardner, the man behind the design, distraction was never the goal. “It wasn’t intended to be something to fiddle with,” he says. “I don’t like calling it a toy.” Indeed, the unique design does offer some functional benefits. It allows for a stylus tip to be hidden in the body itself, for one thing. It also lets the owner customize the implement to his or her desired size. The pen, which can be pre-ordered for about US$40, was intended to be a “modular platform where you can add new tips and new cartridges,” Gardner explains. It’s “a really organic platform for creativity.”

It offers some functional benefits, like the ability to adjust its size and to conceal a stylus tip for a touchscreen.

But you have to imagine that the 8,000-some backers who have already pledged over a half a million dollars to the project saw something else when they looked at Polar. They had to have watched the clip showing all the things it can do - seeing all the mesmerizing magnetic structures it can transform into - and come to the obvious conclusion: This thing the Sistine Chapel of time wasting.

But it also lets the pen do some neat tricks.

Gardner, who works at Indiedesign in Waterloo, Ontario, has been fascinated with magnets since a young age. He’s been an avid disassembler of pens for just as long. When those two passions converged earlier this year, he knew he was onto something right away. “You’d think it was more of a progression, but it wasn’t actually,” he says. He found it to be an elegant solution even before he figured out all of its, erm, extracurricular potential; the magnets hold everything together, so it requires no screws and no glue. “When I first came up with the design,” Gardner explains, “I actually did a lot of looking around, like, ‘how has nobody ever done something like this. This has to be done by somebody, so I better go do it.’”

"It wasn't intended to be something to fiddle with," Gardner says. "I don't like calling it a toy."

Polar’s fantastic crowd-funded success has come with its drawbacks. There are already a slew of magnet-pen copycats rushing to market, and some have tried to peg Polar as a health hazard, throwing it in with other controversial small magnet products like BuckyBalls, whose fun was matched only by their swallowability. And then, of course, there’s the lingering concern that always comes with carrying a stack of magnets in your pocket: that you run the risk of messing up some other thing, either wiping the magnetic data off your credit card or somehow turning your smartphone into an expensive paper weight. Gardner says he has been carrying one around himself, though, and has no ill effects to report with his electronics or his credit cards. He has, however, found that Polar is strong enough to wipe flimsier transportation cards clean, a fact that’s left him trapped behind the turnstile on more than one occasion. Still, that’s a small price to pay, especially considering that he had the perfect thing to keep him busy until he managed to flag down some help.