Tungsten Cube

Our one hundred and sixty-something cubes have all been specially made to have the same form and dimensions (40mm2). These four centimetre cubes, made in a multitude of different materials, are one of the stalwarts of the Materials Library, with a long and rich history. They started their life back in the mid-2000s as one of the first sets of specially made objects for our Director Zoe’s PhD, which she used to explore people’s experiences of the density of materials as varied as tungsten, jelly and balsa wood.

We still use these original cubes today as an often-memorable part of our introduction to the workshop for new members: passing round this tungsten cube along with its partner, an aluminium cube, and seeing the joy and surprise when people experience their drastically different densities. These cubes are used to help our visitors and members to experience and understand material science in action (in this case that density does not depend on the size or shape of the object, but how densely packed together a material's atoms are). These cubes are also used to encourage people to think critically about how the materials they choose for their work might impact on people’s sensory and aesthetic experiences of everyday objects, as well as their function.